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 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
