On the day I nearly drowned I distinctly remember the color of the sky (charcoal), the smell in the air (wood smoke), and the sound of a dog barking (mine, a shepherd-collie mix named Ranja, running up and down the shoreline). It was Halloween, 1980.
What had been a long, glorious summer had faded into late fall. I was 26, living in the heart of Iowa, running a weekly alternative newspaper which I also co-owned, giving me the freedom to have sailed or wind surfed almost every day since early May. I know what you’re thinking…sailing and windsurfing in the middle of Iowa? The Army Corps had recently dammed a couple big rivers, creating sizable reservoirs, which had become boating oases in the middle of the heartland. Four, often five times a week that summer around noon I’d call a buddy, load a cooler and head for the smaller of the two, called Big Creek. I owned a pair of 16-foot Hobie Cats, which we raced, and raced, and raced.
This final day of October though, I was on my own, hadn’t even bothered to call anyone to join me. Who would have come anyway? It was brisk, overcast, the wrong season to be on the water. But I’d had such a great summer I wasn’t ready to let it end.
Even while rigging the boat on my own, struggling to step the mast, which usually takes two, it never crossed my mind that this might be unwise. The lake was empty and so was the parking lot and the boat ramp. But that was part of the brilliance of the day. Who would go sailing on Halloween in Iowa? It was beyond the pale on anyone’s safety meter yet somehow seemed a perfect challenge for a young, fit, adventuresome twenty-something.
I wore a long, blue skanorak over a paddling top and wedged a life jacket under the webbing on the boat’s trampoline as I pushed the boat into choppy, cold water. A stiff wind banged the jib taut as soon as I turned the boat away from shore. As the boat picked up speed immediately I was quickly aware this would not be a day for racing back and forth across the two-mile wide reservoir but for a cautious sail on a gusty day.
As soon as I cleared the last protective point of land the wind exploded, the main sail boomed and the catamaran rocketed into the air, immediately up on one pontoon. Grasping the butt of the rudder extension in my right hand, I let the sheet out as far as it would go with my left and leaned back over the edge of the airborne pontoon. Within seconds a 40-mile gust blew the boat over, tossing me into the cold lake.
Though I didn’t come from an adventurous family, I had taken to the water early and had always had a canoe, a couple kayaks, some small sailboats. My father could not swim, thanks to a traumatizing youthful experience involving local thugs tossing him into a quarry. Despite that, we had always spent summers on Midwestern lakes, where I’d live on the water for weeks at a time.
I had righted tossed catamarans dozens of times in my life, often by myself. But this day I tried for 15, 20, 25 minutes, leaning back on the righting line, pulling with all my strength to turn the floating boat into the wind to help lift its water-soaked sail. No luck. I scanned the shoreline for help, but there was no one.
“Never leave your boat” is the hard and fast rule. But as I watched the shoreline grow farther away and the skies darken, a strong wind pushing my floating boat towards a remote corner of reservoir many miles walk through thick woods back to my car, I made a decision that was almost my last. I would swim to shore.
My guide was Ranja’s barking; Lassie-like, he sensed trouble and I could see him running back and forth along the shoreline. As I dove off the boat I left my life jacket secured beneath the webbing, figuring it would slow my swimming and I knew I didn’t want to be in this cold water any longer than I had to be.
I was a half-mile offshore, a long swim on a warm day. My arms and fingers turned numb and I struggled against the cold, the wind, the chop. I just kept swimming, targeting the barking onshore, urging myself over and over, “You cannot drown. Not here. Not today.”
I managed to drag myself onto the sandy beach, thankful the car keys were still in my pocket. The next day I returned with a friend and found the boat blown into a far corner of the lake. Righting it on a much calmer, sunnier day I sailed it back to the marina and de-rigged it for the season.
In the years since I have spent many hours, days, weeks, even months in small boats on much wilder seas, all over the globe, from the Aleutian Islands to Antarctica, Tasmania to Gabon. That day on Big Creek has often popped into my head, reminding me to be careful out there, wherever I am. That day, I was close enough to the worst possible scenario to understand consequences of a small mistake — or, perhaps, small, adventurous decisions compounded.
Now, hile I always take being on the water seriously, that’s not the same thing as being earnest about it; that day never dampened my joy of being on a river, a lake, in a vast ocean. A year ago I was on a sailboat in the middle of the South Pacific, midway between the Cook Islands and the Tuamoto Archipelago. We stopped near a barely exposed, mid-ocean reef. Jumping into the wild ocean, naked but for a pair of shorts – no fins, no mask, no snorkel – it was the most exposed swim I’d ever made.
