Another day under the tropical Pacific sun, at the equator 500 miles from Ecuador. The three of us, Larry Spear, Steve Howell (not Steve Emslie from the Farallons) and I are perched on high stools set near the front rail of the highest deck of the NOAA Class 1 Research Vessel Discoverer. We are 80 feet above the water with a 360-degree view of the sky scattered with clouds, and the ocean scattered with whitecaps. The mission of the handful of sailors and scientists on board the ship is to service the weather buoys arrayed along the equator and to measure ocean temperature and salinity. We three are the "bird people" - our task is to identify and count the seabirds as the ship sails along the track line connecting the buoys. Our work is not essential to the ship's mission, we are not NOAA scientists or crew, but instead on board as the result of a handshake between Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO) and NOAA to let us ride along and do our thing. We are minor players, barnacles latched to the dorsal fin of this majestic whale of a ship, separate from the rest of the ship's crew and I suspect viewed as oddballs with our binoculars and tattered bird guides. Larry is the lead PRBO biologist, sporting his signature handlebar mustache and truckers cap, shirtless in the heat of noon. Steve is skinny and scruffy-bearded, wearing cut-off jean shorts and a faded brown T. Steve and I are both volunteer assistants, although Steve is a few years older than me and much more experienced in ornithology.
I can hardly believe it's already been two weeks since I stood alone on a pier jutting into Lake Union in the October pre-dawn grey, anxiously looking for a familiar face. I had made the 20-minute drive from Magnolia in the dark and parked my tan Volvo sedan in the long-term lot nearby. Dad had recently upgraded to a sporty Audi and gifted me the frumpy family car, the car both my younger brother and I learned to drive in. Although Dad welcomed me with open arms to my childhood home for the two months between the Farallons and this adventure, during which time I fortified my bank account with lab temp work, he must have agreed when I assured him, I didn't need him to send me off. That, and he probably didn't want to get up well before sunrise, or at "0-dark-thirty" as he termed it, to drive me down to the NOAA pier.
I cross the pier towards a metal gangway and look up to see the Discoverer looming four stories above me, stretching to 300 feet in length. She is a queen among the other vessels gathered around her, resplendent in white, three decks stacking like layer cake above her long, elegant hull, portholes glowing in the morning gloom, generators rumbling deep below deck. She is twice the size of the two NOAA research ships sharing the pier and three times as big as the fishing boats in the small fleet at the neighboring dock. I am very early. My duffle bag is at my feet, and I am holding a guitar case, and of all things, a houseplant, a hanging philodendron. I don't know why I thought a plant was what one brings to make a cabin at sea feel like home - pictures of girlfriends or family or pets are the norm. I didn't have a significant other to miss during my two months at sea. Maybe I thought I would miss greenery? The plant takes up residency in the porthole of my faux wood-paneled cabin on the officer's deck, which I reach by climbing one flight of steep metal stairs to a narrow passageway extending along the right, starboard, side of the ship. I shoulder through the door, set my bag on the single bunk along the 8-foot wall, place my guitar case on the 4-foot desk that takes up the shorter wall and arrange the plant in the porthole. I turn to open a second door next to the door I came in through and peer into my private bathroom, or head. The toilet is plumbed with sea water, and I am tickled to discover, sleepily flushing at 2 am that first night, that the swirls of water in the draining bowl sparkle with phosphorescence. Sitting on the bunk and bouncing to test the springs, little did I realize that having a berth and head to myself was highly unusual and in all my future cruises I would share cabins not much bigger than this with one to three people. But the skeletal crew on this cruise meant I got lucky. I also got lucky in that the grand length and breadth of the Discoverer dampens the ocean's swells and chop. Nonetheless, I spend a queasy first morning as the ship plows through the swells off the coast of Washington, sitting on a large wooden crate next to a lifeboat on the main deck and staring fixedly at the horizon. I feel seasick but not enough to lose my breakfast (this time). I earn my sea legs relatively quickly and feel fine by the afternoon, well enough to sit down for an early dinner in the officers' wardroom on the main deck.
