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Calm Seas Means More Diving
July 4, 2000
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I set the alarm for 0600 but am awakened earlier by a strange sensation—the ship is barely moving. I race from my bunk to find an amazingly quiet ocean crowned by at least a thousand sleek black birds, sooty shearwaters, moving as if held in place by magnetic forces just above the sea surface. The sun breaks through a dense but distant fog bank, throwing golden streaks across a mostly gray sky as a flotilla of albatrosses—I count 28—float nonchalantly in McArthur’s wake. Phil Otalora is already up, heading for the subs. “This is unbelievable,” he says. “Yeah,” I respond. “Let’s go diving!” Minutes later, Kip Evans, the designated pilot for the morning, begins a review of the predive checks. The possibility that wind and waves could kick up as quickly as they had dissipated spurs us on, as does the aroma of coffee, bacon and something baking. Kip and the sub are ready to take the plunge in record time.
As usual, nothing at sea is quite as easy as you think it ought to be. Though DeepWorker was in the water by 0730, problems started right away with ship to sub communications. During a turn to keep close to the sub, the McArthur ran over and chopped a vital link in the through-water communication system—the transducer trailing behind the ship. Dive Supervisor Phil Otalora and the two Nuytco technicians, John Vance and Mike Reay, responded like surgeons in an emergency room to splice a new transducer onto a new cable, solder the wires, cover them with heat shrink, wrap the splice with watertight tape, reinforce it with more tape, spool out a new length of polypropylene line, attach floats with tie wraps and duct tape and send the new setup back overboard in 12 minutes flat. Hearing Kip continued to be difficult and intermittent, but it was always possible to tell exactly where he was relative to the ship, thanks to the Trackpoint II system that precisely monitors the sub’s position by receiving a signal from a transponder mounted on the sub’s back. New Winfrog software adds another refinement—the ability to show the position of the sub relative to known seafloor terrain.
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The sub’s batteries were changed for a fully-charged set and by early afternoon, Kip was ready to return, this time at a new location chosen by Baldo Marinovic to be “guaranteed to have krill.” And he was right. Kip and the sub landed on the upper edge of Soquel Canyon about 500 feet [152 meters] down and continued along the slope, surrounded by clouds of krill even at his maximum depth, 1017 feet [310 meters]. He said, “With the sub’s lights out it is pitch black except for hundreds of eerie green spots glowing all around—the photophores that light up in rows along the sides of the krill.” He added, “It’s midafternoon on the 4th of July and I’ve already seen fireworks!”
Back at the surface, the sub emerged amid the now-familiar flock of black footed albatrosses who peered quizzically inside and paddled around and around the sub as if trying to get a better view of the strange creature in their midst. Tomorrow, Mike Guardino returns and we hope to dive again at Point Lobos.
—Sylvia A. Earle
Project Director
Sustainable Seas Expeditions
[Note: nationalgeographic.com does not research or copyedit dispatches.]