Transitions

Received 3/30/10 from Jon Glaudemans


Transitions

Macaroon, our dive master for the day, before he briefed us on our day's dives, asked: meters or feet. There were five of us: three seriously hung-over Argentine young professionals, Jennifer, and me. One of the Argentinians - a lawyer it turned out -- had just been on the phone with his doctor, who ruled out a dive that day for him. Not because he and his two friends closed the local bar just 5 hours earlier after 4-5 Long Island Iced Teas and several parting complementary shots of tequila from an obliging bartender, but because of a recent pneumothorax. He had a hole in his lung. No diving for Alfredo that day. Augustine and Leo did dive, but not without incident beforehand as their stomachs rebelled against their decision to be on a rocking and rolling boat. Food for the fishies.

I was fine with either feet or meters, but candidly would have preferred feet, as my ears are sensitive to depth, and I'm reasonably in tune with my need to clear my ear canals at various depths (measured in feet). But Macarron took me at my word that I was good with either, and briefed the dive in meters. We were diving to about 20 meters (65 feet), but then another choice presented itself. Our air pressure gauges were configured in two distinct ways: Jennifer's measured pressure in pounds per square inch (3000 was a full tank) and mine measured in millibars (200 was a full tank). It's no good to be caught 65 feet (20 meters) below the surface without air, and it's imperative that each diver be able to signal to other divers the status of their tanks using clear hand signals. I needed to learn the convention for millibars, so that when I wanted to indicate my tank was half-full, Jennifer would understand. For PSI, it's simple: one hand displays the thousands, and the other hand the hundreds. One finger plus 5 fingers equals 1500 PSI. For millibars, it's different, and even though I was stone-cold sober, I still got my signals wrong when we were underwater. Happily, Macaroon anticipated that, checked my gauge, and we were good for another 10 minutes of diving.

Traveling in other parts of the world, with other conventions and systems of measurement and language requires a lot of on-the-spot transitional activity. A taxi in New York City stops, and the meter is preset at something like 4 dollars; in Puerto Ayora, the main town on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galapagos, 4 dollars buys you 20 minutes in a taxi - enough to travel every street twice. Paying by time and not distance was not that difficult, but I still wondered whether we were being fair. Again, Macaroon came to our rescue when we ended our dive and dashed off to buy produce and some extra bottles of water. He assured us that our payment would be seen as fair.

When we left Puerto Ayora on our 44' catamaran "ile de Grace" on that Wednesday, Jennifer had just returned from a week in Denver, helping our daughter re-adjust too academic life after a major surgery; she left the day after a spring blizzard dropped a foot of snow on the foothills of the Rockies, and arrived in the Galapagos where the daytime lows never fall below 80 degrees. Let's not talk humidity. Making the transition both physically and emotionally was difficult for Jennifer; she enjoys the cold, and leaving your daughter confined (temporarily) to an arm sling, virtually immobile, was not easy, but talking about it helped us each understand each others' perspectives. As noted in an earlier post, we're working on linking our complementary perspectives on life: Teflon and Velcro to oversimplify a complicated symbiosis.

We had been at anchor in the harbor for 20 days; the waterline of the boat was thick with a yellowy-green scum, a slimy mix of algae, diesel exhaust, and grime. There are a lot of boats in one of only two protected anchorages in all of the Galapagos, and the warmth and fecundity of the water, coupled with the sheer numbers of boats, made for an interesting, far-from-hydrodynamic surface coating. I spent the morning of our departure in a mask and fins, brushing the hull clean. In cleaning the hull, I was helping an inanimate object make a transition: from rest to movement. I had been monitoring the growth, and had even hired our favorite taxi driver, El Gato, to help clean the hull mid-stay, but it needed a final scrub.

There are many chores associated with simply maintaining a boat on the water; even more associated with getting a boat ready to leave for a 3 week trip at sea. Many of these preparations occurred in our fitting out of the boat, but many are repetitive with each successive passage. Deflating the dinghy is an example; on short hops and in harbors, it hangs from our stern arch, beneath 4 solar panels and our wind generator. At sea, we can't risk having a following sea drop 500 gallons of salt water at 8+ pounds per gallon into the dinghy, so it gets deflated and stowed. Stephen helped with that, and Guita helped with other pre-passage chores, including helping replenish our ship's stores, and pre-cooking some meals. Together, they refilled our tanks with water from the purification plant ashore, as I had mistakenly left open - for the second time - the valve to our tanks. To say my shipmates were understanding would be an understatement; no recriminations, and offers of help to remedy the situation timely. Adjusting expectations and being resilient - an important part of transitions.

We needed fresh produce, bread, and refills for our snacks. We needed to check the various lines and sails for chafe. We needed to stow the various items that inevitably accumulate on the deck, in the cockpit, and in our cabins. Catamarans are more stable left to right than monohulls, but clutter is clutter, and clutter is dangerous if you need to find something fast or move quickly across a deck or cabin. To me, there are two types of clutter: hardware and boat equipment, and clothes, food, and bedding. For better and worse, I tend to focus on the former. I'm OK with the other kind of clutter, at least for a few days. Jennifer focuses on the latter kind of clutter; unless we're ship-shape all around, she feels as if the boat's not ready. And if the boat's not ready, sometimes she's not ready.

We need to make sure our ditch bag is complete. In the unlikely event of a catastrophic event at sea, we would deploy our life raft, and grab our ditch bags - bags containing survival gear for the crew, should we be forced to live in the lifer aft for 2 weeks. For most sailors, but especially for catamaran sailors, the life raft is truly a last resort, with ditching the best option if (and only if) the boat is actually sinking. Examples abound of sailors ditching their non-sinking boats, only to have the boat survive the storm afloat, even as the crew struggles (sometimes unsuccessfully) with surviving in a tiny life raft. For me, the biggest fear is fire; our vessel can be filled with water and it will still float. It can turn upside down, and not only would it float, but two escape hatches on the bottom would allow us to re-enter the boat and in effect, live in the space under the now overturned hulls. Fire is the real threat, and for that, Stephen inventoried our bags, identified missing items, and helped complete the checklists.

