Kure, Part Deux

Operations proceeded smoothly at Kure the last two days we were there. Lots of territory was covered by towboard, with divers switching every hour and a half between duties of driving and towing. During our transits to and from the ship, the resident pod of spinner dolphins would find our avons, and excited by our speed, swim along at our bow. At full bore, we're usually doing around 20 knots and the dolphins easily match that speed, diving in a out of the water inches from the boat and splashing anyone sitting up front.. One of our teams stopped to dive with the dolphins one day on the transit home, and found a big net halfway embedded in the sandy bottom near where they were swimming. One of the dolphins had a piece of net hung up on its pectoral fin too, although its net was probably from a different source. So, the next morning, my boat team headed back to pull up the big net on the bottom. It was pretty big, and about 25 feet down, so we brought along some liftbags. (heavy nylon open-ended bags with straps attached, look kinda like miniature hot-air balloons) A thin strip of the net about 8 feet long was sticking out of the sand, but the majority of it was buried, and the suction was way too much to pull it out by hand. So, we attached two 200 lb liftbags and filled them with air from a scuba tank. One of the bags ripped out the piece of the net it was attached to and went rocketing to the surface, literally. Anybody directly over the bag would have been launched out of the water... hmmm. That lesson learned, we attached another bag to a more substantial piece of the net. Once filled, all we had to do was dive down and shake the bags back and forth. As they vibrate, they slowly work the net out of the substrate and if they're properly placed, they pretty much do all the work for you. Two liftbags pulled some of the net out, but we had to throw on a third bag to get it all to go. It worked like magic, and the third bag was just enough to work all of it out of the sand. The net exploded upwards in a giant mushroom cloud of sand, and hung there at the surface like a limp, well.... net. Jubilee and I then painstakingly cut out all the old coral heads that it had gathered over the course of its life since it fell off some fishing boat a couple of years ago. Then, of course, it went up and into the boat- not an easy task for something that is 15 feet long, waterlogged, covered with slimy growth, and weighs a couple hundred pounds...

After the days work, all the avons (there are 4 of them) and the ship's SAFEboat all rendesvouz back at the ship. Usually, we all get to the ship within a few minutes of each other, so plenty of time is spent circling around off the stern quarter of the ship waiting for your turn to be craned aboard... Two days ago, the ship's SAFEboat (which goes out every day carrying two other NOAA guys to do fish surveys) returned to the ship the same time as my avon. They charged right up to us and began to play bumper boats. One thing led to another, and soon there was a volley of mustard and mayo from the lunch coolers. My attempt to spray mustard failed miserably, as the French's mustard nozzle makes for a poor stream and terrible trajectory. The Kraft mayo, however, sprays a nice inch-wide stream as far and as long as you want. After Jubilee and I, our boat, and all our dive gear were thoroughly coated in mayo, a truce was called. Side note: most bottled mayo these days apparently requires no refrigeration. The ships cooks were under the assumption that our mayo would be fine left out on the galley table day after steamy tropical day. Upon close examination, it was found that OUR mayo did indeed require refrigeration- not only that, but it had expired in February...

So, I'm covered in mayo, and thoroughly disgusted. I had just asked my boss if it was alright if I jumped in the water to wash off, when four Galapagos sharks appeared out of nowhere, instantly attracted by the greasy little bits of mayo floating in the water. They swam around, nipping at all the little chunks. Somehow a breakfast biscuit found its way into the water, and Frank accidentally dropped a chicken wing over the side. The sharks weren't intersted however, and never touched anything but the mayo. Ken and Jeff and I have always tried chumming for sharks back on Oahu with good stuff like Ahi bellies, and have never met with any success. Who knew all you needed was mayo?? Frank stuck his arm over the side of the boat and took this pic.

Yesterday, our last day at Kure, we finished up with operations at around 2:00 in the afternoon. Not one to waste good diving time, the boss had us rendezvoused up in the middle of the atoll, and then took us outside the barrier reef for a fun-dive. We anchored up in 40-50 feet of water in an area of spur and groove reef structure. Derek and I took off to find some neat stuff to film with his underwater video camera. The visibility was absolutely PHENOMENAL- You could see well over a hundred feet in every direction, quite possibly 150 feet. I felt like I was floating in the sky above the ground and that I could fall at any moment. Pretty cool. The reef was pretty standard- big coral-cement spurs with small evenly-spaced pocilipora heads everywhere. Sand channels lay between the coral spurs. At first not much was going on; just the usual reef fish hovering around near the bottom. Then, a small gray reef shark meandered over and began circling, then another. A little while later, two big uluas showed up and came to check us out. Derek and I took turns diving down to the bottom. I'd go down, hide behind a ledge, and settle in for a while. With no scuba tank bubbles to scare off the fish, after I'd sat there for a while, the uluas came in very close to check me out (see pic), and so did the two sharks. By the end of the dive, we had the sharks, the uluas, a school of rainbow runners (see next pic), and a school of kawakawa (small tunas) circling around us in one big gyre. Pretty amazing, I gotta say...

