Читать книгу The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor - Bradley G. Stevens - Страница 12

CHAPTER 5

FIRST

LOOKS

MAY 1992: BILL DONALDSON AND I received funding from NURP for more research on Tanner crab aggregations using the mini-sub Delta. Because the peak of crab aggregation had occurred in early May of the previous year, we brought the Delta to Kodiak for the second time in May of 1992. For ten days we cruised around the bottom of Chiniak Bay looking for crabs. But to our surprise, aggregation and mating had already occurred. It was apparent that the event had ended several weeks previously because there weren’t many crabs present, and those we did find had already mated and produced new egg clutches. We missed the party completely. This was a year in which El Niño, the periodic warming of equatorial waters, was very strong. Ocean temperatures in Kodiak were 5°C, almost two degrees warmer than in the previous year. Perhaps that had something to do with why we missed the aggregation event. Having little else to do and with several days of sub time still in our budget, we decided to take the Delta and its mothership over to Spruce Island for a little look-see.

The Delta was supported by a 120-foot mudboat called the Pirateer. These boats were originally designed for the offshore oil industry in Louisiana and had long, open decks capable of carrying loads of pipe to the offshore oil platforms. As the age of oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico evolved into a period of stable oil extraction, the drilling industry wound down and mudboats became available for many other uses. Some of them migrated to the West Coast, where they were converted for fishing and other uses. As it turned out, the Pirateer was just too big to get into Monk’s Lagoon, so we anchored slightly offshore, just outside the mouth of the bay.

Here I’m standing in the hatch of the Delta submarine, ca. 1991.

The Delta was a workhorse for the marine biology research community. We called it the Volkswagen of the sea because it was simple, small, and convenient. Rich and Dave Slater, the owners, were a great team to work with, and Chris Ijames, the chief pilot, knew every wire and valve inside and out. The Delta has made over 4,000 dives and rarely ever had a problem. In all the time I have used it, we only lost one dive due to mechanical problems, but it was fixed within hours. To launch the Delta, we would raise it from the deck with a crane, lower it into the water, and tie it to the side of the ship. I would then climb in through a top hatch and lie prone on the floor of the sub, and the pilot would sit on a small stool, above my legs. The hatch could then be closed for the sub to be lowered the rest of the way into the water, and then the motor would start and the sub would move away from the ship. The pilot would open the valves, and the sub would sink slowly beneath the waves. Inside, we breathed air at surface pressure. The hull of the sub prevented it from compressing. In the back of the sub, a rack of potassium carbonate crystals removed any carbon dioxide that we exhaled, and the oxygen that we used was replaced by a slow bleed from an oxygen tank.

ON THIS DIVE, I LAY in the bottom while Rich Slater piloted the sub. There was a good 15- to 20-knot breeze that day, with 2- to 3-foot chop on the surface. The sub rocked a bit as we descended, but about 20 feet down I could no longer feel any motion. As we sank, I looked downward, wanting to see the bottom. It was always exciting to watch the bottom “come up” to greet you, because you never know what you’ll see—maybe a pile of crabs, maybe some interesting rocks, or perhaps lost crab pots you want to avoid. Maybe we’d see something bigger—a shipwreck. On that day, I thought we’d land on top of the Kad’yak.

I could see rocks coming up at us and warned Rich. At 45 feet, we passed the top of some pinnacles. The water was so clear; if I looked up I could see the surface water, and looking down I could see the bottom. We settled to the bottom at 90 feet. There, we motored around for a while, but we kept running into steep ridges of rock sticking up out of the bottom. When we couldn’t go around them, we tried going up over a few and back down. The seafloor was mostly gravel with small waves in it, about a foot wide; such waves are indications that surface water movements reach this depth and stir up the bottom. After a while, we couldn’t move any further, so we went back to the surface.

Although we didn’t find the wreck during that dive, we did learn some valuable information: The bottom was mostly gravel, and if the ship had settled there it probably wouldn’t sink in very deep. Furthermore, with a draft of 15 feet or less, it probably drifted into the bay over the tops of all those pinnacles. If it settled down on the inside of them, there was no way it could have been dragged or washed back out to deeper water. If the Kad’yak had sunk in Icon Bay, it was still there.

1999–2000

Using the Delta was great fun, and there was no experience that could compare to lying on the bottom of the ocean in a little submarine and looking out through the portholes. But it was expensive—the sub and a support ship together cost about $10,000 per day. Most of my grants were in the range of $100,000 or so, which covered about ten days of sub and ship time. If we didn’t find what we were looking for in that amount of time, it was a great disappointment. And in some years, it took us a week or more to find the crab aggregations. I needed to find cheaper ways to see the bottom of the ocean. So over the past five years I designed and built several small video camera sleds that we could tow behind the boat, but they didn’t give us a live image of the seafloor.