The dimly lit and darkly upholstered wardroom is eerily quiet as I fork into my sweet and sour chicken stir fry, placed in front of me by a silent, white-uniformed galley crew member. I open a three-ring binder with "Welcome Onboard!" printed on the cover and read that the Discoverer can support a crew of 79 plus up to 24 scientists. I learn that she typically carries out large-scale multi-disciplinary expeditions with several teams of scientists, sailing the Atlantic and Pacific from the Antarctic to the Arctic. My imagination is ignited as I read that she has supported scientists studying the seamounts of the North Atlantic, underwater volcanoes off the coast of Washington state, and the circulation around the Antarctic continent. Could these be places I could also experience one day? Sipping my glass of club soda, I flip through pictures from some of these major expeditions: gaggles of scientists gather around complex sampling instruments on the deck, readying them to deploy into the water; or huddle around computer screens showing real time data collected by the ship's sensors; or argue companionably at the dinner table about their observations that day. But during our tropical weather buoy cruise, we seem to be sailing on a ghost ship. Cutting into a piece of cheesecake, I wonder "Where is everybody?" It strikes me as odd that such a large and multi-functional research vessel has been employed to simply ferry oceanographers' assistants between buoys, deploy one of them in an inflatable 12-foot skiff, have them motor out, climb the buoy, change out the windmeter and motor back. But maybe I am missing something. Or perhaps my memory is faulty. Looking back, I assume there were lead oceanographers on board to monitor the temperate and salinity sensors and check the data, but I can't recall meeting them.
*
Today adds another bead to the now fourteen-day string; ultramarine, cerulean and cottony white surrounding us as we sit high up on the top deck; the ever-present wind filling our lungs with salt air and tangling our hair below baseball caps turned backwards so they are not tugged off in a gust. We bird people scan the ocean from horizon to horizon for feeding flocks of seabirds. The sun tightens the skin of our shoulders and cheekbones as we squint through binoculars. The ocean swells have us swaying gently on our stools, feet bracing on the lower rails of the deck. Cans of Coke, beaded with condensation, are carried up two flights of stairs and a ladder by, Tim, a NOAA Corp ensign sympathetic to our cause and to me, the soft-faced 23-year-old in a tie-dyed T-shirt with unshaven legs and messy shoulder-length hair. Tim is not a military man. True, the NOAA Corp is a uniformed service, with ranks of ensign, lieutenant and commander, but its role is not national defense. Rather the men and women of the Corp sail NOAA ships and fly NOAA aircraft in service to science. The Bay Area hippy in me finds the pseudo-military posturing, the dress whites and protocols, kind of silly, but I appreciate the work they do. And Tim is cute.
We sip our Cokes with eyes closed for the cold, sweet luxury of it. It has been several hours of sailing the seemingly featureless sea with no seabirds in sight, and our heads are starting to nod heavily in the heat. We are looking for birds who are scattered across the tropical Pacific, having flown hundreds to thousands of miles out from breeding colonies on islands and atolls in search of prey for themselves and to bring back to their chick.
"Like a needle in a haystack", I am groggily thinking.
I am startled out of my daze, when Steve calls out “Foraging flock to starboard!”, pointing with his binoculars towards a swarm of darting shapes just coming into view several miles to the right.
Larry and I train our binoculars on the flock as the ship steams closer.
"Are those Cook's petrels?" I ask Larry, straining my vision through the twin eye pieces of the binoculars as the dark, streamlined birds swoop in and out of my field of view.
"Nope, de Filippi's petrels", replies Larry, not impatiently. But I feel frustrated.
I berate myself silently, "Why can't I tell the difference? They all look the same to me!"
I take a deep breath and ask, "How can you tell the difference?"
Larry matter-of-factly points out the shape of the head, the details of plumage, and the "jizz", the unquantifiable personality of a bird's form and flight, that distinguishes Cook's from de Filippi's petrels. Cook's Petrels have a gray cap, he explains, and a small, slender bill. Whereas de Filippi's Petrels have a bold black eye patch, "like smudged mascara", and a thick black bill. He poetically describes the de Filipi's flight as "leisurely and buoyant", whereas Cook's fly with rapid wingbeats and "bounding glides”, but damned if I can tell the difference. Oh, he tacks on at the end of his explanations, flight style changes when the wind is strong and the colors on the birds' heads are obscured when the sun is behind us. I feel thoroughly, tearfully confused.
