[ed. note: the following was written by United defender Marc Burch, who recently wrapped up a tour of the pacific with teammate Devon McTavish and the Houston Dynamo's Bobby Boswell and Mike Chabala. The four players visited bases in Hawaii, Kwajalein and Guam as part of a Armed Forces Entertainment Tour]
As I’m writing this we just landed in Guam after leaving what I consider as one of the most beautiful places ever - Kwajalein. I wanted to let everyone back home know how our 3 days went.
For those of you that don't know, Kwajalein is on the largest atoll in the world in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at about 8 degrees above the equator.
After telling bobby, devon and mike how amazing Kwajalein was from my trip two years ago and how it was 90 degrees with no clouds and just pretty much perfect, we landed and it was pouring rain! Even though it was raining we really wanted to take a tour of the island and show the guys how nice it really is. Everyone was blown away by how beautiful the water is, crystal clear up to 40 feet and it feels like bath water. We were shown the satellites, harbor, beach, yacht club, garden, golf course, turtle pool, and of course the ocean. A group decision was made to not do the clinic that night because it was really raining too hard, but we still had a welcome party near the beach. The party was great – it was good to see some of the people that I had met two years ago and it was nice for the guys to find out how interesting the people of Kwaj really are. Some very brilliant people!
Day two one of the busiest days of our trip, but it was AWESOME! Everyone woke up at 6:15 am to have breakfast and then we headed over to the harbor to go fishing. Before getting on the boat, everyone checked out the Nurse sharks that wait around all day to feed on the scraps of catches from the day. We headed out lagoon side but the good fishing is ocean side so we had to pass through one of the passes nearest to Kwaj.
Devon and I sat up front in the boat and looked for bird piles – areas where a group of birds are feeding on minnows. For those of you that are not big fishing buffs, birds feed on minnows, tuna (what we want) feed on minnows, sharks feed on tuna. After we found our bird pile we made a couple drives through that area and we had a couple hits. The first one was on the hand line and Mike Chabala (Chewy), my new best friend, handled that. Devon and I remained up front really just soaking in the sun (getting fried) and enjoying the sunrise (blinded). Chewy handled the first tuna pretty easy, you would assume because he was strong, but really because the tuna was missing his back half because a reef shark had taken a nice bite.
The second hit on the line was for Bobby to handle. For those of you that don't know Bobby, he is not very strong, so this was a struggle. It started off well by Bobby whipping it in and then he hit the wall – our Captain/friend Paul had to help him with most of it. I was still up front but now just laughing as Bobby struggled to get the line in. We would soon find out that the reason why it went from easy to very hard was because our shark friend had now eaten our second tuna and was on the line. After about 10 minutes of struggle for Bobby we got it up to the boat. Paul saved his lure, and we got to see what the struggle was about. A 3-foot 50-pound shark! Just kidding, it was about 6-foot long and was probably 150 pounds. Those were our only two catches but we had an amazing time. We headed back in towards the harbor and took a little time to jump out and see how far the sea actually drops off the atoll. We all hopped in and took a look, to our wonderful surprise there were some jelly fish and a shark. It was really a great time.
A few hours later we headed back out on the boat but this time just to do some snorkeling by an uninhibited island. The water was so clear, so warm and really just beautiful. We got some great pictures underwater, saw another shark and some cool coral, and did a little spear fishing (but no one caught anything)!
Later, we were set-up to do three clinics, one with the elementary school, one high school and one with the adults. They were all great we had a lot of fun with the kids and the adults. They are all great people and really embrace the amazing opportunity to live on this island. We followed up the clinics by joining a bunch of the adults at the yacht club and told some stories, asked some questions and looked at the stars. I wish I could describe it so that everyone could understand how beautiful the stars look when you are on the beach in the middle of the pacific. You can see everything and I saw over 10 shooting stars (which I found out were sometimes old satellites falling out of orbit). It was even so relaxing that Devon and Chewy fell asleep looking up.
The next day we woke up at 6:30 AM so we could play some golf before we headed out, a little D.C. United-Houston challenge that ended in a tie because of some great putts by Bobby and some great shots from Devon.
In summary: KWAJALEIN IS AWESOME!