We left on a Wednesday; our visas had run out, and while we could surely have stayed an extra day or two, we were all anxious to get to the Marquesas, our next stop. Stephen and Guita will be headed back home from there, and we want to arrive in time for them to visit the beautiful islands that make up the eastern edge of French Polynesia. As a result, several passage-related chores were left undone as we lifted anchor, among them the de-cluttering of the clothes, food, and bedding, and the completion of our ditch bag preparations.

We took care of these remaining items on our second full day out. After a few days at sea, our transition to passage-making was complete in both the physical and mental aspects. Leaving harbor for sea requires adoption of a different mindset: being alone on an ocean, self-reliant in the extreme, is much different than being able to hail a water taxi for something left ashore. There's a new way to think and act when your watches come and go throughout the day and night. You sleep when you can. Meals become a logistical challenge, when some are awake and some asleep at any point in time.

Our rush to leave left some things undone, and in retrospect, my lack of appreciation for the impact of these undone chores on our collective ability to make the mental transition to passage making made the mental process of transitioning to passage making more difficult for us all. I assumed everyone could throw a switch. Unlike Macaroon, who promptly checked my gauge after my missed signal, I didn't check my shipmates' gauges until the third day. That's when we cleaned up the clothes and food and linens, and that's when we completed our ditch bag preparations. That's when we began, as a group of sailors, our passage to the Marquesas - not when we left the harbor.

Transitions. Whether its feet or meters, or harbors or passages, they all require a certain sobriety and flexibility, an awareness that it matters whether a single finger on a forearm means "I'm OK on air," or, "I'm low on air." Resiliency, and the capacity for adjusting expectations. Being aware that different people and different cultures undergo the process of conversion differently. I tend to make the mental switch from harbor to passage with the seeming flick of a switch. I've been to sea many times, and have made that mental and physical conversion many times, and to me, it's just that: a flick of the switch, and I'm in passage mode - or so I delude myself. In truth, I need time as well, time to accept the fluidity of an existence where mutuality is the key to not just harmony, but possibly survival..

Being aware of transitions - and more importantly, respecting others' needs for appropriate transitional environments, milestones, and benchmarks, and helping others transition at rates and rhythms they are comfortable with -- are key attributes of leadership in any situation. Macaroon taught me several lessons that day of diving, and I'm working at reading others' gauges as they make transitions in the nautical environment. I'm working even harder at measuring my own gauges accurately. I have patient shipmates and a candid co-captain to help me. And as fond as I once was of them, the dive reminded me of another lesson: I'm glad I no longer drink Long Island Iced Teas.

Leaving Galapagos

Thoughts on Leaving Galapagos


It's the midnight watch on Saturday, March 27, 2010 and we've been back at sea for two and a half days. Last night, I had the two am watch and saw the moon set at 0230, followed by an incredible array of stars from horizon to horizon. I was accompanied by 8 laughing sea gulls. A few had been with us during the day, but more came along for the evening. Sea birds are interesting. They just appear from nowhere and disappear into nowhere. These weren't too noisy and made for good company as I tried to learn more about the stars of the southern hemisphere. The Southern Cross is beautiful, but I don't know many of the other southern constellations yet. Today, Captain Jon gave the rest of us our first lesson is celestial navigation, and tomorrow we take our first noon site.

I feel very fortunate to have visited the Galapagos Islands. Lucky to have seen the mating dance of the blue-footed booby, the male frigate birds spout their big red chins for the ladies, the tortoises making their slow comeback from near extinction, and the iguanas disguising themselves as lava rock. Lucky to have walked so close up to baby chicks (within 1-2 feet) and observe them and their mothers without the slightest worry that we might be a threat. Lucky to have seen a week old sea lion cub, waiting for its mother's return. Lucky to have seen some of the Earth's geology laid bare on the dried up lava flows. Lucky to have made a dive along a lava wall where we saw white tipped sharks resting on ledges. Lucky to have met so many wonderful and dedicated naturalists who guided our journeys, such as Menino, Jairo, El Gato and Macaron.

These islands are truly unique and special and one leaves with a sense of hope that they can be preserved. That hope is not without some anxiety, however. I was surprised to learn how much the islands were already compromised by the time they became a national park in 1959. Many plant species were introduced that have taken over so much of the vegetation. The guava tree, for example, is now all over the island of Isabella. Photos of the island from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and today show how much the once barren landscape has been covered over with newly introduced vegetation. Also, the introduction of animals, such as cows, goats, pigs and horses, for the use of the human population also changed the environment for the worse. Some of these negative effects are being reversed. For example, they have removed all the goats from most of the islands. But pigs that have gone feral are still hunted as wild boar. We saw two boar carcasses hanging next to someone's bananas and laundry as we drove through the countryside on Isabella. Sadly, overfishing has also damaged the sea life around the islands and the Ecuadorian government has its biggest problems with the local and foreign fishermen.

The biggest shock, however, was how many people actually live in the Galapagos. First of all, about 120,000 tourists visit each year. While those who choose to visit these remote islands are for the most part environmentally conscious, their impact must nevertheless be real. Moreover, 30,000 people live on the island of Santa Cruz! It just seems like too many. The attraction of making money off the tourists is irresistible. The government is trying to find a balance between using selective spaces for tourists and the native population to create wealth in order to protect the rest. 97% of the islands are National Park and most of the islands are uninhabited, but were humans are concentrated, it's difficult to imagine these islands not being even more compromised. How it will turn out, remains to be seen.