The ship's track brings us closer to the feeding flock. It has resolved into a riotous congregation of hundreds of birds: swooping petrels, plunging boobies and soaring frigatebirds. How to even begin to quantify this maelstrom?
Larry directs us briskly, "Steve, you identify and count the boobies and frigatebirds. I will take the petrels. Libby, grab the field notebook and write down what we call out. We can organize it onto the data sheet later".
To be honest, I am relieved to be relegated to note-taker, although simultaneously disappointed in myself that I can't wield my binoculars as effectively as those two. How do they tell the difference between species? How can they possibly count the hundreds of birds they are calling out to me?
Ten minutes later, we have sailed past the flock. Steve and Larry put down their binoculars and roll out their shoulders, and I close the field notebook with the pencil folded in at the last of the seven pages I filled out. For each entry I wrote the species of bird - deFilipi's petrels (dark and streamlined), Blue-footed boobies (large white footballs with a dagger for a bill and, aptly, bright blue feet), frigatebirds (black warlocks with a vivid red pouch at the neck, soaring serenely on high); the number and behavior - tens to hundreds sitting on the water, feeding or flying. Sitting at the small desk in my cabin, I will copy these data onto paper forms that are packed up, carried back to Marin County and dropped on the desk of some unfortunate low-level hire at PRBO. They will enter the data into bulky office computers, and it all goes into a massive digital database of information gathered from a heroic collaborative collective of bird people sailing on research, fishing and merchant vessels deployed throughout the Pacific Ocean. Bespectacled scientists, avid data miners, will plumb the depths of the database and create maps - scattershots of seabird points across the Pacific from Alaska to Hawaii. They will project the maps onto screens in conference rooms and point to clusters of seabird points just north of the equator; or off a cape on the California coast; or over a seamount in the Gulf of Alaska and wonder: "Is this small bit of ocean real estate in the expanse of the Pacific a feeding area critical for the survival of the adults and their chicks? Is this area worthy of special protection from fishing, oil drilling or wind farms?"
But on this day, up on the top deck with the field notebook in my hand and the wind snarling my hair, I am not yet aware of my small contribution to the scientific community's understanding of the at-sea lives of birds. I do wonder at what I am seeing in this present moment, however - I look behind us at the receding flock and notice that there is no obvious change in the ocean's color or texture. There are no protruding rocks or submerged seamounts to focus the seabirds’ attention. Nothing to attract them from hundreds of miles away.
It makes me wonder, "Why here? Why now?"
*
I turn my body to the 25-foot white metal wall fronting the main deck as the blast from the fire hose hits my back. The other dozen "pollywogs" on either side of me shriek with laughter, but I am not amused. As soon as the "Shellback" who is wielding the hose pauses his attack, I rush from the deck, through the side passageway and up one flight of stairs to my cabin, where I plop down on my bunk and cry.
"I can't do this", I whine to myself.
It all started out playfully enough. The Discoverer was approaching the equator and those of us who had never crossed it by sea were informed that we were "pollywogs" and would be undergoing a series of trials culminating in the award of our certificate as a "Shell back" once we crossed the equator ("Shellback" evocative of an experienced sailor's hard and weathered skin, resembling a turtle shell or a seashell). Basically, hazing, as I was soon to discover. The trial the first day was to wear our clothes inside out and backward. I arranged my T-shirt and shorts as instructed but instead of feeling camaraderie with my fellow pollywogs (whose names and faces I do not recall), I felt like an immature and awkward adolescent. I am not sure why I went along at all; this wasn't the kind of chummy group activity I was drawn to. I probably felt it was expected of me and didn't want to make waves. This afternoon, on the second day of the week-long initiation, an announcement on the ship's PA directed us to gather on the main deck at the bow.
I glanced questioningly at Larry, seated beside me on his stool at the rail of the top deck and he tossed off, "Go on ahead".
