Kim deadpans “That’s not good”, at the shrieking sound of sea ice scraping along the hull.
I lock eyes with her and release a worried sigh. Six of us gather around the two galley tables, seated on benches along the wall and the low round padded stools affixed to the floor. We are the science crew, women ranging from mid-forties to early twenties, veterans of at-sea life to recently graduated interns, dressed in formless sweatpants and fuzzy fleece sweaters. Some look down at their knitting, others hold books (trying to read), some sip mugs of tea. Another woman, the ship's cook, stands with her back to the galley tables, stirring a pot over an orange flame on the grease-stained cast iron range. We are gathered in the galley for the comfort of each other's company and to stave off boredom. Our crates of supplies have been unpacked and organized in the ship's hold below us; our equipment has been assembled on deck, secured against the tossing seas and ready to work; we have settled into our two- and four-person cabins. Now there is nothing to do but wait until we make it through the ice and reach our first sampling site, with luck, only a day or so away.
Up a narrow and steep stairway, the two deck crew play cards in a tiny cabin. One, blonde and bearded, is hunched on the single bunk; while the other, compact and swarthy, sits on an overturned milk crate. Another steep stairway leads up to the wheelhouse, with windows spanning forward; radars, radio and depth-sounder on a low wall aft. The captain, tall and with an outwardly calm visage, paces port to starboard and back, squinting out the windows at the pancakes of ice that surround the ship. The floes are card table- to living room-sized and extend in all directions to the horizon. The engineer, mustached with a ball cap pushed up on his forehead, lounges in the high-backed captain's chair, a line of worry creasing between his eyes. The bo'sn stands to the side, alert and at the ready should the captain need him to mobilize the other two deck crew. The galley, crew quarters and wheelhouse are in the fishing vessel Ocean Explorer's house, compact and painted an optimistic true blue, perched near the bow and occupying less than a third of the ship's length; the rest is all working deck - van-sized reels to spool trawls and hulking black cranes to heave the catch on board. The Ocean Explorer is smaller than a NOAA flagship, but larger than a Puget Sound salmon trawler. Today she is alone in the shifting ice off Point Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point of the US, six days of steady steaming from the nearest deep-water port, Dutch Harbor, and at least ten hours of rescue helicopter flight from the nearest Coast Guard base on Kodiak Island. To the west is Russia, to the north is nothing but frozen ocean to the apex of the Earth.
How did I come to be stuck in the ice on a fishing boat off the farthest reaches of the continent? I raised my hand. This was over a year ago during a meeting at NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle where I had been employed for eight years, after finishing my PhD and post-doctoral positions. Six of us were seated around the table in the Center Director's conference room. Five men and one woman, we were the leaders of the Programs that conducted at sea research for our Divisions.
Mike Sigler, the Center's ecosystem research coordinator, standing at the head of the table, asked, “Who wants to write the proposal?"
He was referring to a call by the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM) to document the living marine resources of the undeveloped oil fields in the Beaufort Sea, an Arctic sea off the north slope of Alaska.
I raised my hand and asked, "Doesn't BOEM usually conduct seismic surveys, using cannons to send explosions of sound into the ocean floor to detect oil reserves below? Why would they want to fund a fish survey?"
"Right, good question", Mike replied. "The deal is that when opening new areas for oil exploration, BOEM is required by law to write environmental impact statements that assess the possible damage of oil drilling and oil spills to fish and other marine life", he explained.
"Ah, I see, that makes sense", I said as the other Program Managers nodded.
"You see, only a handful of fish trawls have been deployed in the Beaufort Sea", Mike went on, "and they were done opportunistically over a couple of years in the mid-1970s as part of other, non-fish surveys."
"That's right, I remember reading that technical report", the most senior Program Manager remarked.
Mike continued with, "So, as you can see, BOEM has no recent data with which to conduct their assessments."
I raised my hand again, "Makes sense for BOEM, but why is NOAA interested in doing a survey up there? Isn't the Arctic, north of Bering Strait, closed to commercial fishing? Why would we want to collect data on fish abundance, size, productivity, etcetera, if we don't need the information to recommend fishing quotas like we do in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska?"
"You're right, Libby", Mike conceded. "And there isn't a lot of pressure from the fishing industry to expand into the Arctic at this time. But if and when there is, NOAA would like to have the information needed to steer the industry towards sustainable fishing practices".
Listening to Mike as the other Program Managers nodded in assent, it struck me that this was a unique opportunity in commercial fishing management. My understanding was that most industrial fishing in the US had been underway in a variety of informal ways before NOAA stepped in with a system of regulations codified in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishing Act of 1976. Wow, I thought, I know Magnuson-Stevens has been a success in Alaska, and that none of our populations are overfished, but how cool to develop commercial fishing regulations without having to struggle with lack of data, or a legacy of unregulated and potentially harmful fishing practices!
As Mike queried us again about writing a proposal, the other Program Managers kept their eyes on their notes and laptops.
I looked around the room, shook my head, shrugged and said, "Well, I can write it".
