Photo of the week: Joy Island

Joy Island, off the coast of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia. February, 2006. © Rob Verger.

Joy Island is an uninhabited speck of sand, dirt, trees, and concrete platforms, the remnants of old structures. It sits within a protected lagoon, with Pohnpei’s large, circular reef separating the much smaller Joy Island from the open Pacific. I paddled there in the outrigger canoe in the photo with some friends in 2006, and once on the island, we realized we didn’t have as much water as we needed. The solution? We cracked open coconuts and drank the sweet water inside, which is as a process as tricky as it appears in the movie “Cast Away.”