I was hoping that he would say he couldn't spare me, but I reluctantly left my post and headed down the ladder and two flights of stairs to the main deck below. I stood a bit apart from the cluster of other pollywogs, who were nervously chatting as the sun bared down on us.
"Attention, you scallywags! You scumbags! You lowly pollywogs!" A beefy crew member standing next to a large black plastic trash can called.
As I approached the can, a rancid fishy smell reached my nostrils and looking over the rim, I saw fish heads, coffee grounds and eggshells slopping in a putrid broth as the ship swayed in the swells.
"Oh no", I thought with dread, holding my nose, narrowing my eyes and resolutely not joining in on the nervous laughter of the other pollywogs.
But, yes, I did allow myself to be picked up by the armpits and knees and lowered into the disgusting stew. And yes, I allowed myself to be lined up against the wall. But I drew the line at the fire hose. The dread as the painful spray of the hose passed over the others and came for me; the humiliation of not being able to see or breathe or escape the stinging salt water - it was all too much. It brought to my mind images of Black picketers in Birmingham and their white allies being subjected to the same abasement. Bully and victim were not roles I wanted myself and my shipmates to be acting out. This was no longer play for me.
I shake the tears away after a few minutes of crying on my bunk, feeling so alone in my anger with the crew and disappointment with myself. I change out of my filthy clothes and take a quick shower.
Climbing back onto my stool on the top deck, I say in a shaking voice, "I won't do it".
Larry glances at me and turns back to his binoculars, "Don't be a wuss".
"No, it's stupid", I say, face and neck reddening. "It's just an immature hazing ritual. Some idiotic fraternity", I continue hotly. "I won't be part of that, it's so stupid, I hate it", I continue to splutter.
"Suit yourself", shrugs Larry, and the topic is closed for further discussion.
I take up my binoculars, blinking back another round of angry tears, feeling inarticulate and frustrated. I don't blame Larry for being impatient and unconcerned, it's my problem not his. But, after a couple of hours of surveying for birds, Larry continuing to steadily school me in the differences between the petrel species, we both admiring their elegant black and white plumage and their wheeling flight, I feel centered again.
*
We are suspended in mid-air alongside the steel flank of the ship's hull, seated in a 12-foot inflatable skiff that is enclosed in a frame of rusted pipe. A cable attached to the peak of the frame to a crane on the second deck is unspooling slowly to lower us 50 feet down to the water. Steve and I watch our hands, so our fingers don't get pinched between the skiff and the frame, as Larry struggles with the outboard engine. The skiff (a.k.a. the "Zodiac" after the brand) is now floating on the water, but we can't motor out of the frame until the engine starts, obviously. Larry tries to maintain his composure as he pulls the throttle chord again and again. The Zodiac and the frame are now smashing into each other and the ship as we are tossed in the 5-foot swells that seemed so harmless high above on the deck but now feel formidable down on the water. Finally, the outboard catches and we motor free of the frame and head away from the ship. The Discoverer will be stationary all day, the crew occupied with a buoy and water sampling, so there is no point in us being on board to survey for seabirds. I look forward to these twice-weekly excursions away from the hulk and noise of the ship, just us three skimming the surface of the deep blue in our little boat.
Onboard the Zodiac are a 10-gallon cooler, lashed down at the bow, a bottle of cod liver oil, a shotgun, and boxes of shells. Our mission is to collect seabird specimens to dissect out their stomachs and see what they are eating (mostly plastic, sadly, much of it small beads used on cargo ships to ease the rolling of large containers on deck). Larry and Steve also use the specimens to document differences in plumage and shape between different species of birds, particularly the difficult to identify petrels such as Cooks and de Filipi's that I have been struggling to figure out. Upon returning to the ship, we will place our bird specimens in a dedicated freezer in the hold, next to the food freezers, stores of dry goods and the desalinization/fresh water-maker. But I will be too squeamish to venture down to put them away - a corpse is stored in one of the freezers. I don't know which one and I don't want to find out. Larry told me over breakfast of black Lipton tea and cold cereal that an engineer died of a heart attack the night before and we were too far from land for a helicopter to reach us. We were both stunned into silence, imagining how the Registered Nurse on board spent her night, futilely administering CPR - this was before the advent of Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs).