As I peered down into the three-mile deep ocean I felt very, very small and vulnerable. Yet very, very much alive.
The Current often laments humankind’s tendency to treat our one ocean as a kind of infinite, unpollutable dumping ground. From municipalities to fishing boats, cruise ships to oil rigs, people seem to feel that tossing unwanted junk into the sea is easy and appropriate.
Photo: Alexander Safonov/Getty Images
Which is why on Monday, when Osama bin Laden wound up on the wrong end of automatic weapon fire and needed to be dumped, no one blinked as his corpse splashed into the sea. My mind, of course, went immediately to: What exactly happens to a body when it’s dropped into the salty ocean? Does it sink, or is it instant shark bait? If it floats for awhile, how long will it take to decompose?
Scientific studies of ocean-borne bodily decomposition have been done pigs, because pigling skin is, like humans, hairless and soft-skinned, and we carry similar “gut bacteria.”
On land, although dogs, vultures or other large animals may get first dibs on decomposing flesh, flies and other insects are usually first to attack the soft tissue of dead bodies. Depending on weather conditions, a corpse left exposed in warm conditions in the wild will be reduced to bones within a couple weeks.
When the deceased is swallowed by saltwater, a different set of predators takes over. Like so much about the ocean, relatively little is known for sure, but one thing is certain: Sharks are the number-one scavenger.
“Like any predator, sharks are opportunistic feeders, and they’ll take advantage of any resource that’s given to them,” says George Burgess. Director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Burgess is also the curator of the International Shark Attack File.
The VENUS Project of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, joined by the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, experimented with weighting a dead pig and dropping it into the Saanich Inlet. A remotely operated camera transmitted real-time data back to scientists aboard a Coast Guard research vessel on the surface.
The results? “The pig saw a lot of action,” says the official report. “After a first day, a large section of one haunch was missing after a possible shark attack.” Hit-and-miss scavenging continued. After six days, crabs had gathered en masse over the carcass.
If a human body drops to the deep ocean floor, the lack of light, the extreme cold and heavy pressure will kill off bacteria, slowing decomposition. Big fish may swim deep and take some bites, followed by smaller detritivores, like lampreys. Even at the bottom of the ocean floor, the competition for food, and microscopic but voracious organisms, would reduce the body to bones in a few days.
When a big whale dies and sinks, it sets in motion a new beginning for deep-sea life, bringing “a whopping amount of organic matter” to a place where food is scarce. The first so-called whale fall was observed in 1987 by marine biologists off Santa Catalina, California, at 4,000 feet below sea level.
For several years the dead whale becomes a kind of sub-ocean aquaculture project, feeding a community of more than 190 species, including lobsters, bristle worms, prawns, shrimp, hagfish, bone-eating worms, crabs, sea cucumbers, octopuses, mussels and clams. Eventually, large colonies of tubeworms take over the carcasses. More than 30 previously unknown species of marine life have been discovered at whale falls around the globe.
But a good-sized whale outweighs even a tall man by thousands of times; so the end for a human body heading toward the ocean floor would come relatively quickly. Given bin Laden’s unsavory infamy, I guess it’s not so surprising that he would end up, to paraphrase Don Corleone, “Swimming with the fishes.”
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
The first time I met Richard Branson, we were in the kitchen of a small bed and breakfast in the high-Arctic Inuit village of Clyde River. Taller and blonder than I expected, the Virgin entrepreneur was dressed in full cold-weather gear and had just flown in by private plane to join a dogsled expedition. Slightly bemused, he was struggling to figure out how to microwave a cup of tea.
I picture that scene whenever Branson announces that he’s setting off on a new adventure—whether by hot air balloon, cigarette boat or, as of last week, in a one-man submarine. While the intention to explore the bottoms of the five oceans, by diving deeper below the surface than any man or woman before, is exceedingly bold, Branson’s microwave fumbling worries me that technology may not be his strong suit.
His $10 million Virgin Oceanic continues a project begun by Branson’s friend and former ballooning partner Steve Fossett (whose small plane mysteriously disappeared over the Nevada desert in 2007). The goal is to take the ultra-lightweight sub to the deepest, least-explored parts of the planet. These dives might be conducted simultaneously with the launch sometime later this year of the first Virgin Galactic rocket carrying paying passengers ($200,000 per seat) into space.
