Well, the last 24 hours have been a foretaste of what is to
come. Our plan has been to join the US Navy team who were providing all the
medications and gear on Tarawa which was going to make things a little easier
in terms of cost and carrying gear. But at the 11th hour, an email from Brian
the US Navy vet yesterday afternoon informed us that the pallets with some of
the gear had been put on the wrong ship, and there was a long list of stuff he
thought we might still need….
At least he gave us 24 hours! But it is a weekend! So Helen
and I have phoned and begged favours and generally sounded probably fairly
risqué as we have tried to source various veterinary medications including
anaesthetic drugs. So crash course in working
out how many bottles of everything you approximately need to desex
approximately 300 dogs! So hoping we have done that right. A good contact in
Canberra and Mick at Lyppards in Adelaide opening after hours made it possible
to pack what we think we need!
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| Our new vet team at Melbourne Airport plus all our gear!!! |
So the unpredictability began before we even set foot on a
plane. You had to smile at least. We may end up on Tarawa with a double set of
medications but Brian was not able to get any more information from the ship
about what they had. At least it is good
for an adrenalin rush (Editors note – 2 days later we now know that some of the
injectable anaesthetics we brought were not doubled up and without them the
dogs would have had pretty rough, if not impossible anaesthetics!).
So that was an interesting prelude to us all meeting
eachother, at least the Australian part of the team. We all met up by around
9pm in Melbourne airport with our departure time delayed to 12.30am. So that
together with 6.5 hours waiting in Nadi airport Fiji gave us a fair bit of time
to chat and get to know eachhother!
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| Our view over Tarawa as we flew in the next afternoon. |
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| Tarawa, late afternoon. |
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