and I both stared in awe—we had never seen anything like it before.
For the previous month, I had been diving in the Delta with my colleague Bill Donaldson, a fishery biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, trying to find mating crabs on the bottom of Chiniak Bay, about 10 miles from the town of Kodiak. But instead of being scattered around in isolated pairs as we expected, all the female crabs were gathered into a dense aggregation in the center of the bay. There, they formed themselves into haystack-like mounds, containing hundreds to thousands of crabs. If it were possible, I could have walked 50 yards on top of crabs without setting foot on the seafloor. Our discovery was mind boggling and totally unexpected. In fact, it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.
It was a great discovery in the annals of crab science (which, admittedly, are not that thick). And for me, it was the crowning point of my professional career so far. I had arrived in Kodiak in 1984, and spent the next six years surveying crab populations in the Bering Sea. It was my job to estimate the abundance of crabs, and calculate the available quota for the fishing industry. All of this was done by dragging the bottom of the ocean with trawl nets from two chartered fishing boats that went out to the Bering Sea every summer for almost three months. But that was just routine work; it wasn’t particularly exciting and didn’t fill my need to conduct publishable research.
By 1990, I had been doing my job for six years and was becoming restless. I needed a project I could really sink my teeth into. At that time, I became interested in the mating habits of crab. How do they select mates? And more specifically, how large does a male crab have to be before it can mate? This has important implications for fisheries management because the crabs need to mate before they are captured, otherwise they do not contribute to future populations. Fisheries regulations included a minimum legal size for the crab that was based on certain assumptions about the size at which they became mature, but no one had ever tested these assumptions. What size are mating crabs in the ocean? The only way to find out was to go there and observe them, and the only way to do that was in a submarine.
Even I had thought it was a rather outrageous idea. I didn’t know how well a mini-sub would work for the job or how we would capture crabs with it, but I was determined to try. Certain people within my agency thought that it was all a great waste of money and that I should be spending my time doing other things. I have learned, over time, to ignore such scoffs, or at least to listen carefully and file away their criticisms while still pursuing my beliefs. Little has been learned by scientists who acquiesced to majority opinion, and if there was one thing I was known for, it was pushing the boundaries of my job description. In 1990, I had learned about the National Undersea Research Program (NURP), a division within the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that provided funds for such work. It was one of very few opportunities for federal employees to obtain research grants. (Unlike our university colleagues, federally employed scientists cannot apply for many types of grant opportunities offered by the National Science Foundation, Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, or other NOAA-related agencies.) I had decided to apply for the grant, and in the spring of 1991 we had begun exploring the depths of Chiniak Bay with the two-person mini-sub called the Delta.
Our research with the Delta turned out to be a great success, generating lots of excitement around the Kodiak docks and within a certain segment of the fisheries research community. Submarines and crab sex even caught the attention of the Alaskan news media and led to a few stories in the Anchorage Daily News. I was interviewed by the Anchorage TV station (there being only one) and talked about our work with Senator Frank Murkowski on his weekly radio show. With that success under my belt, I couldn’t help but think—what else could we do with a submarine that couldn’t be done any other way? Could we perhaps use it to find a long-lost, legendary shipwreck?
MAY 1991
Less than a month after our submarine expedition, I received a phone call from Mike Yarborough, a self-employed archaeologist living in Anchorage. He had heard about our submarine dives and wanted to tell me about a pet project of his. He knew about an old Russian ship that sank 150 years ago near the town of Kodiak and was intrigued by it. He briefly relayed the story to me, of Arkhimandritov’s unkept promise, the sinking of the ship, and its journey to rest in Monk’s Lagoon. Mike had done some preliminary work on the story and had obtained some information from the captain’s records that had been translated from Russian for his use. Would I be interested in looking at the information, perhaps even go look for the ship?
Why not, I thought. If I can find a bunch of crabs in 600 feet of murky water, maybe I can find a ship. After all, how hard could it be? Quite hard, as it turned out. That attitude has typified my career as a scientist, whenever faced with an interesting but intractable question. Many times I’ve regretted asking that question, but this time I didn’t.
A week later, a package arrived in the mail from Mike. Inside were a letter from him recounting the story of the Kad’yak, the translation of Arkhimandritov’s notes, and diagrams of a ship similar to the Kad’yak. I read the material over several times. As I did, the hair on my neck stood up. Could the ship still be there? Would any part of it still be intact? And where, exactly, was it? Could I find it? The prospects of such an endeavor filled me with excitement. Of course I could find it, I thought. If it’s there. If it’s still intact. Sitting on the seafloor surrounded by some of the coldest water in the world, some of it surely must still be recoverable. I was intoxicated with the idea. The Kad’yak was in my blood, and I had to find it. But how? And when? That was the hard part.
I shared the story with Bill Donaldson. He, too, was intrigued by the story, and together we began to hatch some plans. Could we go over to Monk’s Lagoon on Spruce Island for some exploratory scuba diving? It seemed so simple, like we could just jump into the water and there it would be, waiting for us to find it. Maybe we could even take the Delta over there and dive for it. Perhaps NURP would fund a trip to go search for it.
Still flying on the wings of our success with the Delta, I walked into the office of my supervisor, Bob Otto, and proposed the project to him. Would he support my taking time to work on it? His response was a cold shock that brought me back to earth. It wasn’t my job, he said, to go off treasure hunting. This was not what I was paid to do. I was supposed to be doing crab research, and he was not going to let me to spend taxpayers’ money on such a wild goose chase. Forget it, he said, not on their nickel at least. My bubble was popped for the time being.
So I put the materials away in a file cabinet and went back to work, planning for next year’s research proposal. What were those crab piles all about? Why did they do that? How many crabs were there? I planned to submit my second proposal to the NURP program in September for more work with the Delta the following spring. This project would be focused just on crab aggregations, and we would solve the puzzle. In the meantime, I forgot about the Kad’yak.
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