After loading our boats onboard the ship, we set course for Pearl and Hermes Reef, about 150 miles southeast. We arrived this morning and began ops around 9:30

Kure Atoll

We've been at Kure Atoll (pronounced Kure-eh) for about 4 days now.. It felt great to get back in the water after our weeklong transit on the ship. On Tuesday our team hopped in the water on the north side of the atoll to begin our towboard surveys. I was filled with what some might call "awe" or "shock" or perhaps "giddy slobbering" when I saw the endless pristine fields of blue and white montipora coral that stretched away before me. (Something you'd never see on Oahu) We began "work", and I was towed behind the boat on my towboard, swooping and diving around coralheads and ledges- literally as close to flying as I'll ever get. The fish were HUGE, as expected, and the visibility was tremendous. I was totally stoked, and ready to declare a national holiday when one of my co-workers said "Oh yeah, Kure has nice beaches, but the diving really isn't all that great compared to the other NW Hawaiian Islands..." I was stunned, being that our first day of operations had been so amazing. But I began to think about it, and it makes sense. Kure, being the world's northernmost coral atoll, has some pretty cold water temperatures in the winter, and thus probably fewer tropical species that care to tolerate freezing their asses off half of the year. Right now during the month of July, the sea-surface temperatures are such that Kure's water feels no different than that of the main islands, 7 full degrees of latitude south. In winter however, the water circulation patterns cause a sharp drop in temp up in the northern regions of the state. Regardless, the diving is far better than anything I've experienced in my life, and it sounds like there's nowhere to go but up! As part of our first three days of operations, my boat team made several runs to Green Island, the main island on the southern side of the atoll. There are three people from the NOAA protected species division camping out there during the monk seal pupping season, much like the folks on Laysan. Our ship was carrying supplies for the campers, which as far as I could tell consisted mostly of two giant coolers full of gourmet ice cream. We met the folks at the old coast guard pier that juts out on the north side of the island (they used to have a station there in the old days). After dodging the monk seals that were strewn like bowling pins all over the beach, we got their gear ashore and had a little chat. They liked to chat. I suppose 4 months on a desert island will do that. The woman in charge, Cynthia, seemed very content on the island- 50ish years old, tan tan tan, and a headful of dreds, she was master of her domain. Apparently last year the crew of the ship had trouble convincing her to leave at the end of the season.... One of the other campers took us to the highest point on the island (probably about 15-20 feet) and showed us the grand view. A family of 4 Laysan Albatross occupied the summit of the "hill", so we had to jockey for space to snap a few photos. Green Island is small, perhaps a half mile long and a quarter mile wide, but again like Laysan, is home to thousands of seabirds.
The monk seal campers had very kindly collected all the debris from the island's beaches and piled it all on the pier. We began shoving it over the side and into our avon (inflatable motorboat). We kept piling and packing and piling some more until we had at least 500 lbs aboard. The pile of debris inside the boat was monstrous and almost head-high. I sat on top of the mound of stinky nets for the entire 5 km ride back to the ship. Best seat in the house. Over the course of the week we made 3 trips, and other boats made about 4 more, and now our 22 foot cargo container is almost half full... We've been pulling a relatively minor amount of debris off the reefs themselves as most of Kure was surveyed thoroughly last year.
When the monk seal campers arrived this March, they discovered that a 30 foot sailboat had washed ashore on the east side of the atoll. It had washed over the barrier reef and into the lagoon and then sunk in about 12 feet of water... There was noone aboard. After reporting it to the coast guard, they found out the story behind the boat. The "Grendel" was captained by a 70 year old man who was making the crossing from New Zealand to Seattle just as he had 25 TIMES before... (!!!) Apparently he went missing this spring and noone has heard from him since.
The boat was directly adjacent to one of our survey areas, so we stopped for a few minutes and dove on the wreck. It sat in about 12 feet of water at about a 45 degree angle. The mast stuck up out of the water about 20 feet and looked almost brand new- roller furling headsails, newish looking radar antenna, weather instruments up top, etc... The hull was steel and looked to have a small hole in the port side. I dove into the cabin and found a couple of guitar cases, a bunch of jars with granola in them, and floating up against the ceiling was a pair of the man's shoes. It was kinda unnerving and pretty sad, not knowing what happened to the old guy. I'm guessing he just fell overboard somewhere in the night and wasn't able to climb back onboard- the sailor's worst nightmare. There was a carved wooden polynesian mask on the bulkhead, and a wooden alligator was floating up against the starboard cabin wall. The monk seal people had taken many of the man's personal belongings back to the island so they could be sent to his relatives, along with the anchor, much of the hardware, and the sails which had been torn to shreds. We took the sails with us along with all the land debris back to the ship...

