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