"Why the freezer?" I whispered.
"Where else to store his body until we reach Hawaii in three weeks?" Larry, recovering his composure, replied reasonably.
I am perched on the cooler at the bow of the Zodiac - it affords the best view - fixing my gaze on the horizon as my inner ear adjusts to the swells. After ten minutes or so of staring and deep breathing, I feel fine and can turn my attention to the task at hand. Larry shuts down the outboard and we coast to a quiet stop. As we rise and fall in the broad swells, he measures out a portion of cod liver oil onto the ocean surface to attract hungry or curious seabirds. It spreads in a slick behind us and when the wind shifts to blow the intensely fishy smell back in our faces, I spend another few moments swallowing shallowly and staring at the horizon until the queasiness passes. In a half hour or so, a petrel swings into view over the slick. Petrels are among the few birds that can smell, they are colloquially known as "tube noses" for the twin nostril structures on top of their bill. We hope that other, non-smelling species, will see the gathering of tube noses and fly in to investigate as well. Larry pops some shells into the chamber of the shotgun, I think it's called (what I know about firearms wouldn't fill a thimble) and carefully levels the barrel at the swooping petrel. He times his shot to the rising and falling of the Zodiac and the wheeling of the bird - even a non-hunter like me can appreciate that this is no easy task. Crack, and the bird crumples and falls to sea. We motor slowly to the floating body, and I lean over the side to gently scoop it up with my hands. I stroke the velvety plumage of the the dusky grey-brown bird, aptly named a Sooty Shearwater. It's slender cigar-shaped body is light in my hands, it can't be more than two pounds. I breathe in its characteristic musty odor and carefully place the bird on ice in the cooler where our lunch is stored. A necessary efficiency in the small skiff and our bologna and mayo sandwiches will acquire a hint of birdy flavor by the time we are ready to eat. After a couple hours of collecting, a rank of petrels lined up in the cooler, Larry suggests,
"You two want to go for a swim, and then we can eat lunch?"
"You bet!" Steve and I reply and whip off our shirts. Consistent with the tie-dye and unshaven legs, I am braless. Would it be considered appropriate in these current #MeToo times for a single 20-something female to jump topless into the water with a male peer; the other, older man grinning at them from the Zodiac? Perhaps not, but it did not feel untoward to me at the time.
"Hey!" I call to Steve, treading water and looking down at the rays of sunlight disappearing into the 12,000-foot depth below us. "I wonder if we are actually swimming over the equator right now?" The penciled track line on the chart spread out on the navigator's broad desk back at the Discoverer indicates we may very well be.
"Now this is the kind of 'Shellback' ritual I can relate to", I think to myself as I float on my back in the warm salty embrace of the sea, eyes closed against the burning sun.
Larry interrupts my reverie with "Melon-headed whales approaching!"
Steve and I widen our eyes at each other and crawl stroke quickly, laughing, back to the Zodiac. We know the dolphin-sized whales are harmless, but sharing the water with them nonetheless makes us giddy, like the drop of a rollercoaster at the fair or the distant sighting of a bear in the mountains. I shake out my wet hair and climb to the bow and reclaim my spot on the cooler, letting the sun dry my back before donning my shirt. Larry smiles at me and takes a photo with my Nikon once I am dressed. In the resulting picture, my hairy shins take up half of the frame, my face relaxed yet grinning self-consciously above, the wide-open sea twanging away all around me.