LOCATION UPDATE

At 6:40 pm on Saturday, March 27th, Grace and crew are at 3 degrees 58.65 minutes South and 96 degrees 33.45 minutes West. Good sailing with the genaker sail up. We've caught no fish yet 9 but Stephen and Jon keep trying.

http://www.pangolin.co.nz/yotreps/tracker.php?ident=WDF2670 Has a current picture up of their location.

Little Things

We leave Academy Bay, on Santa Cruz in the Galapagos tomorrow for a 20-25 day sail to the French Polnesian islands of the Marquesas. Our planned port of entry is Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa. Coordinates = 9 degrees 45 minutes south and 139 degrees west. That means we`ll be travelling south about 600 miles and west about 2800 miles.

A few of the little not-so-glamorous things I`ll miss (or not) about Santa Cruz:

• The nightly serious money "volleyball" games on the town square, by the water taxi docks. The ball is a soccer ball, there`s three to a side, and you pay to play -- usually $1-200 a game, and winner takes all. Lots of side betting. Referees, but no real enforcement of the "carrying" rule, given the weight of the ball.
• The lottery that is the wait for the water taxi. Getting to and from boats requires use of a yellow (eat your heart out, Joni Mitchell) "agua taxi" at 60 cents per ride, 24 hours a day (evenings are $1). These guys motor in and out of the dock and will see you or not, whistles are sometimes responded to .... calling on the radio elicits the usual "uno minuto" but the response time is equally random.
• The traffic patterns -- no lights of course, but very few stop signs, yet everyone seems to yield gently and without acrimony. Tons of motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles.
• At night -- every night -- dozens of kids playing in the town square .. barely supervised, all safe, and all happy. The birth rate here must be astounding.
• The bikes -- many are fitted with pegs on the rear axles, and a special wooden seat on the frame between the seat and the handlebars. Seeing three kids on a single bike is common. You gotta get around I guess.
• The seals -- bold enough to climb on board any boat (including ours) and making it their resting spot. There are cute yes, but they stink, leave small bits of furry hair, and a stubborn brown stain.
• Struggling to buy oil rags, wrenches, and other slightly esoteric items in a place where very few people speak any English. I got to be good at drawing items on a piece of paper, and my favorite store is Bodega Blanco, the "carry everything" hardware store that is the moral equivalent of Home Depot. 10,000 items in stick, as they proudly note. I think they count each screw.
• The soft serve ice cream at Cafe Hernan.
• The streetwide dinner party that happens every night a few blocks up, where the restaurants along the street take over the street with tables and chairs. Three-course dinners for less than $4.
• The gasoline is $1.25/gallon, and the diesel is $1.00/gallon -- locals only, thanks to huge subsidies that keep the islands' tourist businesses (cruise ships and taxis) in business. We paid $4/gallon for the boat`s diesel.
• The twice-weekly freighter that arrives, anchors well offshore, and is unloaded crate by crate, bag by bag, by hand onto sketchy looking small barges that are pushed to shore by agua taxis, and then unloaded again into trucks, crate by crate, bag by bag. Everything by hand.
• No cans. Everything comes in bottles and everything is recycled. The same ships that bring in cases of Pilsener in full bottles (hand unloaded etc.) take the same bottles back the following week, empty. Sodas are 70 cents, with a 50 cent bottle fee. You can´t redeem the bottles -- it´s basically a recycling tax. There are recycling barrels everywhere, and there`s virtually no litter anywhere.
• The black beetles that crunch underfoot and, if provoked, can spread a smelly substance that leads people to go change their clothes.
• The internet cafes that are slow, hot, and humid.
• The rallying sailboats -- groups of sailboats that travel in packs, around the world on compressed schedules. They take over the entire harbour, meet each other in one and only one bar, and never seem to mingle with other sailors who are not in their rally, and never seem to mingle with the locals. They also tend to be insular to the point of rudeness, and refuse to share their radio frequencies (where weather information is shared) with other cruisers. This runs against every ethic I've ever experienced or espoused in sailing, where the principle of local respect and enagagment, and helping each other is meant to extend beyond the dues-paying exclusivity of these rallies. I only hope they move on past us in their haste to notch their belts with a "round-the-world" mark. (Not to cast too wide a spell -- many are very nice people.)
• Lava Flash, our lavenderia, which does our laudry for $1/kilo. However, without explanation, the price just seemed to go up to $1.50. Still a great value, and good service.
• The main drag, filled with curio shops, tour operators, amd restaurants.
• The fish dock, where the boats arrive continuously from sea, -- small open boats -- with ice boxes stuffed with wahoo, tuna, swordfish, etc. The fish are unloaded onto a common table, gutted, skinned, and fileted, and sold as fast as they arrive to restaurant buyers and households. Pelicans and seal lie and sit on the dock table, waiting for scraps. Favorite moment: a pelican with a HUGE fish head stuck halfway down its throat, unable to fly, and trying desperartely to swallow it whole. 10 minutes later, it hopped off into the mangroves alongside the dock. I hope it made it.
• The nightly rain, the daily heat, and the respite of cool air in the highlands.
• The wonderful people of the Galapagos, who have embraced us and welcomed us and made us feel a part of their islands for a few weeks. God bless them and their fair islands. Special shout out to Antonio, Conchita, and El Gato!

More postings when we get to the Marquesas. Be good.

On a Lighter Note: Neptune Rises

On a lighter note from all the geological/oceanographic postings, I wanted to update everyone on our actually crossing the equator, March 3^rd. As some of you may know, it is a rite of passage to cross the equator in a boat. All four of us were equatorial virgins, but Captain Jon had crossed it in an airplane so he got to do the honors of calling up King Neptune.