It's time for bed now, but I'll post more on Kure soon.

Laysan Island

Yesterday we conducted land debris operations at Laysan Island. Described by one website as the "crown jewel" of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, my expectations for this island were quite high. I was not disappointed. Laysan is a small, oval-shaped island approximately 1 mile in diameter. There is a hypersaline lake that lies in the middle of the island, and provides excellent habitat for waterbirds like the endemic Laysan duck.. We landed our Avons around 8:30 in the morning in a little cove on the west side of the island. We were greeted on the beach by about 8 people from the monk seal research camp and the Fish and wildlife camp.. Many of them had been there for months with very little outside contact and No fresh fruit, due to invasive species quarantine rules... For the marine debris crew to even be allowed on the island, every one of us had to be wearing brand new clothing from head to toe, and even that had to be in the deep freeze for 24 hours prior to landing. Much of Laysan has been restored to native vegetation following the extermination of introduced rabbits several decades ago.. Thus, there are many rules about what you can and cannot bring to the island, to minimize the risk of weed seeds or other invasives making it onto the island.. Guano mining took place there extensively about a century ago, but today the island looks much as it did before human contact. It was 'effin BEAUTIFUL.. We had several big piles of debris to pick up on the beach at Laysan. The campers there were kind enough to gather it up for us and consolidate it into piles on the beach. We hiked a few miles around the north side of the island, gathering debris. Some of the crew was following us around the shorline in our Avons (inflatable motor boats). They would pull into shore, oftentimes in the middle of the surf for us to load the debris onboard. When full, they would run it back out to the Sette (our big ship) and offload it using the onboard crane and cargo nets... Let me tell you, it is a lot harder than it looks loading a saturated, sandy, encrusted, stinky, 300 lb mass of ropes, nets, and garbage into a small boat in the middle of the surf. Talk about Amorphus (did I spell that right?)....
Anyway, after the debris was cleaned up, we all hiked back around to the monk seal camp for lunch..
Everyone else ate on the beach and swam in the cove, but I could not bring myself to waste time eating when I was on this amazing island that I may never return to in all my life..... (now that the NW Hawaiian Islands are a national monument, it is pretty much impossible for any normal civilian people to go there. No ship is allowed to anchor anywhere in the monument, and unless you are there on a research mission and have acquired about a million different permits, you just can't go... In that respect, I feel like this may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience).. So, during lunch, I hiked around into the interior of the island with my camera, and captured as best I could the absolute brilliance of the place. It felt so isolated yet so completely full of life.. There wer thousands upon thousands of seabirds there, roosting in every bush and flying around your head in huge numbers. Sooty terns, white terns, great frigatebirds, red-footed boobies, red-tailed tropicbirds, brown noddies, black noddies, wedgetailed shearwaters, black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross, and of course the famous Laysan finches... The majority of these birds were just fledging.. The albatross chicks were quite possibly the most awkward creatures I have ever seen. Though almost the size of the adults (6 foot wingspan), the chicks can barely walk without falling over, and they've got ratty looking downy feathers sticking out everywhere. I felt like I was in the galapagos somewhere, because all the birds, especially the chicks, were absolutely fearless. I took several photos of one Laysan albatross chick with my camera on Macro setting (5 cm-30 cm) for example... There was one grove of palm trees on the island, and the rest was dominated by native beach grass and forbs...
I couldn't hike all the way down to the lake because there were so many bird burrows in the trail, and not crushing baby birds is high on my priority list... So, unfortunately I never got a look at a Laysan duck.. I did however see the Laysan finches (found nowhere else in the world)- 3 fledgling finches to be exact, sprawled out on the sand behind a plastic tote in the monk seal camp. One was completely prone, with its head on the ground, another looked like it was going to tip over any minute. I thought they were dying at first, but as soon as I advanced with my camera to close range, they perked up.. They look strangely like the Maui parrotbill...
The monk seals, of course, were everywhere. Basking amongst the debris, behind logs, in the shallows, just about anywhere. It was pupping time, and all the little pups (dubbed "wieners" by the monkseal people) were playing around. Cute little sausages. Probably pretty tasty too. One adult swam right up to our Avons, herding ahead of it a bunch of our crew, who had been swimming behind the boats... You would never guess that there are only 1600 of these creatures left in the world by the way they dominate the place..
The fish were amazing too- BIG wrasses swimming right up onto the sand, almost out of the water, and huge Uluas and omilus swimming around in water only as deep as they were. You could almost scoop the manini out of the water with your hands. I haven't even donned my snorkel yet, but when I do, I'm bound to be blown away. Derek spent his lunchhour swimming around with his eyes open, trying to see all the fish (we had all left our dive gear on the ship)...
We had only scheduled a half day of operations at Laysan, so at around 12:30 we packed up the boats and headed back out to the ship, leaving our extra food with the grateful campers. One by one, we craned our boats back aboard ship, and then set sail for Kure Atoll, our next destination. Kure is the furthest northwest of all the NWHI and is actually almost on the international date line. We're supposed to be arriving there sometime early tomorrow morning, where we'll dig into the nitty gritty of our debris operations.

