Adventures
During my 50 year career in marine science, I have had some incredible adventures. Here are links to stories describing some of them. One (Crab Mountains) was a great discovery that produced numerous scientific publications. Another (Alvin) was a fantastic adventure but got lost in progress reports that never saw the light of day. And another (the Kad'yak) was a decade-long obsession that eventually became a book and perhaps someday will become a movie.
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In April 1991, while exploring the bottom of Chiniak Bay, Alaska, I discovered an amazing phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands of female Tanner crabs were aggregated into mounds. What were they doing? It took 12 years of continous research to figure it out.
In the summer of 1999, and again in 2002, I descended over 3500 meters into the depths of the North Pacific Ocean in the submersible Alvin to explore Patton Seamount and document the incredible sealife that abounded on this extinct underwater volcano. There, my colleagues and I discovered at least 10 species of crabs living among a great diversity of corals, sponges and other fauna.
In 1861, the Russian 3-masted ship Kad’yak set sail from Kodiak, Alaska, bound for San Francisco with a shipload of ice. Almost immediately, it struck a rock, foundered, and was abandoned. But, loaded with ice, it floated for four days before finally sinking in Icon Bay, on Spruce Island. In 2003, after years of painstaking research, I led a team of volunteer divers to discover the wreck of the Kad’yak. Join me and a team of professional marine archaeologists as we explore and document this 140 year-old shipwreck before it is lost to time.
Stay tuned and find out, but it will probably have something to do with sailing.