*
Another photograph taken by a crew member (anonymous and faceless in my memory), some number of sun-bleached days later shows Larry and me standing side by side on the main back deck in front of the massive black crane and crates of oceanographic equipment. Larry is wearing a red T, "Marlboro" in the iconic white script, sleeves cut off. His camo truckers cap is turned backwards on his head and tangled dirty blond hair falls to his chin. I am wearing canvas shorts, and a tie-died tank top. My face is shaded by my now highly faded Mariner's cap, and my hair is similarly tangled but hanging a bit longer, to my shoulders. I stand a hand taller than Larry. We are each holding a large squid, mantles mottled cream and pink and easily 3-feet long; tentacles reaching the deck where there is a spreading pool of inky sea water. Our biceps are taught with the effort of holding them up for the photographer. Ten years later, Nina, a fellow graduate student at UC Irvine, will tell me she used to tease Larry that my muscles were bigger than his in that photo. She will also tell me that he was the love of her life, but they couldn't stay together - with the adventure came too much drama, apparently. True, I was working out in the gym every day at noon, down two narrow flights of stairs from the main deck, deep in the ship's hold, but I don't think my arms ever achieved Larry's masculine bulk and definition.
Why were we posing proudly with these two beautiful creatures of the deep? Well, the night before Larry had rapped on my cabin door, interrupting my struggles with the guitar and calling in a loud mock-whisper,
"Libby! Let's go squid jigging!"
I joined him in the narrow passageway outside my door, and he grinned and held a finger to his lips, "Shh, let's go!"
I couldn't help but giggle as we hurried along the passageway past the doors of sleeping officers and down to the back deck. Arrayed along the starboard rail, under the shelter of the second deck where we stored our Zodiac, were a handful of ship's crew and NOAA Corp, including Tim. I bumped hips with him and said "hey" quietly. We had been caught kissing on the top deck a couple nights previously and I am embarrassed to remember that Larry had to be the one to instruct me to break off our assignations. During orientation before we set sail from Seattle, a NOAA Corp officer had explained that this was a government workplace and that anytime two people of the opposite sex were alone in a cabin the door was to be latched open ("That assumes that there are only heterosexuals on board", I imagined lecturing the officer). So, no more shy knocks on my cabin door after midnight to admit a nervous yet eager Tim. "Oh well", I had thought to myself after being reprimanded, "that was fun".
In the dark away from the deck lights, a boombox played tapes of heavy metal music, I couldn't say what the band was - I was listening to Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell those days. There were cigarettes, cans of Coke and Dr. Pepper, and raucous conversation. No beer - alcohol was also forbidden on the vessel. Although the occasional toke of weed was secretly puffed in crew quarters below deck (if you exhale through a rolled-up towel, I learned, it filters the smell out of the air), so maybe the no-alcohol-rule was also bent in secret.
Larry handed me a sturdy fishing pole, strung with think nylon line and baited with a squishy plastic glow-in-the dark jig resembling a three-inch squid with a ring of upward turned spikes at one end. Squid are cannibalistic, apparently.
"Okay! So just lower the jig, pull out maybe 20 yards of line. Then yank it up and down in the water." Larry instructed, excited as a 12-year-old boy.
I counted out 20 arm-lengths of line, braced my feet and started jigging.
"Oh wow, Larry! I got something!", I shouted as my pole bent alarmingly and was nearly pulled from my hands.
I held firm and when there was a lull in the fierce downward pressure, I gave the pole a mighty heave. The line abruptly went slack, and the jig flew out of the water. I reeled in the line and retrieved the jig - the ring of spikes had been pulled straight.
"I think we are going to need a bigger jig", said Larry, eyebrows lifting as I held it up for him to inspect.
One of the ship's crew handed us two six-inch squid jigs, adorned with three-inch spikes, and we lowered our bait to the inky depths. Speaking of ink, when I again hooked one of the 30-pound creatures, it showered me and Larry with viscous black liquid the minute we reached over the rail to swing it aboard. My white PRBO t-shirt with the Black Oystercatcher logo will be forever stained with blackish brown splotches. Larry and I high fived each other. I would like to think that this shared late-night adventure warmed me to the crew, but I never forgave the Shellbacks their hazing rituals. I had Larry and Steve and, briefly, Tim and the weed-toking friend in crew quarters - apparently that was all the community I wanted.