It didn't dawn on me until after I was awarded the 998,000-dollar project that I would also be responsible for leading the survey. My proposal was ambitious - I planned to conduct a full ecosystem survey of the area. We would send trawls to the bottom to catch benthic fish and invertebrates (such as crabs, snails and starfish). We would use scientific echosounders to locate schooling fish; and midwater nets to sample what we saw on the screen of the sounder. We would slowly pull fine-meshed nets through the water to catch the tiny zooplankton that feed the fish. We would cast oceanographic instruments on a cable down to the bottom to profile the water temperature and salinity. I was particularly excited to do this oceanographic work, wondering how the patterns of currents, upwellings and eddies might drive the patterns in the zooplankton, fish and other life we caught in our nets. I argued that understanding these connections would empower BOEM and NOAA to not simply document what, where and how many, but to make the connections between ocean and biology. Connections that lead to predictions -- predictions about how the pulses and pressures of climate cycles and climate change will impact the Arctic ecosystem.
I felt gratified and validated that my proposal won out among the competition (and for so much money!) but I was not at all confident that I could pull it off. I lost many hours of sleep that year and had more than a few panicky moments in my office, taking deep breaths with the door shut. What was I thinking? I had never solely led a research crew, why did I think I could run a survey by myself? The Alaska Fisheries Science Center had never mounted a survey that far north, and I was planning to charter a fishing boat (not an ice breaker), why did I think it would be safe? Furthermore, my ambitions for the survey far outstretched my scientific abilities. Up to this day I had only worked in the more southerly reaches of Alaska (the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands). And most of that work was on the zooplankton and juvenile Cods that fed on them. I had no experience in the Arctic. I had no experience deploying bottom trawls or identifying the fish and invertebrates that are caught in those nets. I had very little experience running scientific echosounders and deploying midwater trawls. I had never outfitted a fishing boat for scientific research. So, when I got the news that my proposal was successful, my first task was to assemble a crew of scientists that had the specific and unique areas of expertise that I needed to conduct such a multi-faceted survey. I sat down at my desk overlooking Lake Washington and composed emails to my fellow Program Managers seeking their recommendations: who should I recruit to my team? Who has experience working with the bottom trawl gear? Who can identify the fish and invertebrates? Who can take charge of the scientific echosounders and midwater trawl net? Who will inventory, organize and pack up the mountain of gear and supplies we will need to transform a fishing boat into a scientific research vessel? Who has the flexibility to adapt protocols on the fly as we learn what this unchartered area has in store for us? Who has the courage to venture into unknown seas far from port? Who has the grit to withstand three weeks at sea in rough and stormy weather? Who has the good humor to weather the internal storms generated by the pressure and friction of twelve people cooped up in the house of a fishing vessel with the footprint of a two-bedroom apartment? They wrote back: Kim, Erika, Sandy, Heloise, Jenn. I didn't set out to assemble an all-female science crew; it just worked out that way. These five women were simply the best people for the job.
We spent the long gray days of winter and the brightening months of spring in Seattle planning, purchasing and packing. In August, we loaded our gear into an ocean freight container bound for Alaska and flew to Dutch Harbor to meet the Ocean Explorer. The six of us gathered in a giddy huddle on the back deck of the ship and posed for the traditional pre-cruise group photo with the ship's cranes and reels looming over us. Tom Giacolone, the ship's engineer, snapped the photo and in his Massachusetts fisherman's brogue dubbed us the "Beaufort Broads". We good-naturedly tolerated the appellation, but I couldn't bring myself to think of them as "Broads". I thought of them as "my crew" and they joked that I was their "fearless leader". So, there we were, the "Beaufort Broads", about to set sail for the Arctic, squinting into the unusually sunny morning as the two deck hands cast off the lines. We were all laughing and buzzing with excitement as the ship pulled away from the dock and made its way across Fisherman's Bay towards the open ocean, the late summer green of the low-lying grasses like velvet on the steep treeless slopes of Unalaska Island. It was the first voyage to the Arctic for the science and ship's crew alike.
As the ship sailed out of the bay and began to rock steadily in the open ocean swells, I left my crew joking with the deck hands and climbed the stairs to the hush of the wheelhouse. The captain, Darin, and I studied the satellite images of ice cover spread out on the chart table. They showed that the ocean around Point Barrow and east to our study area in the Beaufort Sea was free of ice.
"Looks like we are good to go", the captain, Darin, said matter-of-factly.
"Looks like", I replied with naive confidence.
But the ocean's moods are nothing if not capricious. As we made our way north up the Bering Sea towards the Beaufort Sea, we had a strong steady wind at our bow and upon reaching Point Barrow six days later found the area clogged with floes. The wind had pushed the ice from the north pole in towards the coast. Lucky for us, most of the ice was "first year ice" - ice that had frozen for the first time the winter before into shallow flat pancakes. As opposed to "multi-year ice" which doesn't melt over the summer and accretes more ice each winter to form large blocky pieces with broad underwater keels. We were also lucky that we were far from places like Greenland that calve off true icebergs with their massive underwater bulk and predilection for damaging ocean liners. Darin and I again conferred up in the wheelhouse. We scanned the sea from ship to horizon and saw nothing but a mosaic of frosty white. We studied new satellite images faxed to us from Seattle and decided to pick our way through the ice towards the north, in hopes that the water out there was clear of ice.