Branson’s become the Steve Jobs of high-end adventure. Anything he proposes is quickly bought up by wealthy folks who seem ready to follow him anywhere. Sir Richard’s attitude is equal parts measured and cavalier. “I have a great difficulty saying no,” he admits. “Life’s so much more fun saying yes.”
The Deepflight Challenger is the brainchild of renowned ocean engineer Graham Hawkes and was built by Hawkes Ocean Technologies of Point Richmond, California, the leader in sophisticated submersibles. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Moss Landing Marine Labs have signed on to support what Branson’s calling the Virgin Oceanic Five Dives project. The 18-foot-long, 8,000-pound craft will study marine life, the tectonic plates and help Google Ocean map the ocean floor in 3D.
Hawkes has constructed submarines for explorations of the Gulf of Aqaba, Jordan, and a multi-year ocean expedition led by venture capitalist Tom Perkins.
“I love a challenge,” says Branson. “When I learned that only one person had gone below 18,000 feet under water and the sea goes down to 36,000 feet, it seemed too unbelievable. And talking to scientists and finding out that 80 percent of species on earth haven’t been discovered yet—that’s unbelievable. Knowing there are thousands of shipwrecks on the bottom of the sea that never have been discovered is pretty good fun as well.”
A leak or engine malfunction at depths where pressure is 1,000 times normal won’t be much fun, for man or machine.
The first of the Five Dives—which are intended to set 30 world records—will take place as early as this summer. Explorer Chris Walsh is expected to captain the sub to the bottom of the Pacific’s Mariana Trench, more than 30,000 feet below sea level. Branson intends to captain the next trip, to the bottom of the Atlantic’s Puerto Rico Trench, a mere 25,000 feet below.
The other three areas to be explored are the Indian Ocean’s Diamantina Trench (26,041 feet), the southern Atlantic’s South Sandwich Trench (23, 737) and the Arctic Ocean’s Molloy Deep (18,399).
The carbon fiber and titanium submarine should be able to drop seven miles below the surface and snoop around for up to 24 hours. The hope is that each descent and return will take no more than five hours. The craft’s “wings” will essentially allow it to “fly” over the ocean floor collecting data.
Before each dive, remote-controlled vehicles (ROVs) armed with bait will be sent down to stir up marine life, which will be filmed by the submarine that follows.
Branson already owns a three-person version of the sub, also built by Hawkes—the Necker Nymph—which he rents for $2,500 a day at his Caribbean island resort.
“This experimental trip to the bottom of the ocean could lead to bigger crafts,” said Branson. “We’ve coined the phrase aquanaut—anyone who goes below 20,000 feet—there’s only one person at the moment, and it would be fun to make as many aquanauts as there are astronauts.”
Branson is familiar with adventuring risks. In 1972, marlin fishing off Cozumel, he swam two miles to shore when his boat was swamped by 10-foot waves. He’s been nearly killed skydiving and rappelling down a Las Vegas hotel, and plucked from the ocean on numerous occasions when his balloons went down. In 1977 he was the first to fly a kind of tricycle with wings and managed to land it after soaring hundreds of feet off the ground; its inventor was killed a week later doing the same thing.
When we traveled together in the Arctic, Sir Richard (only his mother still calls him Ricky) told me about getting lost in the north woods of Canada when one of his ballooning adventures went awry. “We called on the radio and told the guy who responded that we were on a frozen lake surrounded by fir trees. He paused a minute before saying, ‘Well, this is Canada … you could be in any of 10,000 places.’ “
A rescue chopper picked up the expedition eight hours later.
Swooping rescuers won’t be an option at 25,000 feet below; if something goes wrong down there, dashing Sir Richard will need an extra set of wings.
Eleuthera, Bahamas – The late 1600s and early 1700s were the golden age of pirates here, led by Edward Teach (a.k.a. Blackbeard), who wove hemp into his beard and kept it smoldering during battles; Calico Jack, who favored striped coats and pants and nurtured the careers of the most famous women pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read; and Sir Henry Morgan. As the Caribbean islands changed hands among the English, Dutch, French, Spanish and U.S., pirates were often hired to “police” them by faraway governments with their hands full back home.
While Somali pirates seem bold today — grabbing private sailboats and killing all onboard, not hesitating to kidnap women and children, and yesterday making a run at an American cargo boat, the Maersk Alabama, for the third time – they are legacy of a long history.
Ships commanded by pirates first explored the entirety of the Indian Ocean, from Persia to the tip of Africa. The same waters the Somali’s operate in today were dominated by pirates in 694 BC, when Assyrian king Sennacherib grew so fatigued with them attacking his ships heavy with gold, silver, spices, copper and teak that he went to war against them. Roman emperors were hassled by the same headache while simultaneously the Mediterranean was home to pirates from Turkey to Greece.
