Here’s the backstory.
Our first day anchored off Panapompom, Toby paddled up to Totem in his outrigger. He was hoping we had some powdered milk to trade, because his wife wanted to make a special bread for a feast on the weekend. In his bag were passion fruit, papayas, limes, and green beans from his garden. We had just arrived a few hours previously, so after our trading was finished, sat in the cockpit and shared some biscuits and a cool drink and learned from Toby about the island he calls home.
Before he left into the fading evening light, he made a special request. Could we help him save a photo? The oldest photograph of a member of his family, taken of his great uncle in the 1960s, was deteriorating. We were happy to try what we could. The next day, he paddled back out with this photo carefully tucked into a ziploc bag.
We have a basic printer/scanner on board. It typically does duty for providing copies of documents for clearance into a country- I think this is the first time it’s been called into service to scan someone’s photo. I spent some time retouching it as best I could, and then printed off a few copies onto our plain paper.
We have Toby’s mailing address. I would love to send him an improved copy of this photo, printed onto quality paper (whenever we reach a place that can do this- probably Bali, which is still some months away). I don’t think it’s a big job for someone with Photoshop skills- something we don’t have.
If you or someone you know can help, add a note in the comments or email me! The photo can be downloaded from our Flickr account. Click through the image, then on the Flickr page, select “show all sizes” from under the ‘actions’ menu above the photo. An option on the page that takes you too is to download the original file.