It's only been one day, but it feels like an eternity since we made that decision to turn north in search of smooth sailing. Back down in the galley, my crew and I are still sprawled on the benches and stools with our tea, books and knitting. I smell greasy porkchops sizzling on the grill and hear potatoes burbling in a pot licked by orange flames. Kim and I grimace as, again, "Sreeeeeech" goes the ice on the side of the ship. I put down my book with another heavy sigh; I haven't turned a page in twenty minutes.
“I wonder how Darin is doing?” lifting my eyes towards the wheelhouse where our steadfast captain has maintained a 24-hour vigil, staring at the radar and picking his way through the ice.
Kim regards me calmly with her wide-set eyes below a thick fringe of straw-colored hair. Following my gaze she suggests, vowels rounded by her Wisconsin accent, “Let's go up and check on him”.
Kim pours coffee into a white paper cup, and I wrap a piece of carrot cake in a napkin. We carry our offerings up to the tense hush of the wheelhouse.
"Hey, Darin, how are you doing?", I say as Kim and I approach warily with the coffee and cake. He stands grim and focused at the front windows, commanding yet exhausted. Will he welcome our visit and well-wishes? Or will he order us away?
Giacolone, the engineer, offers drily, "God damn, it's like a funeral. Everyone bringing him casseroles". Apparently, we weren't the first of my crew to climb the stairs to the wheelhouse with food or drink.
Kim and I freeze, exchanging nervous glances.
Darin slants his eyes at Giacolone, exhales a weary puff of laughter and says with a wry smile, "Very funny, Tommy", and we all relax into easy grins.
"Thanks, gals", Darin directs kindly to Kim and I, and we head back down to the galley.
Joining the others at the table, we relay the engineer's comment. Laughs all around. After another few hours of anxiously waiting, Darin comes down to the galley to let us know we are free of the ice, and the sea looks clear to the horizon. We all beam our thank yous to him and he turns away, shoulders slumping with fatigue as he makes his way up the stairs to his cabin to sleep, leaving the helm to Tom.
"Thank God", I think, weak with relief as I trudge up to the cabin I share with Kim to read, while the others pick a movie to watch on the DVD player in the galley.
*
It is cold grey morning, an hour past dawn. Was it just last night that we finished the steam up from Dutch Harbor and made it through the ice without injury to the vessel? I feel relieved but also nervous as I stand in the wheelhouse while Darin maneuvers the vessel and instructs the deck crew over the loudspeaker. This is the first time I have ever deployed one of the research bottom trawls that the manager of the bottom fish assessment Program back at the Center leant me for this survey. I feel the weight of the responsibility as I look out the wheelhouse's aft windows at the 80 by 100-foot net slowly unspooling from the huge reel. The net floats for a few hundred feet, before it's lead weights pull it down towards the bottom. All that planning and worrying and we are finally doing it. Underlying my nervousness is a sense of excitement and pride. Those feelings turn to puzzlement thirty minutes later as I watch the net being reeled aboard. On the deck below I see tangled rigging, ropes, weights and floats. I am not sure what I am seeing, but it feels wrong.
Darin turns from the helm and says with his calm authority, "That is not good. Where is the net?"
"Oh shit", I say, walking briskly to the rear door and stepping out on the landing to get a better view. I grimace down towards my assembled crew. They all look up at me, stunned.
"The net ripped off!", calls Kim, gloved hands cupped around her mouth.
"Oh, fuck", I think to myself.
"What happened?" I ask Darin, my voice quavering.
"Don't know. Maybe we hit a rock? Or dug the net into the mud?", he replies calmly, though puzzled. "What do you want to do?"
"Oh god, I don't know", I think to myself. My mind goes cold and blank, my stomach icy, and my knees weak. I am standing alone on a narrow metal platform high above the deck of a fishing vessel in the middle of a lonely Arctic sea, the captain and crew all looking to me for guidance. I am responsible for a nearly million-dollar research project, and I have no idea what I am doing.
"Well, let's put on one of our spare nets and try again" I say aloud, struggling to project confidence.
Our second deployment is not the disaster of the first, but it is only marginally better. The net comes aboard in one piece, but it is filled to bursting with mud and Snow Crabs. I suit up in my slicker and boots, heave a heavy sigh and climb down the back stairs to join my crew. As I approach the gooey gray, Cadillac-sized mound, I see Kim and the rest of my crew conferring with heavy expressions. What do their downturned mouths and unsmiling eyes convey? Puzzlement at how to sample this mess? Dismay at the labor it will require? Worry that their fearless leader is completely clueless?
"Hey Libby", Kim turns to me with her frank and steady smile.
"Hey", I say with a sigh. And then ask, brows furrowed, "What do we do with this?"
