Wall Street

Palau -- Jewel of the Western Pacific

Author: David Finkelstein
It was a front-page story in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal that first drew my attention to the place. Bearing the dateline, "Koror, Palau," the article told the tale of Larry Miller, a young lawyer working for a high-powered New York law firm, who, unhappy at his $170,000-a-year treadmill-to-nowhere job, answered an advertisement in the National Law Journal and soon found himself on an island in Micronesia -- a newly appointed justice on the Supreme Court of Palau (at one-fourth of his former salary).

Online Stock Market Trading The article piqued my interest, since I too lived in New York and I too had once been a lawyer, though I had said good riddance to that line of work after less than a month in a law office. (For me it was an easy decision, since my salary had far fewer digits.) But what really intrigued me about the story was that these expatriate New Yorkers were finding life in Palau so appealing.

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Stock Investing Course Shortly after the article appeared, I received a phone call from International Angler's Paul McBride, a California outfitter who has built a reputation on customizing fishing packages to lodges in Alaska and Cabo, as well as on the long-range "tuna" boats out of San Diego. Working with Continental Micronesia Airlines, McBride was now in the process of exploring the Pacific for potential new big-game-fishing destinations, and he invited me to join him in Palau. With the Millers in mind, I jumped at the invitation.

style Palau de la Generalitat (location of the Catalan government) and on the other by the Ajuntament (city hall). Nearby, the Palau Real on Plaça del Rei houses the Museu d’Història de la Ciutat. The remains of the Roman city of Barcino, beneath the palace, were uncovered in 1931; Roman streets are still visible in the vast cellar space that stretches as far as the cathedral.

Stock Market Game A 400-mile-long archipelago of mostly uninhabited islands, Palau lies on the westernmost edge of Micronesia, separated by at least 700 miles of ocean from its nearest neighbors- - Guam to the northeast, Papua New Guinea to the south and the Philippines (Mindanao) to the west. Stunningly different from the islands of central and eastern Micronesia, Palau boasts one of the most spectacular landscapes found anywhere on earth, which, at the time of our visit, even an unprecedented haze produced by Indonesia's raging forest fires over 1,000 miles away did little to impair.

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Stock Investing Game Every tropical island's tourist brochures make the mandatory reference to the "lush, forested mountains overlooking the crystal-clear waters of its emerald-green lagoon," and in that regard Palau is no exception. But nowhere else in the world are these elements so extraordinary, so exotic in their configurations as in Palau. Here the huge lagoon, 23 miles in length, is studded with as many as 300 limestone islands, the remains of ancient coral reefs lifted up and out of the sea by volcanic forces long ago.

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Journal Prime Rate Street Wall The waters surrounding these islands provide habitat to 1,500 different species of fish and 700 types of corals and anemones, which explains why scuba enthusiasts have long recognized Palau as the "diving equivalent to Nirvana," a submarine paradise containing many of the greatest dive sites in the world. Happily, this newly established island republic, until 1994 a trust territory of the United States, is now eager to open up its waters to big-game fishermen as well. And the potential looks great indeed.

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Stock Market News Approximately seven degrees north of the equator, Palau sits atop a submerged ridge of volcanic mountains, an appendage of the "Pacific Ring of Fire," which extends as high off the ocean floor as Mount Everest does into the atmosphere. Just east of Palau runs one of the deepest trenches of the world's oceans, plunging 27,000 feet into an abyss, which several hundred miles to the northeast nosedives into the Mariana Trench -- at 36,000 feet, the bottommost point of our planet.

Stock Investing Basics All the guidebooks repeat the litany that three major currents sweep past Palau. But a study of the region's maritime charts suggests that, in fact, no fewer than six currents affect Palau's reef-studded waters: the North and South Equatorial currents, the Kuroshio current, and the Equatorial, Subtropical and Kuroshio counter-currents. Whatever the case, it's clear that Palau sits astride some major migratory thoroughfares for the big ocean-going predators and is, further, surrounded by countless sea mounts and endless miles of shelves and reefs (many of them still unexplored), where vast schools of bait fish find some degree of sanctuary.

Stock Investing Software In May 1997 senior representatives of the Japan Game Fishing Association visited Palau to explore the island's fishing potential. Targeting everything from blue marlin to giant trevally and red snapper, the five-man team reportedly was delighted with what it found and, happily, has expressed a desire to promote a catch-and-release fishery in Palau. To that end the team is working closely with the Palau Conservation Society, which is spearheading efforts on the island to develop a "sustainable and economically beneficial sport-fishing industry." Palau's congress, in fact, has considered legislation that would actually make the support of sport fishing a matter of national policy, designating areas to be reserved solely for sport-fishing development, inaugurating a system for training and licensing professional charter captains and guides and, presumably, better policing its waters against the often illegal intrusion of Asian longliners.

Stock Market Trading With public- and private-sector support for big-game angling gaining considerable momentum in Palau -- the rapidly expanding Hawaii-based Outrigger Hotel Group, for instance, will soon be operating a new resort there -- what's needed now is only the entrepreneurial commitment to bring a few larger game-fishing boats onto the scene and a couple of qualified marlin skippers to teach the local Palauans how to use them to best advantage. That should be happening in the very near future, and then it's ... all systems go.

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