*
Steve and I are waist-deep in the water, each holding one side of the Zodiac, keeping it oriented straight into the four-foot surf battering the bow. Larry is cussing loudly and flailing the starter chord of the outboard engine. Earlier that morning, we had cruised easily through the surf with the energy of the waves behind us, landing smoothly on the white sand beach of tiny Clipperton Atoll. Clipperton was 2800 miles or about eight days away from our mid-cruise break in Hawaii. I am not sure whether I knew this at the time, but Clipperton is the most isolated atoll in the Pacific and was named after a British pirate who used it as a hideout. It is also one of the French overseas territories - upon landing the Zodiac we were greeted by a tattered French flag on a 10-foot piece of rusted pipe stuck in the sand, snapping in the wind next to a coconut palm, surrounded by gawking Blue-footed Boobies. It was an excursion we had been looking forward to, a chance to get off the ship after nearly three weeks of sailing, stretch our legs on solid land and take in some wildlife. We spent a peaceful day exploring the low ring of sand that circled nine miles around the inner lagoon; wandering aimlessly among the coconut palms, shrubs and creeping vines. The glorious quiet was only interrupted by the crashing of the surf, the rustling of palm fronds and the clicks, whines and nasal purrs of Black Noddies roosting in shrub thickets. A contrast and a relief from the constant underlying rumble of the Discoverer's four diesel generators. The 35-mm film in my Nikon will be full of images of noddies, boobies, terns and sand crabs. I will be especially pleased with a photo of a Brown Booby glaring at me while standing protectively over its fuzzy white chick; or a shot of an orange sand crab, baseball-sized, claws akimbo and frowning up at me; or a delicate white tern, it's sharp black bill and small black eyes levelled at me from a perch in the low branches of a coconut palm.
It is now late afternoon and time to return to the ship waiting eight miles away where she had spent the day servicing a particularly complex array of instruments on a buoy. And of course, the damn outboard won't start. Steve and I continue to guide the Zodiac straight into the breaking surf, Larry continues to cuss and flail and then I find myself floating in the water, my feet no longer touching the sand. I hold tightly to the lines running along the side of the Zodiac and feel my legs carried by the current under the boat. I am a strong swimmer and comfortable in the water, so am calm as I call out,
"Hey, I can't touch!"
Just at that moment the engine finally catches but then immediately slams to a halt. Larry unleashes an even louder and more elaborate string of cussing. He yanks the engine, and the prop pops out of the water to reveal my sneaker wedged at the heel in the metal blades. He rips out my shoe, drops the prop back in the water, and gives the chord one more mighty yank. The engine revs to life and Larry pulls Steve and I aboard. He hands me my shoe and arcs the Zodiac in the direction of the Discoverer, the inflatable's bow rising and its wake spreading behind us. Only as I am putting my shoe back on does it dawn on me that it could easily have been the fleshy heel of my foot that caught in the blades. Let's say I wasn't wearing shoes. Then I think about the engineer that died of a heart attack because a helicopter couldn't reach us so far from land. I turn pale and quiet, imagining the pain and the blood. Wondering how it would have healed, more than one week away from medical attention. Would it have become infected? Would it have become a crippling injury for my lifetime? Would I have completely lost the foot? I will glance down at the gash in my sneaker from time to time as we finish up the expedition and wonder, do I have a guardian angel?
*
I am climbing the ladder behind the wheelhouse up to the top deck where Steve and Larry are already taking up their positions on the stools by the front rail. It was nice to have a few days on Oahu, a break after one month at sea. Although my first experience of "dock rock" was a bit disconcerting - it's the phenomenon where solid dry land feels like a rocking ship's deck because your inner ear is so thoroughly acclimated to the motion of the ship. I was stumbling a bit as I walked with Tim and other NOAA Corp folks between bars and thinking "But I only had one, or was it two, Mai Tais. I can't be drunk already!" The drinking and body surfing and generally messing around was fun, but it felt right to pull away from the dock this morning, the sense of the land, it's buildings and people and activity receding behind and the sea opening out ahead. Calming and centering with a tingle of the unknown. I stood on the front of the bow, hair blowing away from my face, leaning into the salty wind, not unlike the carved wooden figureheads found on the prows of antique wooden sailing ships.