"Well." replies Kim, "We will just have to get in there and pull all that crab out of the mud". She is matter of fact about the herculean task ahead of us.
We deliberate over how to measure the whole catch and then sample it in a statistically viable way. I am still a bit distraught about my stumbling leadership this morning. Kim doesn't touch me, she is not a hugger, but her voice feels like a reassuring hand on my shoulder. She has been with me from the start. She helped me write the proposal that funded the project, scouring the NOAA Regional Library catalog for papers and reports that could tell us anything at all about what we might expect to catch up here. We had put our heads together over maps and charts of seafloor depth, laying out transects and arrays of sampling stations, calculating time needed to tow, sample and transit, ultimately arriving at the Cruise Plan that will guide our work. I relied on her to inventory, organize and pack our equipment back in Seattle, everything from nets to scientific scales to waterproof paper and pencils. I will trust her to lead the others in our work on deck, while Darin and I deliberate in the wheelhouse. She has more time at sea than nearly all of us. She never gets seasick.
We all spend the remainder of this first day of the actual survey, not cataloging the diversity of Arctic marine life as planned, but hosing clayey mud off a mountain of orange spidery creatures. The crabs are abundant and healthy - many large enough for commercial catch. What are they doing here? All the reading I had done back at the Center told me we might catch some crab, but that they would mostly be small and immature.
"Well, we are in unchartered waters", I think to myself as I train the deck hose on the muddy heap.
I look up from my task, and my face relaxes from its worried clench to see Sandy, the jester, posing for a picture on top of a pile of crabs three times her height. She is elfin with strawberry curls wisping around her pale round face. A tiny conquering warrior, she has one hand on her hip, chin out, beaming at the photographer, resplendent in mud-smeared orange raingear. Not only does Sandy bring a sense of fun and adventure to the cruise, but she also brings years of experience leading midwater fish surveys off Washington and Oregon as a research biologist at our sister science center in Seattle, the Northwest Fisheries Science Center. I clearly have about all I can manage with the bottom trawl and the overall responsibility for executing the Cruise Plan. So, it will be a relief to leave the midwater trawl work to her when I have finished with the bottom trawl each day.
Turning my gaze away from Sandy, I see Kim and the others shuffle past, lugging the round plastic laundry baskets we use to move, sort and weigh the catch, each one full of crab.
"Good job, you guys!" I call out entreatingly - an apology and an ask for forgiveness implicit in my tone. Do they still believe in me?
In reply, they all roll their eyes and laugh.
"What a day!", Kim calls back and I feel a surge of affection for these steadfast women.
We all stagger into the galley many long, muddy hours later for a dinner of fried chicken kept warm in the oven. My limbs are weary and my brain blank with exhaustion and worry, but Sandy has me laughing as I peel off my heavy fleece. My laughter catches in my throat, and my smile falls like lead when I see Erika's blazing eyes and tight jaw. She corners me while the others file to dinner.
"You left us dealing with the mud and crabs to do the plankton nets with the guys", she hisses. Her words are reasonable, but her anger burns through.
After the bottom trawl net was dragged on board, I had left my crew contending with the heaps of muddy crab and joined the two deck hands, João (the swarthy) and Ben (the blonde and bearded) on the elevated platform from which we deployed the small plankton net. The three of us struggled to cast the net correctly, but after several attempts I had my plankton sample collected in two one-quart jars. I lingered on the platform, laughing as Ben cracked jokes and João looked on shyly. Basking in the warmth of Ben's smile, I felt relaxed for the first time that day, and really for the first time since we set sail from Dutch Harbor. But I lingered too long.
"You should have come right back and helped us", Erika continues hotly, dark eyes drilling into mine.
"You're right, I am so sorry, Erika", I stutter out, cheeks blazing. "I don't know what I was thinking, I will be more mindful in the future, I promise. It was inconsiderate of me", my apology trailing off. I am grasping for words that will assure her. I feel intimidated by the force of her emotion and chagrined at the frivolity of my behavior.
She takes a deep breath, relaxes her stance a fraction and turns away from me. I stand alone for a few moments then fill my plate and take a seat at the periphery of the gathering at the galley table. I sit hunched on the bench and morosely pick at my food while the others eat heartily, their conversation eddying around me. I frown into my lap and make a silent plea that tomorrow will be an easier day.
*
The days are rarely easy, but they do get less difficult. One morning, deep in the dog days of the cruise, I wake thirty minutes before the rest of the gang as usual. I take my coffee up to cool dawn quiet of the wheelhouse where the engineer is finishing the nighttime watch. We sail alone among ice floes loosely flung over leaden seas.
"Welcome to Sherwood Forest, Lady Marian", Giacolone quips with his signature grin.
"Hey Tom", I gently laugh in his direction and give him a quiet smile. "Another beautiful day. We have lucked out with the weather on this trip".
"We have indeed, my friend", he agrees.