Taking hostages has always been part of the game: In 78 BC a young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates and held for six weeks, until a ransom was paid. Two years later, in Pompeii, laws were passed to “stamp out” piracy, which never quite took hold. In 1575 pirates operating out of Tunis and Algiers grabbed of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, and his brother Rodrigo and held them for five years. It took American President Thomas Jefferson sending his Navy to war, in 1801, against Tripoli-based pirates to stop open-sea hijackings … until the Somali’s emerged a few years ago.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
An obscure Pole named Aleksander Doba has pulled off a somewhat obscure first: Sea kayaking across the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean in 98 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes, the longest open ocean kayaking adventure ever.
Leaving quietly from Dakar on October 26 and spending much of the first two months fighting into relentless winds and currents which kept pushing him north, it seemed – if you followed the GPS tracker online – that the 64-year-old Doba was going in circles, or repeating some kind of weird figure-8 patterns.
A straight line from Dakar to his finishing point in Fortaleza, Brazil, would have been just less than 2,000 miles. Of course thanks to winds, storms, currents and the two hours he slept each night, there are no straight lines in ocean paddling. In the end he paddled a total of 3,352 miles (average speed: 1.4 miles per hour; average daily distance, 33.5 miles; longest day, 78.6 miles).
Doba is hardly a novice to the kind of physical strength and mental endurance necessary for long solo paddles. Though this time he embarked in a sophisticated, 23-foot kayak with monster roll bars and a pair of flotation cabins at either end – he had previously kayaked more than 40,000 miles, including a 2,600-mile trip around the Baltic Sea in 1999, a 3,300 mile journey from Poland to Norway in 2000 and a 1,200 mile circumnavigation of Lake Baikal last year.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
The Sea Shepherd’s Southern Ocean season – dubbed “Operation No Compromise” — is more than half over and reports so far it may be having its best season of protest ever.
How to measure? Very few whales taken by the Japanese whaling fleet and no ships sunk on either side. Yet.
Of course there’s been plenty of verbal slugging since the season began in December, as well as the tossing of some literal bamboo spears, by the Japanese!
Lead-Shepherd Captain Paul Watson accused the Japanese of making a false “Mayday” distress call from the Southern Ocean last Friday, claiming it was “under attack” by the anti-whalers.
Watson admits he and his gang had deployed its typical weaponry: prop foulers (wire ropes intended to damage engines), and a fair number of stink and paint bombs – resulting in the return fire of those bamboo spears — but that they were hardly close to ramming the Japanese whaling ship.
“They said they were in distress and we were standing by,” Watson told the AP. “The ‘Gojira’ [the Shepherd’s new attack ship, named after Godzilla] is right beside them and they refuse to answer our calls.”
Truth is, according to Watson, it was the Japanese ship “Yushin Maru No. 3” which nearly cut the “Gojira” in half, coming just 10 feet from its hull.
Given the remoteness of the battleground, for now all we have is the he-said/she-said issuances of the two fighters. But all will be made clear later in the year, since for the fourth consecutive season a film crew from Animal Planet is on board documenting the campaign for “Whale Wars.”
It would appear that this year’s campaign strategy has paid off. Utilizing thee ships, a helicopter and 88 crewmembers the Shepherd’s have successfully chased the Japanese whaling fleet over 5,000 miles. Early in the season they isolated and cut off its refueling vessel – the “Sun Laurel” – even while being harassed by two of the Japanese’ three harpoon boats – which have focused on trailing the Shepherd’s rather than hunting whales.
Watson checked in from port in New Zealand, where he’d taken the Shepherd’s lead ship, the “Steve Irwin,” for fuel and supplies. He is optimistic about the season, suggesting it may be “our most successful yet.”
“They have taken very close to zero (whales),” he says, hoping this may be the last season the Shepherd’s presence will be required off Antarctica, hoping its non-stop harassment will finally encourage the Japanese to give up its “scientific” hunt.
Where whaling commission edicts and international protest have failed, a combination of the seaborne fights, new Japanese tax laws, falling meat sales and having been caught running a whale-meat black market, may succeed in stopping whaling in the Southern Ocean.
Success has apparently been felt on the fundraising front as well, since the Shepherd’s have recently raised a giant electronic billboard in Times Square depicting a breaching whale about to be harpooned. It is the media savvy non-profit’s first stab at outdoor advertising.
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