Day 3&4

Things are going great out here. Yesterday we made landfall at Tern Island (part of French Frigate Shoals Atoll) where we offloaded three people and some supplies. One of them was a Fish and Wildlife volunteer who was to be spending 4 months there doing bird stuff, and two were NOAA employees who were on a shark culling mission to eliminate a few specific sharks that have been eating the endangered monk seal pups.. The island itself just started out as a sandbar, but during WWII the military built up the island with coral they blasted from the reef in order to build a runway on it. It is a very small island with a few barracks on it, and of course an old runway.

Millions of seabirds call the runway home, so any plane landing must do several low flybys before they land in order to scare off all the birds. When we arrived, the wind was blowing 20 knots, and the little island looked very barren and bleak. The fish and wildlife boat came out to meet us (we came into the shallows as far as we could before our 15 foot draft limited us)... The folks on the boat looked a little bedraggled and had a crazy shipwrecked look in their eye... Tern Island is the only outpost of civilization before you reach midway, ~700 miles northwest. There are other islands (called motus) that make up French Frigate shoals atoll. Most of them are just sand-spits, but there is one remnant of volcanic rock called La Perousse pinnacle that still remains of the high island that has now sunk into the ocean. See picture. We will be returning to French Frigate shoals on one of our later cruises to do debris removal, but for now we've begun steaming our way northwest to Laysan Island. I'm part of the crew that will be removing nets and debris from the beach at Laysan, so I'll have to break out my quarantined set of clothing in order to land on the island. I'm looking forward to seeing the endemic Laysan Finch and the Laysan duck (only 600 left in the world), both found nowhere else in the world but this tiny island. There is a freshwater/brackish "lake" in the middle of Laysan that seems to provide great habitat for birds....

This morning it was my duty to assist with a CTD operation aboard the ship.. This is an oceanographic operation during which we drop a big apparatus with various instruments attached down to 500 meters, where we then take conductivity measurements (determines salinity), Temperature readings, and collects water samples. We winch the apparatus over the side using a deck-mounted crane, and then lower it on a cable to the required depth. My duty was to guide the thing up and over the side, as it is swinging around on the cable in the rocking seas. It is bigger than I am and weighs way more than I do, so it was kind of hard to control, but we managed to seal the deal. I then had to relay the angle of the cable to the crane operator as he lowered it down to depth to avoid drift and damage to the underside of the ship. Anyway, today we start gearing up for land operations ashore.

Day 1&2

Well, it is our second day at sea and things are going great! Yesterday after leaving Pearl Harbor, a Coast Guard helicopter conducted training operations with the boat, lowering a basket down to the deck to simulate an evacuation. Unfortunately I saw none of this, as all scientific personnel aboard were instructed to stay in the mess hall so as to stay out of the way... We're steaming along at about 11 knots, and the crew have fishing lines trailing out the back 24/7. The ship is a diesel/electric drive, meaning that the main propellors are powered by electric motors, using power produced by diesel generators.... I was talking to the captain at dinner and he gave me all the stats on the ship: approx 220 feet long, 43 foot beam, 15 foot draft. Fuel capacity is 163,000 gallons of diesel, and at full bore the ship only burns 1% per day. Last night at sunset, we passed to the south of Kauai, and Niihau was barely visible as the sun went down. This morning we passed Nihoa Island, a 900 foot rock that is the second to last of the higher Hawaiian Islands. It is a huge seabird nesting location, so we were seeing lots of seabirds skimming around including tropicbirds, red-footed boobies, and numerous petrels of unidentifiable species.. It was barely visible on the horizon, as the ship passed several miles to the south. These days in transit to and from the islands are very laid back. No real duties except eating, reading, watching movies and sitting on the flybridge snapping photos... The food is awesome- we have an allstar cook and baker aboard, so there are always homemade desserts, etc. I feel like a kid in the candy store....
Our first stop will be Tern Island at French Frigate Shoals atoll....