We stand at the forward windows in companionable silence and gaze at the gently rolling silver-gray sea, ruffled by an easy wind. The low clouds glow on the horizon with the rising sun, in shades of shell pink and pearl. My mind is as calm as the untroubled ocean around me. Draining the last of my coffee, I sigh and smile, say a silent thanks to the sea, and turn away from the windows. As I descend the stairs down to the light and heat of the galley, I smell frying bacon and coffee. I hear quiet conversation punctuated by bursts of laughter, accompanied by the sound of pots clanging on the burners. I say good morning to Kim, scoop some oatmeal into a bowl and slide onto the bench. The rest of my crew fork into eggs and bacon, chatting companionably. The talk gets louder, the laughter more frequent after Ben and João come in from the deck to join us.
"I am heading up", I say to Kim, finishing my oatmeal and sliding out of the bench.
"OK, standing by", she answers with a brief nod.
I join Darin in the stillness of the wheelhouse; he stands at the starboard windows with a steaming mug in his hand. He turns towards me and says good morning, eyes steady and kind above his ginger-blonde goatee. We confer at the computer monitors. One, a GPS program, shows the location of the ship on a map of our study area. Black lines are transects starting near the shore and extending to the north. Blue squares are our trawl stations punctuating the lines at regular intervals. Another screen, the bottom sounder, shows the texture and slope of the ocean floor. We pick a stretch of bottom that, fingers crossed, is firm but not rocky and relatively flat. I boot up the trawl logging program on the computer we packed from Seattle. At Darin's signal, João pulls a lever on the net reel while Ben operates the crane, and the net slowly snakes across the weathered steel deck into the water and sinks to the bottom.
I can't see them, but I know that my crew are in the passageway between the galley and the deck, pulling on their insulated brown Xtra-Tuff boots and shrugging into orange Grunden rain jackets over heavy fleece, yanking hats down over their ears and donning insulated water-proof gloves. They put blank waterproof data forms on clipboards, calibrate the electronic scales, gather specimen jars and the laminated picture field guides of fishes and invertebrates. I can't hear them, but I know that they are alternating between confiding conversation and easy-going humor. Sandy is probably buoying the mood by posing with Kim for a selfie, both giggling with eyes screwed up and tongues out; Kim flashing a "one" and a "five" with her fingers to indicate fifteen days at sea.
After ten minutes of trawling (we learned our lesson about how much mud comes up in the net after thirty minutes), Ben and João reel and crane the net onboard. From my vantage point in the wheelhouse, I watch silently, and a bit tensely, as the final lengths of the net drag out of the water and on to the deck. I see a hay bale-sized bulge in the bottom of the net. It's a good-sized catch, not so large as to tear the net, but not so small as to be an inadequate sample of the sea life on the bottom. Ben cranes the net into the air and over to the sorting table - an elevated platform with wooden slats lining each side. João yanks the chord gathering the net closed and the catch tumbles out, the slats holding it in place. After the hydraulic whine of the crane is silenced, I see my orange-clad crew stream out onto the deck. I enter the last of the trawl data on the computer, don my own brown Xtra-tuffs and orange Grundens, pull on my pale blue fleece hat and climb down the back stairs to join everyone else around the sorting table. Spits of a light snow sting my face and my nose drips as I inhale the cold, astringent air. I am grateful for how focused and present I feel in this moment, away from the computers, calendars, paperwork and meetings of my life as a supervisor at the Center. And, as always, the first look at the pile of marine life we have hauled up from the depths fills me with curiosity and wonder.
"What do we have here?", I say as I turn to Erika. She has more than a decade of cruising the Bering Sea with the bottom fish assessment Program at the Center. I was thrilled when I found out they could spare her so she could join my Beaufort crew. My reasoning was that although no one had experience studying the benthic life of the Beaufort Sea, having someone with experience in the Bering Sea, our neighbor to the south, would be very helpful. Standing next to her at the sorting table, I defer to her judgement about how best to quantify the beanbag-sized heap of tangled, spiny, slimy creatures in front of us.
"Looks like a bunch of Brittle Stars, urchins, anemones, and some Ctenodiscus", she replies.
"Yum, giant Cheese-its!", Jenn contributes, referring to the Ctenodiscus - flat orange starfish, octagons with little nubs of legs on the corners. Jenn is the sprout of the group - a former intern at the Center who showed lots of promise and carries herself with a striking confidence for one so young. Her face is perpetually graced by warm brown eyes and a small, relaxed smile.
"I know!", Erika says fondly to our youngest crew member. "Let's see", she continues, "I do see a few fish mixed in there, so let's sort through, pull out all the fish and sub-sample the rest".
"Sounds good!", I assent, "Did everybody hear that?"
They chime in with a "yep" (Kim), "you got it, fearless leader!" (Sandy), and "you bet!" (Jenn).
