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June 22, 2009 – Gulf of Alaska, 54 07N 164 47W
by Herb McCormick
At Sea, Gulf of Alaska, 54 07N 164 47W (June 22): On the Caribbean island of St. Lucia in the Grenadine chain, there are a pair of twin peaks known as “the Pitons,” a rather graphic description no doubt first uttered by a lonely French sailor that refers to a specific portion of the northern landscape in the female anatomy. They are rolling hills, green and lush and verdant, rising from a turquoise sea.
At dawn today, the crew of Ocean Watch was struck silent by the awe and wonder of what might pass for the Alaskan version of the Pitons, a pair of cold, stark volcanic mountains; capped in ice and snow; brutal triangles launched skyward from a frigid northern ocean. Their crazy, alphabet-soup names-we were transfixed by the 9,400-foot Shisholdin Volcano, hard by the 8,100-foot Isanotski Peaks, the predominant features of faraway Unimak Island-belied the fact that these were mountains on a grand, majestic scale.
Everyone scrambled for their cameras. The new sun glowed orange on high, and cast severe shadows on the crags and canyons. It was bloody cold out, which somehow added to the allure. After thrashing across the Gulf of Alaska for a long week, we felt we’d earned the view. There wasn’t much to say, but David Thoreson, who captures moods as well as images, put it perfectly.
“It’s starting to feel like we’re in the north,” he said.
Today Ocean Watch is closing in on Dutch Harbor on the island of Unalaska, a longtime harbor of refuge for countless hardscrabble fishermen that has tasted a certain blush of celebrity in recent times, for it’s here that the TV crab stars of “The Deadliest Catch” hang their wooly hats when not contending with fierce conditions and reality fame. We’ll try our best to keep scientist Michael Reynolds from searching for autographs.
The fresh vista is not the only new feature on the horizon. For the last 48 hours, relatively speaking, we’ve had plenty of fun staring at the radar and dodging gargantuan tankers, bound to and fro between the Far East and the U.S. West Coast. Ocean Watch is crossing a chilly shipping lane not for the faint of heart. Offshore navigators sail what’s known as a Great Circle route, which in basic terms is the shortest distance between two points. Traversing the sphere that is our planet, on a passage across the Pacific that means charting a course over the top of the round, distant north. On a trip from, say, Japan to Seattle, it saves countless miles, tons of fuel, and many days at sea. We were startled when a ship’s captain hailed us on the VHF-radio: He’d heard about our trip, and was curious about jellyfish.
Skipper Mark Schrader and mate Dave Logan have been busy at the navigation table today trying to pick a pass between the islands that’s not beset by fierce current. As we’ve weaved our way along the chain, tacking in and out, we’ve had a good look at the landscape. Black and angular, shrouded in fog and mist, there is a sense of foreboding about these islands. If a winged dinosaur suddenly took flight from one of them, no one would be shocked at all.
The stark physical nature of the Aleutians above the waterline, then, makes what’s happening in the depths below all the more surprising. From the website www.lophelia.org we’ve learned that recent seabed surveys around the Aleutians have revealed an amazingly diverse community of cold-water corals, including stolon corals, true soft corals, sea whips and sea pens, gorgonian corals, hydrocorals and black corals.
This vast and rich abundance of species and subspecies form vast coral gardens, a vibrant ecosystem that provides habitat for many other species of fish and invertebrates. The primary reasons for all this are the strong tidal currents that Ocean Watch is most assuredly trying to negotiate. Studies have found that bottom fishing heavily impacts these coral gardens, and to protect these rich reefs, the U.S. government has banned bottom contact fishing in some 370,000 square kilometers around the Aleutians. The crew of Ocean Watch is happy to report that we haven’t seen a bottom trawler in quite some time.
Once through the pass, the crew will transit from the gray North Pacific to the grayer Bering Sea. We’ll be in Dutch Harbor in a few hours. Yes, it’s starting to feel like we’re in the north.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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