Jeanette Thomas and her daughter Charlie who is on remote Kure Atoll. Photo / Supplied
Jeanette Thomas and her daughter Charlie who is on remote Kure Atoll. Photo / Supplied
Kiwi teenager Charlie Thomas is holed up on one of the world's most remote coral atolls, off the grid with three others doing conservation work as Covid-19 ravages the outside world.
The 18-year-old is on Kure atoll, a speck at the northernmost tip of the Hawaiian chain with only briefsatellite phone calls and short messages their only contact with authorities and their families.
She and the others - effectively in a bubble many weeks before they became common around the world - have no internet connection and they're continuing their habitat restoration work with only limited knowledge about the global crisis.
They were dropped off there in early February before Covid-19 had spread so widely (they are all well) and are not due off Kure until October. They do have enough food to last them through to December if needed.
Her mother, former TV host Jeanette Thomas, said while she was missing her daughter "like crazy" she was probably in one of the safest places from Covid-19 on Earth.
"There's no chance of them getting it unless there was some kind of shipwreck."
In brief email exchanges, Charlie has told her family about the excitement of doing conservation work on the North Pacific atoll but had only been given a general outline of the global impact of the pandemic and the lockdown in New Zealand.
Jeanette Thomas said her daughter has no real concept of what's happening globally at the moment.
"She knows we're in lockdown but even then, what I've been able to tell her has been very limited. I also don't want to overload her with info that she has no real way of processing through lack of internet access. She's living in a parallel universe.
"I've given her the basics but I don't want to overload her with anything. She can't Google anything to make sense of it - she has no parameters around what is happening."
Those with access to all the information were having enough trouble understanding the crisis, said Jeanette, a longtime host of consumer show Target and breakfast TV star.
"I'd be keen to know what I would have felt like if the whole Covid-19 thing had not happened - whether I would have been feeling any differently. At the moment I miss her like crazy but at the same time I'm very comfortable with the fact she is where she is because it's probably one of the safest places on Earth."
The plan is to continue the programme until October and the team will clear the tiny land areas of invasive weeds, monitor the birds, including albatrosses, and clean up the mountains of plastic waste that have washed up on Kure's reefs from vast gyres of trash that drift around the Pacific.
Two months ago, two field camp managers from Hawaii and another fellow volunteer from Texas were dropped off by a research ship on the atoll, which is effectively in quarantine from the rest of the world.
A party landing at Kure before an earlier mission. Photo / Supplied
They had to take brand new clothes, which are frozen to kill bugs, and no fresh food. What they eat can only be tinned or frozen. There's only solar power, a long drop toilet and the shower is a cold-water hose which Charlie reported had an aggressive pair of terns nesting above it.
She is the first Kiwi in the eight-month programme run by the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources and she got support from Hawaiian Airlines and Hawaii Tourism Oceania.
Charlie had been involved in the Sea Cleaners group, clearing up the New Zealand coastline, and one of the main motivators for her had been the chance to work with albatrosses.
She had long followed the oldest known banded bird in the world, a Laysan albatross named Wisdom which nests on Midway Atoll, about 100km south from Kure.
Her messages home are filled with wonder at the natural world she's now immersed in. In mid February she said about 200 spinner dolphins followed the boat through the lagoon while in March she told of how the work was hard yakka.
"It's hours and hours of smashing through dense bush while trying not to step on nesting birds or in burrows (which is much harder than it sounds) while also picking out the non-native plants that need spraying and staying on track with my GPs," she wrote.
"One of the best things has been being able to see a short-tailed albatross (there's only four in the whole Hawaiian islands!) She is more the size of our wandering albatross back in NZ with a beautiful golden head and a pink-blue beak. I felt very lucky."
Charlie Thomas went to Pinehurst School before spending last year spreading the conservation message to other school kids as part of the Sea Cleaners' campaign.
"The more I've observed and the more that I have stood back and tried to be insignificant, the more that the line between life in the human world and life in the natural world begins to change for me. Here, we are invisible," she wrote after observing spotted-eagle rays and albatrosses in Kure's lagoon at sunset.
Her mother said there was one scare last month when the team was warned an earthquake off Russia a couple of weeks back that triggered a tsunami warning for the low-lying atoll and they were warned to take refuge on the roof of the only single-level building.
The food is hearty but basic. However, over Easter Charlie broke out some of the seven bars of Whittaker's chocolate she took for the team for the eight months in isolation. It was hardly an Easter feast - two squares per person per day.