As my crew array themselves around the sorting table, I break off and head towards the stern where the bos'n, Rafael, is waiting for me. Ben and João must be occupied elsewhere on deck. We climb the 15-foot ladder up to the platform where we installed the oceanographic winch. We unfurl the delicate twinned plankton nets; they resemble paired butterfly nets as they flutter in the wind. After we attach them to the winch wire, we slowly lower them down into the mercury-colored water. The ship inches along at the slowest speed it's overpowered engines can manage and we retrieve the nets twenty minutes later. Raf holds the net while I rinse the zooplankton caught in the mesh into the plastic cylinder at its pointed end, unclip the container and pour the sample into a quart glass jar. Holding the jar up to the pale light of the overcast day, I see tiny crustaceans - shrimp-like copepods and krill. They are sesame seed- to rice grain-sized, translucent except for the luminous orange fat droplet stored in their bodies. That fat droplet is what makes them such good fish food, I explain to Raf. The ship then glides to a swaying standstill, and we cast the white canister of the oceanographic sensor straight down to the bottom and back. After dinner, I will download the data from the sensor, a CTD - the acronym for conductivity (a measure of salinity), temperature and depth. Will the water be very cold and salty, or somewhat warmer and fresher? The answer to this question will help me discern the flows of nutrients through the watery depths that are home to the zooplankton in my jar and the fish and invertebrates on the sorting table below us on deck. I nod a thank you to Raf and climb back down the ladder. I don't linger to chat or admire the silver-gray sea under the dusky sky or watch the white and gray Fulmar seabirds swooping across our wake. The memory of the scolding I received from Erika on that first difficult day still stings.
I sidle up to my crew at the sorting table and join them in picking through the heap. We are pulling out the fish and placing them in shallow plastic bins: spiny little Staghorn Sculpin, broad-headed and stout, with wide mouths held in a stubborn grimace; slippery Eelpouts, with lippy overbites and broad orange-brown bands along their smooth wormy bodies; Arctic Cod, the color of bland gravy, about a hand's length, looking wide-eyed with shock at finding themselves tangled in a mess of starfish on the back deck of a fishing boat. Arctic Cod, although not impressive in size or lovely in color, are the linchpins of the Arctic food web. They are prey for just about anything north of Bering Strait that feeds on fish: seabirds, seals, whales and even other Arctic Cod. "Qaluaq" in Iñupiat, they are highly valued by subsistence fishers from villages along the north slope that trek out onto the frozen sea and cast lines through the ice. They are also, along with the Snow Crab that flummoxed me that first long day, a potential target for industrial fishing, if the US Arctic ever opens to commercial vessels.
Once Erika is satisfied that we have extracted all the fish from the pile, she and Kim gather up the trays and move to a smaller wood table lashed under the shelter of an overhanging deck where our motion-compensated scales and length boards are set up. Erika plunks down her copy of "Fishes of the Bering Sea", the closest we have to a guide to the fish of the Beaufort Sea. Kim sets down her ever-present blue travel mug of coffee and opens to the section on Eelpouts. I watch them put their heads together over the open page while Erika holds one of the floppy, triangular-headed creatures. I turn back to the messy pile of seastars and such on the table, confident that the two of them will figure out whether she is holding a Polar or Canadian Eelpout. Erika knows the fish of the Bering Sea better than any of us; and she is dedicated and driven to know the fish of the Beaufort Sea today. As a back up she will take a photo and preserve a specimen of each species of fish in formaldehyde, totaling close to 100 images and corresponding glass jars by the end of the cruise. The fishes' identities will be confirmed by seasoned taxonomists back at the lab in Seattle, in some cases resorting to genetic information to discern the differences. In fact, I would find out months after the survey that there was a new species preserved in one of those many glass jars. The taxonomists gave it the common name “Dusky snailfish", a comma-shaped blob of a fish no larger than a house mouse. They also devised the scientific name: Caryproctus lerikimae. Caryptroctus is the Genus name for a whole slew of snailfishes, but the species name, "lerikimae", was ours alone - "l" for Libby; "erik" for Erika; and "kim" for Kim. I felt a warm glow of pride that the cute beady-eyed creature was named in our honor for, as quoted from the taxonomists' publication detailing their discovery, "collecting or coordinating in 2008 the collection of the first representatives of the new species at sea."[1]
The flat gray sky hangs heavily over my head, the diesel engines hum under my feet and the chill wind numbs my nose as I settle into my spot at the sorting table. Sandy has separated out a small portion of the now fish-free heap of invertebrates; the portion is a subsample from which we will extrapolate to the rest of the catch sitting untouched on the table. It would take a day or more to sort through the entire heap. We start the painstaking process of picking through the subsample. Cheeze-it Ctenodiscus starfish are placed in one tray; spiny cueballs of sea urchins in another; slippery blobs of anemones, tentacles folded away, in another. I stand quietly between Jenn and Sandy, smiling at their banter, as we also sort out shrimps, snails, hermit crabs and alien-looking tunicates - so named because of the protective outer layer that covers their soft bodies like a tunic. And the infernal and ubiquitous Brittle Star. Eight fragile spidery legs radiate out from their pale orange quarter-sized bodies. We catch them in nearly every trawl, often by the thousands and they make sorting through the catch a headache. They break apart easily, bits of their legs and bodies forming a gritty coating on everything we catch, making it difficult to get a clean sort and accurate weight of each species. When Kim analyzes the data after the cruise, they will be the most abundant by number and weight by far.