The familiar smiles of Larry and Steve greet me as climb onto my stool at the rail of the deck - Larry’s broad and mischievous, crinkling his whole sun-weathered face; Steve's quieter, framed by his scruffy beard now highlighted in copper after a month under the tropical sun. My Seattle Mariner's baseball cap has protected my face from sunburn, but my shoulders, exposed by the cut-off sleeves of my t-shirt, are the color of burnt sienna.
"See anything, yet?", I ask as I settle into my seat and raise my binoculars to my eyes to scan the horizon.
"Nope", they reply in unison.
Steve has the field notebook open to a blank page in his lap. Larry is panning from right to left with his binoculars. We pass a couple of hours, alternating from searching the flat blue expanse around us, and chatting easily about where we swam in Oahu; about Steve's girlfriend, Sophie, and her latest ornithological artwork commission; about Larry's newest favorite guinea pig breed; and about the Louise Erdrich novel I am currently reading. Larry is teasing me about how I like to sit on the cooler at the front of the Zodiac when we are out collecting birds, when I see the familiar dark haze of a feeding flock on the horizon.
"Feeding flock to port!", I call, pointing to the left with my chin. "Ooo, looks like a bunch of Cook's petrels."
"Right!", says Larry.
Steve takes up the pencil and field book as Larry directs us, "Libby, you take the petrels and boobies. I will take the gulls and frigatebirds. Steve, take notes".
"Roger!", Steve and I mock salute.
The ship's track line takes us within a boat length of the swarm of darting, swooping and plunging forms. I identify the Cook's petrels easily, their gray cap and slender bill now familiar to me. They glide and wheel on stiff wings or sit on the water pecking plankton off the surface. I quickly count out 10 birds. Fixing the fingerprint of that many birds in my mind, I then estimate the number of petrels by "10, 20, 30, 40..." in a quarter slice of the flock.
I call out to Steve, "50 Cook's petrels, flying. 100 on the water".
I repeat the process for 3 more "slices" of the flock and then turn my attention to the boobies. I can't help but smile at the ungainly white creatures, two-foot-long footballs sporting a long thick neck, a dagger-like bill and bright blue duck feet. They plummet from heights of 90 feet, breaking the surface of the water with a splash and plunging to 80 feet in pursuit of fish.
Meanwhile Larry is calling out, "60 third year Swallow-tailed gulls on the water, 40 flying". I roll my eyes to myself, only Larry would presume to identify whether the juvenile gulls are two or three years old - some nuance in plumage that Steve and I are darned if we can see. But Larry is one of the world's gull experts, so I don't doubt he is correct.
Only ten minutes pass from the time the flock is close enough for us to accurately identify and count the birds to when it is behind us, birds bobbing in the ship's wake. Larry and I lean back in our seats and rub our eyes. Steve takes a deep breath and shakes out a cramp in his pencil-wielding hand.
"That was a good one!", I exclaim.
"Indeed!", Steve and Larry nod.
Once again, I wonder "Why here? Why now?" I now know it has something to do with their prey. I am learning that there is something about the hidden structure below the ocean's surface that attracts and aggregates the plankton and fish that the seabirds zero in on. Was it a tidal front around Ohau that created a convergence? Did we pass over the front between the North Equatorial Current and the Counter Current? Larry had described these ocean boundaries and interfaces while we sat side by side dissecting out the stomachs of petrels in the lab on the main deck. What was going on under the surface of that sun-sparkled blue? How did horizontal currents of surface water, vertical upwellings of deep water and plankton swarming behavior synchronize to create a foraging oasis in this vast blue desert of the tropical ocean? How does understanding this concurrence of oceanography and bird (or fish or mammal) help us understand and protect our planet's ocean ecosystems? As I gazed out at the vastness of the sea, lost in thought, little did I realize that these were the questions that would shape the next 35 years of my life as a scientist. Neither did I realize that the pursuit of these questions would lead me away from the relative ease of cruising the tropical Pacific on a NOAA flagship to pounding into gale force winds off Alaska on fishing boats; to trade in binoculars for trawl nets; to turn my attention from birds that ply clear blue tropical skies to fish that lurk in the gray depths of the north.