We crossed 0 degrees latitude around 7 pm in about 20 knots of wind (very unusual for the equator), so it was dark and the waters were choppy. As you can also see, the salt water had coated our equipment. No stopping the boat for a dip this time.

Nevertheless, Neptune did rise from the sea to initiate us pollywogs.

We all received a dousing of flour (fairy dust), powdered lemonade (the captain’s sourness) and salt (a symbol of our sea worthiness). In addition, Neptune gave us each a special gift.

"Princess” Guita received a food container necklace, so that she may never go hungry in her travels.

"Prince” Stephen received a fishing lure necklace, so that he may always catch fish wherever he journeys.

"Queen" Jennifer received a Velcro necklace covered in stars and sails.

Finally, a nip of Jameson’s was given to the real Neptune, to appease him and ask for safe passage.

A great time was had by all, and we may now all be considered hardy shell backs.

Leaving Panama for Galapagos

We left our mooring at the Balboa Yacht Club (it’s not really a club; it’s a fuel dock, pier and office, with a bar/restaurant and free internet) on Tuesday morning, February 23^rd. On our left was the causeway built by the Americans connecting two small islands to the mainland, with Panama City in the background.

It was exciting to be leaving as we followed the channel markers out to the Gulf of Panama. Channel Markers 1 and 2 are the first ones you see when entering the canal from the Pacific, but they were the last ones we saw leaving. We were closest the marker #2 and, once passed, considered ourselves headed for the Pearl Islands.

It only took about six hours to reach this lovely archipelago and we chose to anchor in a small harbor in the island of Contadora. It is where several peace summits were held during the Central American civil wars in the 1980s. Today, it is a small quiet getaway for Panamanians and expats.

That evening we saw an amazing sunset.

The next day, we hired a local fisherman to take us to some coral reefs for snorkeling. Though the waters were a bit choppy, it was our first venture into Pacific waters. We saw plenty of parrot and damselfish.

We also visited the island of Mogo Mogo. Apparently it was a venue for the TV show Survivor, and as we left the boat, our host said, “Good bye and good luck…” He didn’t leave us though, and, we discovered the beach was covered in a wide variety of lovely shells, including orange scallop shells. Jon was the best scavenger, but we all managed to collect something beautiful.

The next morning, we raised our anchor and left Panama for Galapagos. It was part sailing, part motoring. We were often accompanied by sea birds, darting in front of our bow and guiding us along our way. I think they really hoped we were a fishing vessel ready to offer some easy food, but it was fun to think they were our guides and the first to welcome us to the Pacific Islands.

R.V. Atlantis

The last post discussed the underlying features of plate tectonics – mountain ranges, using magnetic fields to determine the ages of rocks, and the discovery of vast underwater “tears” in the earth’s crust – and the subsequent race to explore these underwater rifts in detail.  This post goes on board the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s (WHOI) research vessel Atlantis for a first-hand glimpse at the tools and toys of a modern-day oceanographer exploring these tears in the earth.   It’s interesting to consider the science of oceanography as a sister calling to astronomy.  In fact, I’m told that the NASA Administrator at the time of the shuttle program was a former WHOI leader, and in fact named the shuttles after existing deep-sea oceanographic vessels – thus Atlantis the ship came before Atlantis the shuttle, and Discovery, and so on.

You can see the large crane-like device on the back, this is used to lower and raise the various instruments and submersibles into and out of the water.  The ship has a full-time crew, and the scientific teams rotate on an off.  It´s funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.  You can also see the white dome, which contains all manner of radio equipment. The ship has internet access, and is able to stay connected to the "real" world.  Alongside, you can see a small boat, to get on and off Atlantis requires climbing a rope ladder from the small boat up to the main deck.  It´s best to be sober when you do this.  It´s about a 25 foot climb, and the ladder sways in the swells.


Below is the punch line to the whole story:  It´s a picture of the ocean floor around the Galapagos.  At the bottom right of the picture, you´ll see the islands -- they have small circles of gradated colors signifying depth.  The lines are the tracks of the ship Atlantis, you can see it has made a few tripos before to the Galapagos Spreading Plate, which is that jagged line on the upper left and center of the screen.  This trip, they plan to go to the bottom of the ocean and explore in minute detail the actual "tear" in the earth at two locations:  one on the western edge, and one closer to the eastern edge.  Since the adjoining plates are moving northeast (the upper Cocos Plate) and  eastward (the lower Nazco Plate), the new earth is newest on the western side, and is a bit older on the eastern side.The Cocos plate is slipping underneath Central America; the Nazcoi Plate is sliding underneath the Andes Mountains.  No rush -- a few centimeters a year, but it adds up.

The second picture, above, shows more detail:  you can see the black lines of the zipper-like movement of the ship as it moves back and forth over the rift.  The colors signify depth.  These are the lines of the Atlantis.  Below, I show pictures of the three submersibles that fill in the blanks between these lines.  Alvin, the manned submersible.  SENTRY, the unmanned autonomous vehicle.  The Towed Camera (no sexy name for this utilitarian piece of equipment).  Together, these three examine the micro-details of this ruft -- at resolutions of a few meters and less.