"What are these even for?", Jenn says, more curious than exasperated.
"Yeah, who would eat this?", Sandy queries, holding up a handful of shattered bits.
"I have no idea", is all I can offer.
After nearly four hours of sorting, then puzzling over the images in "Benthic Invertebrates of the Arctic" in what sometimes feels like a futile attempt to discern the Polar Whelk snail from the Glacial Whelk snail, or the Northern Shrimp from the Sabinea Shrimp; then counting and weighing and measuring them all, I call,
"Hey, everybody, let's go get some lunch." My toes are frozen, my fingers are numb, and I am hungry for the macaroni and cheese the cook, Jessica, has promised us.
"Ten minutes", Kim replies, "we are almost done measuring the fish". Erika stands over the length board, laying the last of the Arctic Cod along the zebra stripes of centimeters extending along the plastic stapled to the board.
"Yeah", says Sandy, nose down in a pile of Brittle Stars "I just need to finish counting these and then we will be done here".
"Okay", I assent "I will let Jessica know we will be late for lunch".
When Kim and Erika are done with the fish, and Sandy is done with the Brittle Stars they notice that Heloise is alone at the far end of the deck. She is hunched over a white tray of critters, and surrounded by a dizzying array of specimen jars, thimble- to cookie-jar sized, each with an invertebrate specimen slowly pickling in formaldehyde. I count on Heloise, our quietest crew member, to catalog and preserve countless specimens of the spiny, slimy or shelled creatures we pull from the depths. She is from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, employed by Katrin Iken, who is the leading expert in Arctic bottom-dwelling invertebrate taxonomy and the author of our guidebook. Dr. Iken will examine the preserved specimens back at her lab to verify our guesses at species identity.
"Hey Heloise", Jenn calls out kindly. "Need some help?"
Heloise looks up and smiles gratefully as her mop of curly brown hair falls into eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses. The four of them gather around their shy crew mate and help her finish placing what seems like hundreds of specimens in jars. We are nearly two hours late for lunch that day.
*
The afternoon proceeds much as the morning has. And each day proceeds much as the others before. Some days we catch Brittle Stars and Arctic Cod; some days we catch mud and rocks. Some days the net is hauled on board intact; some days there are gaping holes where it hung up and tore on a patch of boulders. Most days the sea is a serene gray lightly flecked with whitecaps, but some days it kicks and bucks angrily at the bow as the ship pounds into a storm. We put our heads down and plod through the grind of three weeks of 12- to 16-hour days. The tons of sticky gray muck rinsed off the net; the looming piles of Brittle Stars, crabs and snails; the endless pickling of specimens; the furrowed puzzling over fish and invertebrate guides; the hours of checking and keying in the data; the worry about our decreasing supply of spare nets are lightened by distractions such as...
... Sandy swiping Erika's small digital camera and taking nonsensical shots of boots, gloves, plates of food and unidentified toothy grins. Erika discovers them with a "Hey, what the heck? Who took these?" and a hearty laugh.
... knitting klatches in the galley, Erika teaching us all. Although, despite her expertise, she knits a peaked white toque for Ben that is several sizes too large. He pulls it over his ears and, with a sparkling grin, poses for a photo. Erika looks on fondly and the rest of us melt into puddles of laughter. We are all a little in love with him.
... my crew, working through a particularly muddy catch, following Sandy's lead and marking their faces warrior style with smears of the inky grime. Then posing proudly in front of the tangled pile mounded on the sorting table as Ben snaps a photo.
... pedaling fiercely on a stationary bike that I found on Craigslist when we were acquiring gear for the survey, the indie rock band MGMT in my earbuds. Not a fully adequate substitute for the long runs I am accustomed to, but better than nothing and it goes a long way to relieving my pent-up stress.
... a clean haul of slippery eel-like Capelin landed with Sandy's midwater net. "Hey, they do smell like cucumber!" Jenn exclaims while Sandy explains that the smell is a result of the volatile organic compounds that they produce when fresh.
... lashing empty Cup Noodles Styrofoam cups to the CTD for a lark. The cups ride the CTD down to a depth of 200 meters and the extreme pressure perfectly miniaturizes them. The shrunken souvenirs will take up residency on office windowsills and shelves upon return to Seattle and other ports of home. A reminder and a boast about weeks weathered at sea.
... "Polar Bears!" Darin calls down to us at our breakfast in the galley. We clatter up to the wheelhouse to see a mother and two cubs on an ice floe a football field away, suspiciously? curiously? sniffing the air. "We must smell deliciously of bacon!" I laugh to Kim at my side.
... evening movies on the 70-inch video screen in the galley. "How many times can they watch "Love Actually"?", I wonder as I climb the stairs to our cabin to read.
... breakfast, lunch, dinner, cookies, cake, tea and coffee. Food is one of our few pleasures at sea. Kim, holding the blue plastic mug that never seems far from her hand and gesturing with a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven, jokes "Good thing we are all wearing sweatpants! We won't be able to fit into our jeans after all this."