In 1999, I began using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). This particular ROV was called a Phantom, and it was powered by several motorized propellers, or “thrusters,” that allowed it to fly around underwater. It was owned and operated by Mark Blakeslee, a biologist-engineer who ran his own company, Aqualife Engineering, doing various odd jobs that required his unique mixture of skills in biology, engineering, inventiveness, and Rube Goldberg creativity. Mark and I had met in the mid-1980s soon after we both moved to Kodiak and found in each other a similar mix of adventurousness and offbeat humor. Whenever I had a project that required some devilish bit of techno-wizardry, especially if it involved underwater stuff, I would ask Mark to help me tackle it. His solutions were always fun and interesting, occasionally a bit over-the-edge, and sometimes they even worked.

The Phantom ROV was on the end of a long electrical cable, or tether, that sent power down to it and video signals back up to us. In such deep water, the only way to know the exact position of the ROV was by using a Trackpoint system that provided the range and bearing to the ROV. The Trackpoint operated by sending a high-frequency sonar signal out from a transducer suspended beneath the boat. A pinger on the ROV detected the signal and responded. Mark controlled the Phantom by steering it with a joystick and watching a small video monitor to see whatever was in front of it. It was the ultimate video game.

Using the ROV, we saw extremely dense crab aggregations that seemed to coincide with the lunar tide cycle, and over the winter I published my observations in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. But I needed more than just one year’s observations to confirm anything. So in 2000, five years since my last grant, I submitted another proposal to NURP to ask for two more years of funding for crab research with ROVs and camera sleds.

APRIL–MAY 2001

Because the ROV took up much less space than a submarine, we didn’t need a big ship to support it. So this year I chartered the 50-foot fishing vessel Anna D, skippered by fisherman Dan Miller, as our research platform. But results were disappointing. We didn’t find many crabs, the tides were weak, and by early May, whatever aggregation may have occurred was all over for the year. However, I still had grant money to cover use of the Anna D and the ROV for another week. This was an unexpected opportunity, and we decided we would use it to explore some new ground. For three days, Dan, Mark, and I explored the seafloor in Monashka Bay, on the north side of Kodiak. There, we saw colorful fish hiding among the rock-strewn bottom, octopuses skulking off into the gloom, and large halibut exploding out of the silty sediment, but few crabs.

With two days of boat time left, I made a decision. We would go to Icon Bay and look for the Kad’yak with the ROV. It wasn’t crab science, it wasn’t part of my job, and it wasn’t specifically covered by my grant. But those were minor considerations. One of the truths about scientific research is that discoveries rarely came about by pure determination or chance. In most cases, scientists made their preliminary observations while working on other projects. Have a little time or money left over from the last project? Why not make some new observations? Maybe they won’t amount to much, but it might help steer the course for next year’s work. In fact, it is very difficult to obtain funding for grant proposals without some preliminary data to show that your hypothesis is reasonable and proposed methods practical. A cardinal rule is to never to give back unspent grant money; that suggests you didn’t budget carefully, and you might not get what you need next time. And it is always necessary to push the boundaries. To try something that challenges expectations. Something that will require learning new skills and information. Something slightly crazy. Why not now?

Mark Blakeslee with remotely operated vehicle Rosebud.

For two days, the Anna D sat in Icon Bay as Mark drove the ROV around on the bottom. We intentionally anchored the boat as far into the bay as we felt was safe, given the poor chart of the bay and our knowledge that it was full of sharp, rocky reefs. We watched on the video monitor as the ROV passed over sandy bottoms, rocky outcrops, and kelp-covered reefs. Unfortunately, we could not determine exactly where the ROV was at any time. The Trackpoint system worked well in moderately deep water, but in this shallow bay, with many reefs and channels, the signal bounced around a lot, and it was difficult to determine exactly where the ROV was at any time.

As Mark drove, I constantly scribbled notes about depth, distance, and bearing, and made a crude chart of where I thought the ROV actually was. Another problem with using ROVs was that while looking at a video screen, you have no depth perception or scale. Is that rock large or small? Is it close or far away? The narrow view provided by the camera results in tunnel vision. You might pass right by something without seeing it, and if you turn the ROV around, you lose all sense of direction. How far did we turn? Which way are we facing now? In a submarine, you still have a sense of spatial orientation. But staring at a video screen can be very disorienting.

In the end, we could only make a general picture of the bay bottom. There were at least two channels that ran from southeast to northwest into the bay; each had a bottom depth ranging from 50 to 90 feet, and were mostly covered with sand. Running roughly parallel with the channels were rocky reefs that came up to within 20 to 30 feet of the surface. We might also have detected some hidden basins inshore of the reefs that dropped down to deeper depths, but it was difficult to say exactly where they were. We could even have passed over parts of the Kad’yak wreckage and not been able to identify it from the ROV video.