Here´s a picture of the main research vessel on Atlantis:  Alvin.  Alvin is a storied craft, having been one of the first manned deep-sea research vessels ever built.  Dr. Bob Ballard, then of Woods Hole, is considered its father, and he went on to some fame when he used Alvin to discover the R.M.S. Titanic, among other ships. Ballard-Alvin-Titanic You can see the storage shed for Alvin, and the railroad tracks used to move it to the back of the shipo, where it is lifted by the aforementioned crane and lowered gently into the water.  Alvin is driven by a specialized pilot (there are three on board Atlantis), and can also transport two scientists.  You´ll see that the scientists are limited to looking and not touching while on board.  To the right of the manned vessel Alvin, and under the canopy tent, is the yellow unmanned submersible SENTRY.  This is the vessel built by friend Dana and his colleagues.  They trade-off, these two submersibles.  Alvin spends its days underwater, taking picture and picking up samples with its remotely-controlled "hands" and returns for service and recharging at night.  SENTRY spends the nights underwater, without any tether to the surface, and, on its own, explores the bottom before surfacing for battery recharging during the daylight hours.

Here´s a closer picture of Alvin´s "hand" -- covered with a glove to protect the hand from damage, and, because the hand is steel, to protect human heads from damage.  The hands are controlled via a joystick inside the vessel.  In the old days, the joints were controlled by switches, and the pilot can still use a switch to conserve power.  The joints in the arm and hand are the same as a human´s -- it´s a robotic arm.  A skilled pilot can pick up very fragile bits of the bottom and place them into a bag for closer examination on the surface.  An unskilled pilot can crush precious specimens.  There are no unskilled Alvin pilots.

Of course, all work and no play makes for a tedious journey.  Here´s one of several large work rooms for the scientific crew.  Note the ping-pong table.  That´s my sister-in-law Guita in the stylish hat, talking with Dana.  There are several such rooms on board for working, and if you didn´t know you were on a boat, they look just like a lab at a university or a conference room at a high-tech company.  The ship also boasts a video room, a library, and other creature comforts. 



We had a chance to go inside Alvin.  Here´s a  picture of me and Dana inside.  It´s pretty cramped but comfortable enough .  Dana´s face reveals his passion for his work.  Imagine getting to play with grown-up tinker toys and making boats that descend miles under the ocean!  Below, there´s a picture taken down the entrance hatch, with Stephen clearly visible, and Guita´s eyes barely visible on the lower right.  The knees belong to Dave, one of the pilots.  Dave was in the Navy on a sub, and after he got out, he cold-called Woods Hole asking for a job.,  Now he´s one of a tiny handful of Alvin pilots!  It pays to ask!

Once inside, the hatch is closed, and the three-person crew breathes from a slow trickle of oxygen streamiung out from a tank onboard. The carbon dioxide is scrubbed out of the air using dry chemicals, so the resulting air, while a bit rich in CO2, is usable for many hours. It´s a tall vessel -- maybe 15 feet high, and you need to climb down a ladder to get into the pressurized cabin. 


















Here´s SENTRY, Dana´s baby.  He´s explaining to Stephen and Guita its design.  It was built to be simple, reliable, easy-to-transport, and cheap.  It fulfills all these criteria to a tee, and it now has 4-5 sister craft on other research ships.  Alvin takes an entire ship to support its infrastructure (remember the railroad tracks?!), SENTRY takes a small container that´s easily moved around the world. 

Engineering is often the art of the possible, and Dana is describing one of the many challenges they had to overcome in building SENTRY:  how to provide both bouyancy (so it can come back up after a dive) and submersibility (how to get it down to the bottom).  It turns out that this is not an easy problem to solve, and the craft is covered in a special mix of microscopic glass balls -- encased in that yellow material -- as part of the buoyancy-structural stability solution. 

A few weeks earlier, an older version of SENTRY named ABE suffered a catastrphic failure off the coast of Chile (unrelated to the recent earthquake).  Dana was on board that research ship at the time, and was forced to accept and mourn the loss of ABE.  A subsequent New York Times obituary for ABE may be the first such obit run for an inanimate object.  Dana took the loss wello, pointing out that one of the risks of putting vehicles deep underwater is the possibility of failure ABE´s NYT Obituary


Underneath SENTRY lie the instruments -- several magnetometers (remember the need to measure the magnetic fields of rocks?) as well as other detection and location-determining devices.  The orange rudder on the front is just that.  SENTRY can hover, rise, fall, and drive forward without
human intervention.  It´s all by itself on the bottom, and can track the sea bottom at a pre-defined height, moving up and down across the sea floor.  Dana´s colleague James is part of the team that wrote the control software for SENTRY -- software which allows the vessel to correct for ocean currents.  In fact, one of the now-many hydrothermal vents discovered on the bottom of the ocean (where very hot water is ejected from beneath the ocean floor) was discovered by SENTRY when Dana and team noticed it jumping up unexpectedly as it crossed a strange underwater feature.  The hot water was rising, and throwing SENTRY (briefly) upward and off course. Taking a closer look, the SENTRY team discovered a hole in the earth´s crust, deep underwater, where superheated water was shooting out into the cooler ocean.



The yellow shell in the second picture is used to cover the vessel underwater and to create a more streamlined shape.  It sits inside the container that houses SENTRY in its world travels --. a container just like the ones you see on trucks on the highway.  Simple.  Easy.  Usable.  The more I talked with Dana and the team, the more I appreciated the scientific value of simplicity.  Building a $10 million submersible that needs a $100 million ship to carry it first-class is helpful perhaps, but nothing like a $2 million vehicle that can travel coach class.

The third and last large research apparatus on Atlantis is the towed camera.  Here, a colleague of Dana´s, Allison, is explaining how this gets lowered over the back of the ship and is towed at varying depths, taking strobe-lit photographs very few seconds or so.  It´s basically a rectangular grid of steel, with very sophisticated gear bolted on, with a cable running back to the ship.  The trick is operating it. Together, the data gathered from Alvin, SENTRY, and the towed cam can be combined to create detailed pictures and understandings of the sea floor, and, on this expeditiopn, of the Galapagos Spreading Plates.  In so doing, we can understand more about the geologic forces that drive the drifting of the continental plates, and color in the storyline of plate tectonics.