... a rare blue bird day, sky a deep cerulean above scattered snowy white caps on a silver sea, the sun warm on our faces while the Arctic air nips at our cheeks. Nothing and no one but us and the Fulmar seabirds from horizon to horizon. Jessica wheels out a barbeque and Giacolone grills steaks, burgers and corn on the cob for dinner.
*
But it isn't all tedium and drudgery leavened by fun pranks and cookouts. As I stand in the wheelhouse watching the net spool out, I am often filled with a deep sense of satisfaction. It is sometimes asserted that the scientific mind and the artistic mind are incompatible, but I feel I am creating something. For isn't creation the making of something new where there had been nothing before? It seems to me that with each day of towing, sampling, counting, weighing and measuring I am patiently weaving another row of a tapestry. I am threading through strands of orange, olive and umber - the myriad weird and wonderful fishes and invertebrates of the Arctic deep. Other strands, silver gray and pink, are the ocean currents and the tiny zooplankton suspended in the sea. But while on board the Ocean Explorer my attention is so focused on the weaving, on accurately acquiring and recording the multiple strands of data, that I can't see the illustration until I hold the tapestry at arm's length.
Holding at arm's length means spreading printouts of maps, tables and graphs across the carpet in my office on a heavy gray Seattle day months after we have returned from sea. I have stolen a precious morning away from supervising, balancing budgets and filing paperwork to do what I was actually trained to do - my science. I gaze down at maps of fishes and invertebrates, a solid circle at each location where we towed the bottom net, larger circles showing where we caught the most. I have overlaid the circles on contours of seafloor depth which outline the steep slopes of canyon and shelf edge. I shuffle graphs showing slices of the ocean from surface to bottom - its temperature and salinity, its fronts and currents. I scratch my head with a "hmmm" and stoop to shuffle the maps into a different order, to substitute one version of a graph for another. I stand back with a tilt to my head as the pieces click into place and I feel an inner thrill. After weeks of puzzling over the data (not to mention the weeks of toil at sea) I can now see clearly how the currents streaming up the submarine Barrow Canyon have drawn cold, nutrient-rich water from the dark depths to the surface. The surface where sunlight and phytoplankton turn this ocean compost into food for zooplankton. Zooplankton which then multiply to create an area of bounty like a deep swale of clover in the fading green meadow that is an Arctic ocean in late summer. This bounty, this swale, was at the head of the canyon, not far from where we had been stranded in the ice that summer ago. Heads bent over muddy piles dumped from the net, my crew and I had, sure enough, counted the largest catches of Snow Crab and Arctic Cod at that very spot, that lush swale at the head of the canyon. Gazing at my charts and graphs, I imagine the Arctic Cod feeding in those rich chill waters, the zooplankton so dense the fish can get their fill with hardly a flip of fin and tail. I see them simply gaping their mouths open and shut to capture the rice-grain-sized shrimpy creatures that are plump and orange with stored lipids. In my mind's eye other hungry planktivores converge on the scene: Capelin fish, Fulmar seabirds, and the Bowhead whale (Aġviq), revered by the human denizens of the Arctic for their meat and blubber. There is plenty of food to go around. I imagine that the fish, birds and whales can't consume it all and what is uneaten rains down to enrich the lush octopuses' garden of anemones, snails, seastars and crab on the seafloor. Gazing at my charts and graphs I am seeing not just facts and numbers, but the swirling choreography that is the human-animal-ocean-seafloor dance of the Arctic. I am also feeling the familiar quiet joy of finding the answer to the question I had first asked almost twenty years ago on the top deck of the Discoverer, skin burnishing under the topical Pacific sun. A question that formed in my mind as I watched seabirds converging from vast distances on what appeared to my human eye to be an unremarkable spot in the horizon-spanning expanse of indigo ocean.
A question I had been asking, and answering, ever since: "Why here? Why now?"
On that gray Seattle morning, the symphony of the Beaufort Sea swelling in my mind's ear, did I have a growing sense that after eight years at Alaska Fisheries Science Center of dabbling in this and briefly curious about that, of assisting with other people's projects, I had finally found a field of study of my own? That I had unearthed a rich vein of purpose for my life as a scientist? Did I imagine that I would be sought after to join other multi-disciplinary Arctic field studies? That I would be invited to chair international expert groups and committees, to organize seminars and lead working groups? That I would spend the rest of my career listening for the rhythms and harmonies of Arctic voices? The voices of the ocean and its swimming and scuttling citizens? The voices of the the humans looking to the sea for physical and spiritual sustenance? I wasn't aware of it at the time, but my career took a firm first step towards what may prove to be my legacy that day when I raised my hand in a conference room.
[1] Orr, J.W.; Kai, Y.; Nakabo, T. 2015. Snailfishes of the Careproctus rastrinus complex (Liparidae): redescriptions of seven species in the North Pacific Ocean region, with the description of a new species from the Beaufort Sea. Zootaxa 4018(3): 301-348.