Our other primary target area is a deeper site along a parallel contour south of
Miller’s Mountain. Being responsible for discovery of this feature as well,
Mark Miller has the privilege of naming it. This wall, ranging in depth from
1,200 feet [366 meters] at the top to over 1,600 feet [488 meters] at its base, thus becomes known as
Curious George’s Gorgeous Gorge, or George’s Gorge for short.
The morning of September 5, an attempt is made to put Sylvia on bottom at the
edge of the dropoff. Problems with tracking and communications force us to
abort the dive just moments after she touches bottom at 1,250 feet [381 meters]. The rest of
the day we are forced to stand down and regroup in preparation for another try
the following day.
We are up before sunrise again the next day to prepare DeepWorker 6 for this
dive. We’ve decided to try to put her on bottom at the base of the dropoff
rather than the top, allowing her to work her way upslope from there. Touching
down at 1,650 feet [503 meters], Sylvia reports she is surrounded by squid and myctophids,
tiny, silvery deepwater fish. Waiting and listening topside, I breathe a sigh of
relief that we have good comms and tracking. Sylvia has wanted very badly to
explore this site and I was more than a little afraid we’d have to again abort the
dive.
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Cute Crab
Photograph by Gale Mead
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A she traverses the sandy bottom, she reports seeing numerous large shrimp, as
well as golden crabs, a species increasingly suffering from overexploitation in
these waters. The presence of both in this place helps explain the many trawler
tracks she reports along the sandy sea floor.
Even deep waters such as this are targeted by shrimpers and other fishermen.
Humans are taking and destroying in many places we know nothing about, and
the risk worldwide is that treasures will be innretrievably damaged before we
even know they’re there. The importance of this mission, to see and document
the life that exists here, is not lost on any of us. It will be very interesting to
revisit this site after several years as a no-take zone. The biological richness
and diversity of this special place should be much higher if the area is left
untouched for a few years.
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Lobster
Photograph by Gale Mead
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This is my first really deep dive, but the charge I feel is not fear but
excitement. I know what the DeepWorker is capable of, I know what to do
when things go wrong, and I am confident that even if problems do develop, I
will be able to return myself to the surface in one piece. Throughout the
afternoon, we wait out the heat of the day and prepare the sub for its twilight
launch. My biggest fear is that the weather, which has been borderline all day,
will take a turn for the worse and force us to scrub the launch. Those fears
prove unfounded, and I splash just after dinnertime.
Descending directly to 1,650 feet [503 meters] takes almost 20 minutes, and I watch above
me as the water transitions from bright blue to darker and darker shades until I
am in complete darkness. Continuing down through the inky black, now at
1,200 feet [366 meters], I disable all of the sub’s lights to see whether any glow-in-the-dark
critters are moving nearby. Engaging downward thrusters, I am rewarded by
the twinkling of countless points of green-blue fire, bioluminsecent
dinoflaggelates ignited by the rush of water through the thrusters’ blades.
I touch down on a sandy plain punctuated by anthill-like mounds and great
straight trawl tracks. I fly the sub carefully over the sea floor searching for the
small life forms that dot the landscape: shrimp; tiny iridescent fish; squid who
squirt gouts of ink in startlement at the sub’s approach. A crab I am trying to
film scuttles into a depression in the sand. As I maneuver to peer into the
depression I see the cause of the dip in the sand: a giant isopod—a creature that
resembles a massive pill bug—over two feet [61 centimeters] in length is digging a tunnel into
the sand, and the crab appears almost to be standing sentry duty. Over the
course of my four hour dive I see this a half-dozen times, crabs standing
behind, or even on the backs of, these amazing armored diggers as they burrow
their way into the sand. Is this a common symbiosis? What about the
barnacles that seem so frequently to grow just on one species of crab here?
Why that species and no other? Oh, the questions raised here, and this is only
one small spot among millions of square miles of unexplored sea floor.
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Crab Salute
Photograph by Gale Mead
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I have just one moment of real fear during my dive, and it comes early on.
Cruising along the sand plain below the slope, I see what looks like a further
dropoff, but turns out to be a large pit, 50 feet [15 meters] wide and 20-30 feet [6-9 meters] deep. Down
I go, over the edge, seeing what looks like a wire coral ahead of me. But as I
approach, I can see more clearly, and what I thought was a wire coral proves
instead to be a stout rope, floating up from a tangled mass of netting, rope, and
plastic: a discarded trawling rig. Fluctuations in oxygen percentage, lost
communications, even total loss of power I am prepared to deal with. But
nothing is as big a threat to returning safely from the depths as entanglement in
manmade hazards such as this one. As much as I would like to shoot good
video to document the mess, I hit my vertical thrusters hard and swoop up out
of the pit and onto safer ground.
Sylvia and I both do our best to document the species we encounter here:
whimsical goosefish, red long nosed sea robins, tilefish, anemones, burrowing
pink eels, isopods, crabs with red eyes and red toes, red and pink lobsters with
fuzzy claws, scorpionfish, and oh so many others. I can only hope we have
further opportunities in the future to revisit this fascinating place.
—Gale Mead
Sustainable Seas Expeditions