I mentioned the underwater thermal vents before.  These are rather new discoveries, and in their most dramtic, these deepwater vents (which occur far below the depth which light pentrates) are accompanied by life forms that, uniquely, do not rely on solar-based photosynthesis for their energy. These new life forms are just beginning to be understood by scientists.  As these vents spew out from the bottom, the water is extremely rich in dissolved minerals.  Like stalactites and stalagmites in caverns, these minerals precipitate out of the water and form fabulous undersea formations.  Here´s one of the more dramatic of these formations, a formation mapper entirely by SENTRY.  If you look closely at the 4th name on the listing at the middle left of the poster, you´ll see Dana credited for his seminal work.  You can also see the flume of ejecting water behind the towers.

We had a great time visiting Atlantis and catching up with Dana.  We were also blessed to meet with many of his colleagues, including (Little) Dave, Marshall, Bruce, Allison, and others.  A big thanks to the Captain and crew, and we´ll close with a picture of the ship´s departure plate:  with all of the crew and scientists, no excuses for missing the departure time!  Atlantis left on schedule, and is presently atop the Gapalapgos Spreading Plate, filling its data coffers with new information on how our earth continues to grow and shift beneath the seas ... filling in a storyline that began when certain school children and iconoclastic scientists took a look at the continents, and asked: "Doesn´t it look like South America could fit puzzle-like into Africa?

Sometimes, it´s the obvious that´s hard to see.

The 5th Graders Got It Right

If you were to ask, say, the kids in Mr. Van Houten’s class, at Lakeshore Elementary School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to look at a map of South America and Africa, with the South Atlantic ocean between them, and then ask them what they noticed, it’s likely that after a few minutes one or another student would notice that the two continents seem to fit together – the convex bulge of each fitting neatly into the adjoining concave coast.  They might even say that they looked like they were joined together at some point, and that the South Atlantic ocean found a way to come between them.

By the early 1960s, what most elementary school kids knew for certain about this theory of continental drift, or plate tectonics, was, in fact, NOT the received wisdom among the classical geologists of the day.  In fact, the few “fringe” geologists who dared to put forth the notion that our earth’s continents had been connected in the past were termed “drifters,” and at the few universities that humored their lectures, they were introduced with eyes rolling.  

Here’s the first of a several-part posting on this theory of continental drift, based on a Galapagos-harbor visit we had with my college roommate Dana Yoerger.  Dana is one of the scientists on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s research vessel Atlantis, anchored here in Puerto Ayora on the eve of an expedition to the Galapagos Spreading Plate, just 350 miles northwest of where Grace is anchored.  He and I went to MIT together; he went onto a career at the three-part intersection of science, engineering, and tinkering --  pursuing a passion that was evident even in the late 70s when we were in school together.  I went onto a career in BS and politics – for which I too had a passion for as a student.  I’m sailing a little boat; Dana is a lead researcher on a 200+ foot vessel of unimaginable sophistication.  

First, we review 4 basic features of plate tectonics; then in the next post, we talk about Atlantis and the tech toys, including Alvin, the deep-sea submersible that discovered the Titanic.  Dinner before dessert.  

1. Mountains – then Mountain Ranges!  Before the mid-60s, the existence of mid-ocean mountains was well-known, a result of the laying of the  trans-Atlantic telephone and telegraph cables.  Over the years, more and more of these mid-ocean mountains were noticed, and one day, it became clear that the mountains in fact formed a chain – similar to the Rockies or Appalachians – and stretched for thousands of miles.  Then scientists supposed that this and similar chains, or ridges, in other oceans, were formed in the same way as the Rockies or Appalachians:  by an uplifting of the earth, like a flat-lying piece of aluminum foil might form ridges if pressed together from both ends.  

2.  Magnetism and the Age of Rocks:  On a parallel track, scientists had also begun to correlate the orientation of a volcanic rock formation’s magnetic field with the age of the formation.  Here’s how.  Assume you’re baking a sheet cake, and you mix some chocolate into the vanilla batter.  There will be stripes in the batter, and once in the oven, the cake will bake these chocolate stripes into the form cake.  Now, since volcanic rock contains lots of iron in it, these iron particles will tend to align themselves with the earth’s magnetic field.  Imagine a compass – a piece of iron.  It swings to align itself with the magnetic pole.  So as the volcanic rock – liquid at first – rises and cools, the iron particles within the rock will align themselves with the magnetic pole as well.  

One of the interesting things about the magnetic pole is that it was not always where it is now; in fact, it has wandered considerably over the years.  So if the scientists know where the magnetic pole was, say, 100 million years ago, and then they find volcanic rock whose iron is “pointed” to that spot, then it’s safe to say the rock is 100 million years old.  

3.  Symmetrical Ages:  In addition, scientists studying the formation of certain volcanic mountain ranges had noticed a remarkable symmetry of age between the two sides of the range:  if the mountains are formed by lava flowing up and out, it stands to reason that the oldest lava would be equally spread out far from the center, and the newest lava symmetrically arranged near to the center of the volcanic uprising.  It’s like the cake-maker poured the batter into the center of a round cake pan, while the pan was in the oven – the first part of the pour might make it to the sides of the pan, and the last few drops would settle into the center.   The “age” of each dollop of batter could be determined by measuring its distance from the center.