By the end of the second day I concluded that using an ROV was not the best way to explore the bay. I would just have to dive there myself and use my own eyes if I was going to see what lay on the bottom, if anything. Dan started up the engine and pulled up the Anna D’s anchor. Then he put her in gear and began to turn around. As the boat turned to starboard, we heard a loud thunk and felt the boat lurch.

“What the heck was that?” I asked, not wanting to say what I really thought.

“Crap! We hit the reef,” Dan said. He threw the engine into reverse then neutral, and ran out of the wheelhouse. Looking over the side, we could see rocks a few feet below the water that we had not seen before. (Maybe these were some of the mysterious rocks that spontaneously “grew” in Kodiak waters, as suggested by our Russian predecessors.) We must have been anchored right next to them. Dan came back inside, opened a hatch, and climbed down into the engine room. Mark and I listened to the clunks, bangs, and curses emanating from below as Dan rummaged around, checking the bilge, various compartments, and valves.

When he reappeared, he seemed satisfied. “No major damage, as far as I can tell. We’re not flooding. It must have just been a minor bump.” With that, he carefully backed away from the reef, then turned and headed back to Kodiak.

An hour and a half later, we nosed into the dock. As I was packing up my gear, Dan noticed that his engine temperature seemed a bit high. He climbed down into the engine room to check it out. The Anna D’s diesel engine was cooled by a keel cooler; coolant circulated from the engine into the keel, where it was cooled by exterior seawater, then returned to the engine. When Dan took the cap off the coolant reservoir, a geyser of seawater rushed out. He struggled to get the cap back on before it flooded the engine room.

“We must have damaged the keel cooler,” he said. “That’s gonna be expensive to fix. I’m going to have to put the boat in drydock and get it checked out.” He shook his head. “I’ve got a week before my next fishing trip; I just hope I can get it repaired before then.”

A few days later, he had the Anna D lifted out of the water and discovered that when she hit the reef, welds in the keel cooler had been forced open, letting seawater in. Fortunately, he had made enough money from my charter fees to cover the repairs and still make a profit.

But the whole experience was a bad omen. We had hit a reef in almost the same place where we thought that the Kad’yak had sunk. It wasn’t the same reef it had hit, but who knew whether this reef had stopped the Kad’yak from washing ashore. Maybe the ship had been right underneath us all the time. And certainly we had not sunk the Anna D, but if we had hit a little harder, perhaps we might have.

NEVERTHELESS, MY INTEREST IN THE Kad’yak did not suffer from this setback. If anything, it intensified. If it was that easy to get to Icon Bay, and the water was that clear and that shallow, it should be simple to go diving over there. Just get a boat and a few divers, and go do it. But I had to know where I was going, otherwise we would just be wasting a lot of time and effort. I pulled my dog-eared folders out of my filing cabinet and once again pored over the translation of Arkhimandritov’s log that Mike Yarborough had sent me. I drew lines on navigation charts, trying to trace each waypoint and landmark that had been mentioned. I carefully reconstructed every hour of the captain’s journey in June of 1860, trying to see if it would lead me to the Kad’yak. But none of it made much sense.

Nonetheless, I began to make plans for an expedition. If I were to go look for the Kad’yak, I would need at least a week of time and would have to charter a boat. I couldn’t use one of the boats from our lab, since I wouldn’t be doing the work on government time. I’d need some new scuba gear, and we’d need some food. At a minimum it would cost about $10,000, probably $15,000. Where was I going to get that kind of money? I had approached the Undersea Research Program with my idea, but it was just too risky for them; after all, there was no good evidence that the Kad’yak still existed or was where I thought it was, and I didn’t even know where that was. But you don’t get anything if you don’t ask, so I wrote up my plan as a proposal and began shopping it around. I sent it to National Geographic, but they wouldn’t fund it unless I could guarantee them that we would find the ship and make an hour TV show out of it. I sent it to Rolex Corporation (yes, they actually fund exploration), but they weren’t interested either, despite being a well-known supporter of exploration and adventure. I sent it to several other small nonprofit foundations, all with the same result. None of this is unusual; less than 10 percent of research proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation is successfully funded, and most scientists have to revise and resubmit proposals several times before they get funding. The major hurdle seemed to be that I was not an archaeologist and did not have any credentials for marine archaeological research.

But I also felt that I was missing something. I wasn’t convinced of the Kad’yak’s location, and it would be impossible for me to convince anyone else unless I was 100 percent certain of my own argument. I still didn’t understand how Arkhimandritov had recorded bearings to some landmarks, which, according to my reading of the chart, would have been extremely difficult to see from a kayak. If I could see it from his point of view, perhaps I would understand.

That was it, I thought. I had to go over to Spruce Island in a kayak and retrace his journey.