4.  A Tear in The Earth:  Mid-Atlantic ridges, iron lining up to point to the magnetic pole (wherever it was) and the symmetry of volcanic mountain formation.  By the mid-1960s, a team of scientists had begun to map these mid-Atlantic oceans with a magnetometer – a basically a device that measures the magnetic field of rock.  In one of those eureka moments that every scientist dreams about, they noticed immediately that the age of the rock on either side of the RIDGE was perfectly symmetrical – that is, 5 miles from the peak on either side, the rocks were of identical age.  Not just a single mountain, but the entire ridge.  Aha!  So the mid-Atlantic ridge was not an uplifting (aluminum foil pressed together) as previously thought.  Instead, there was , in fact, a tear in the earth’s mantle running the north-south length of the Atlantic, up through which volcanic activity was creating the entire mountain range.

Now, scientists had known of undersea volcanic activity creating mountains for years.  Most of the islands in the Pacific were formed that way.  But this was volcanic activity on scale no one had ever contemplated:  a continuous line stretching thousands of miles of steady volcanic eruptions, with mountains rising and then settling – one half headed west to North America, the other half headed east to Europe.  The ocean floor had torn apart and was expanding, and the earth’s crust, heretofore considered one solid piece of rock, was in fact fractured like a piece of lake ice in the springtime, each piece headed in its own direction.

Mr. Van Houten’s class can see this clearly in the South Atlantic:  at one time, South America and Africa were in fact connected – connected until the crust cracked, mountains ranges formed, and the two plates began to move apart:  one west, and one east, leaving the south Atlantic and its bifurcating ridge of mountains to fill in the emptiness between.  

The elementary schools and the “drifters” were right, and by the time Dana and I arrived at MIT, the textbooks had all been re-written, and a mad race was on to look for these cracks.  The field of plate tectonics was born, and to his credit, Dana was on the leading edge when he took his first and to-date only job at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where some of the seminal discoveries took place about how new earth is formed and how continents move apart and together.  

Consilience:  I´m always struck how advances in one area of human endeavor sparek advances in other areas.  E.M. Forster´s epigram, "Only connect" rings especially true. More recently, Edmund Wilson, the famous biologist, writes of this coming together of sciences in his wonderful book, Consilience.   Quickly, plate tectonics became conventional wisdom, and soon thereafter, the biologists began to understand how species’ similarities across continents could occur:  the continents were once connected.  Geologists could understand how rock strata were similar across continents:   they were once connected.  And marine geologists had a vast array of new questions to answer – and they needed tools to explore the deepest parts of the oceans, tools all contained on the research ship Atlantis, now at anchor in Santa Cruz, Galapagos. 

Dana’s degree is in mechanical engineering, so he turned his talents to developing the tools to go deep below the ocean’s surface and to map, in spectacular detail, the places where new earth was being formed.  Along with a few others, they began to design, improve, and perfect a class of deep-sea research vehicles – manned and unmanned – to explore the ocean’s depths.

Next:  The Galapagos Spreading Ridge, why my friend Dana and his colleagues are here, and a first-hand look at the high-tech/lo-tech toys of deep ocean exploration.

Breaching Rays

Two pictures I took in the Bay of Panama -- jumping rays.  I had the camera set on rapid shutter so you´ll see the first ray airborne, with the following ray just coming out of the water.  The second picture shows the second ray airborne, and the first just having entered the water.  These rays were all around us, jumping out of the water.  There are a number of reports of these rays breaching and striking humans in boats, including one recent report of a ray actually killing a woman -- likely by the force of impact and resulting head injuries, and not the poisonous barb. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/20/eagleray/index.html

Some speculate that the breaches are an effort to evade predators or clean parasites.  Whichever, they were a welcome sight on an otherwise flat calm, windless day as we motored out of Panama toward the Galapagos.

Mating Rituals

The four of us, Bill, Della, Jennifer, and I, took a land tour of North Seymour island a few days.  Located a few miles off the airport-island of Baltra, itself located few hundred yareds north of the Galapagos island of Santa Cruz, North Seymouyr is part of the Galapagos National Park.  As a result, we were required to viti the island in the company of a guide.  Our guide was a 28-year old native Santa Cruzan, Jairo.  He had a degree in Linguisics, and spoke excellent English, and was a delightful guide to the islan`s many mating rituals.

One of the "signature" animals of these islands is the blue-footed boobie.  T-shirts abound with the predictable plays on words, and the birds are relatively common around the rocky shorelines.  Most spectacularly, they can be seen diving into the water for the fish they live on, their big bodies transforming into sleek missles just inches above the water as the penetrate missile-like to catch (spear?) their prey.  Less visible, their mating rituals are as curious as their hunting techniques are unstoppable.

The male boobie, in seeking to court a mate, will circle the female ritually, lefiting first one foot and then the other, in an elaborate show of one-leggedness.  Actually, according to Jairo, the male is being judged on the quality and symetry of its feet.  From time to time, the male will open its wings and lift its head skyward, as if to say, "Enough already!"  We asked Jairo how long the mating dance lasts, and he replied, wryly, "As long as the female wants."  We circumnavigated this pair over the course of 30 minutes, and he was still at it as we left them to their privacy.

The frigate birds are the predatory vultures of the open sea, with wingspans that can exceed 6 feet.  Large, black with a forked tail that makes them look like Batman`s emblem, these birds were all over the Islas des Perles off Panama, and can be seen by sailors well out to sea.  They steal food from other birds, and sit at the near-top of the food chain.  Here´s a picture of a chick, just a few days old.  As many of you may know, the absolutre protection afforded Galapagos animals has rendered them fearless of humans, to them, we`re a harmless species that sometimes hovers nearby and emits clicks from a neck-strapped camera.

The male frigate bird has an enormous red pouch it inflates during mating season.  According to Jairom, femal frigates are less impressed with the pouch (which may be more to assert themselves to other males), and more impressed by the quality of the male´s nest, which he has built prior to courtship.  It`s the house, not the feet or the bulbous neck.  We were fortunate to see one of these in flight with its pouch puffed, a sort of frigate strut through the dance hall, flexing its proverbial muscles for all to see.

Later on our walk, we spot some large land iguanas.  They eat from the cactus, so in this Darwinian place, Jairo explains that on those islands populated with iguanas, the cactii grow taller than on the other islands, thust protecting themselves against the death of a thousands small bites.

We ended up at a small lagoon, populated by a small flock of pink flamingos.  These curious creatures -- the stuff of lawn legend -- walk with legs that are jointed backwards, the better to make their wading way through shallows.  Their beaks are particularly well-suited to root out the small crustaceans that make up their diet, from which their pink color derives.  They can fly, if awkwardly.

North Seymour is a small island; we completed our walk in about an hour.  But it`s filled with more mini-dramas than a teen club dance.  I only hope that blue-footed boobie got an answere, eventually.  My memories of my 7th grade dances are too vivid for me not to feel just a little bit sorry for the bobbing boobie.

Endangered Species

It seems like if it’s rare or endangered, it’s an aphrodisiac to someone somewhere.  Rhino horns, sea cucumbers, and, today's lesson: sharks.  Sharks are increasingly threatened by the testosterone-driven demand for shark fins.  Today, I learned of a particularly insidious way to catch sharks.  Build a box of slatted wood, fill it with fish, attach a solar-powered, floating radio transmitter to it, toss it into the Ecuadorian current, let it float to sea for a few days, and then, using the signal emitted from the transmitter, surround the box’s location with a large (and I mean large) net, and pull it shut.  Inside the net, you’ll find lots of frustrated sharks, attracted to the box of fish yet unable to break inside to claim their reward.  Instead, they are hauled out of the water, their fins are sliced off, and their now mutilated bodies are tossed back into the sea (fodder for the sharks coming late to the party).

How did I learn this?  On our way to dive the channel between the Galapagos islands of Baltra and North Seymour, our dive boat abruptly cut its engines, and one of the boat’s crew jumped overboard to cut the transmitter of such an arrangement free of the box.  Fishing like this is illegal in the marine preserve that surrounds the Galapagos, and the trap/transmitter combination had likely drifted, lost, from the mainland of Ecuador.  The owner had conveniently etched his boat’s number and, of all things, his cell phone number, into the glass cover.  When our Capitan called him, he let us know we could keep the transmitter.  I’m not sure what our dive boat will do with it; at worst, it’s an interesting souvenir for the wall.

Diving was amazing; after a brief checkout dive to recall such near-lost skills as replacing a flooded mask and returning a lost regulator to the mouth, Bill, Della, and I dropped 40 feet below the surface to be surrounded by white-tipped (non-aggressive) sharks, all manner of rays, needlefish, starfish, and eels, and large schools of surgeon fish, damselfish, and various other fishes.   Here's Della, at about 35 feet underwater. 

Being underwater is, always, an almost-take-my-breath-away moment.  Hovering in this below-world sphere of blue-green light, with sand and rock and coral below and a dim scattering of shafted sunlight, moves me mentally and spiritually into another realm.   The only sound is the gentle pulsing of my breath and the crackling of the coral forming around me.   Being weightless and free to twist, turn and move without any gravity, is such a liberating experience for me -- once underwater, I always find myself wanting to stay there for hours.  Once on the surface, I never fail to re-commit myself to dive more and more often.

Rays lie in the sand, barely visible until they shimmer slightly, hover gently, and with an almost-imperceptible shudder of the wings, glide across the bottom.   Here, you can see its open eye, as the ray lies covered under a fine layer of sand.  

 

A green moray eel, algae covering its slick bluish skin, peers out from underneath a rocky crevasse, daring the diver to push a meal-like finger in.  I was once bitten by a moray, body surfing off Hawaii.  Bobbing in 6-8 feet of swells, I felt my foot being raked by something horriobly sharp.  Swimming ashore quickly, and thinking it was a coral cut, I spent 4 hours on my stomach in a local ER having the doctor scape the sandy particles from a set of parallel bite marks on the top and bottom of my foot.  Given their tendency to bite and wrap their powerfully-muscled body around a convenient rock, I felt very lucky not to have become a floating-yet-anchored body-buoy off the Hawaii beach.  There, I had disturbed it in its world, and it responded in kind.  Here, I stopped to look, safely and weightlessly floating a few feet away, at a member of the species that had been my brief and unwanted nemesis a few thousand miles northwest, and a few years ago.

 

Starfish – some squat and fat, specked with red, others long and sinewy, blue in color -- lie draped over rocks.   This one is about 15 inches in diameter.

A forest of garden eels lift up from the sandy bottom, the upper parts of their snake-like bodies waving like flexible reeds in an invisible wind, searching for the plankton they feed upon.  Away from us, the eels are 12” off the bottom; accordion-like, they withdraw into the sand as we approach.  The effect is like walking through a cornfield, with the stalks disappearing magically underground as you approach, leaving a path through the corn.

And the sharks.  Dozens of white-tipped sharks in ones and twos and threes.  Lying on the bottom, swimming slowly in circles, and then the magical moment:  20-30 male white-tipped sharks swimming in a tight circle, each chasing each other inside a circle less than 10 feet in diameter, and then, one shark, not of the group, moving to the center and laying, belly up on the bottom, as the increasingly frenzied swarm cut in and out of the center rubbing across her belly.   

 The circle breaks up, moves a few yards away, and re-forms around another female. The mating ritual of white-tipped sharks, 10 feet below me, 40 feet below the surface, on a sandy bottom off the island of North Seymour.  No one else, just me, our divemaster, and the disinterested rays and starfish, and an oblivious radio transmitter, located uselessly in the well of our dive boat, several hundred yards downcurrent, and a thousand miles from its owner.