Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (17 page)

I looked at Pete.

“Now what do you suppose he’s doing?” I said.

Pete shrugged.

The whale passed the boat completely. He turned another 180 degrees and began to follow us. He crept closer to the stern, then moved up the starboard side into the space between the hull and the outrigger. We leaned over starboard, near the bow, as the whale swam forward beside the vessel. When he reached the water just in front of us, he rolled onto his side and looked me right in the face.

His eye was the size of a grapefruit.

I had to catch my breath.
He was checking us out!
Here was a bunch of researchers, watching the strange behavior of a whale, and we were all dumbfounded. This was a definite role reversal. The boat suddenly seemed like a big petri dish, and we were the subjects of study.

I thought about the whale the entire way home. I wondered why I always jumped at the chance to join these research teams. After all, the work was hard, the conditions were usually awful. I realized, perhaps, that it was because I instinctively needed to do it. Maybe the whale left his pod to observe us on our boat for the same reason. Maybe we’re all just glorified curiosity-seekers, but it’s clear there is something driving us. We often find ourselves in places we were never meant to be, seeking some little piece of the truth that we hope exists there. There are lots of researchers in the world. I was just surprised, I suppose, to discover that some of them live in the water. Now when I’m at sea, leaning over the rail of a boat, it often feels like a giant one-way mirror, and I wonder who might be observing me from below.

Joe Moran

CALVIN AND HOBBES
© Watterson. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS
SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.

The Jonah Factor

I was new. It was the summer of 1988, and I had just started working for Howard Hall Productions, developing an undersea documentary for PBS. We were hearing reports from fishermen that a large number of “really big” whales were appearing off San Diego. The descriptions sounded like blue whales, but the odds of that were slim. But since the stories kept flooding in, we were on board, loaded and motoring toward the Los Coronados Islands in less than twenty-four hours.

I had not spent much time on the open ocean, but it was easy to tell something was different. As opposed to the usual vast expanses of empty blue water, the ocean was alive. All the animals we passed seemed to be on alert, either as predators or prey.

Large schools of anchovies at the surface were being feasted on from above by pelicans and sea gulls, and from below by Pacific mackerel. Flying fish, yellowtail jacks and the strange mola mola, or ocean sunfish, passed quickly under our boat. Blue sharks were everywhere, as they finned just below the surface. All this activity was caused by the presence of a small red shrimp,
Euphausia superba,
or krill, as it is more commonly known.

The ocean had turned blood red in huge patches one hundred feet across. The krill were being herded conveniently into tight balls by the action of thousands of small anchovies. Blue sharks materialized from all directions to gorge themselves on a free shrimp lunch. Howard and Bob Cranston had been diving with blue sharks for years and knew this type of feeding behavior had never been documented before on film. Howard was his usual calm and professional self, and Bob expertly motored our dive boat around the patches of krill. I expertly ran around the boat, yelling and pointing.

Bob shut down the boat’s engines, and we drifted. We only needed to see one huge whale with a small dorsal fin and an immense blow to know we had found the blue whales we had hoped to see. The dilemma was, do you stop and film great shark behavior or try for an uncertain chance at blue whales? The unwritten rule in underwater filmmaking is, “Get it while it’s hot.” Wait until tomorrow, and chances are there will not be a shark or whale in sight.

I went below, loaded the camera and met Howard on the dive step of our boat, the
Betsy M.
The king of understatement said, “Try not to let any sharks bite me on the back of the head.” A reasonable request, but all I could think about at the time was,
Who’s going to keep the sharks from biting the
back of
my
head?
Before I had time to get that question out, Howard said, “Let’s go,” and jumped into about three thousand feet of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

It was easy to see thirty or forty blue sharks in any direction. The shark’s method of feeding was to wait for the attacks of the small bait fish to herd the krill into tight balls. The sharks would approach from below, their eyes covered by a nictitating membrane, and swim through with their mouths wide open. Taking huge gulps, they seemed more like filter feeders than sharks. They ate so much their stomachs stuck out like bowling balls.

With no protection other than our cameras, my job was to keep the sharks off of Howard while he was filming. I was also told to take documentary still photographs and stay out of the way. The blue sharks immediately swam toward us to investigate, and a good bump on their nose with our fists was the only means of keeping them from swimming directly into us. The sharks seemed very fond of Howard’s orange camera housing, which they bit constantly.

This was all happening within a few feet of the surface. Howard would periodically surface and look around, only to realize we were completely surrounded by whale spouts. This was just a bit more than he could take. Once the “out-of-film” signal was given, we raced back to the boat, changed film and lenses, and prepared to chase whales. Howard turned to me and very casually said, “There is no way we will be able to keep up with them in the water, so let’s go wait in a ball of krill and they will come to us.” As I said before, I was new. I was knee-deep in that “I’ll-follow-you-anywhere” stage, so this half-brained idea seemed quite plausible at the time.

The water visibility was great, but inside the krill balls you could barely see your hand in front of your mask. So we would take turns poking our heads out to see if anyone was coming. The Jonah factor was high, and I was beginning to wonder if my day rate was a little low. All of a sudden, Howard grabbed my arm, and we swam backwards as fast as we could. A freight train, shaped like a whale, swallowed our hiding place in one gulp. We were so close it was easy to see the whale’s huge eye. It looked at us both, apparently not concerned with something so small. I began to understand what one hundred feet and 150 tons really mean. I swam slowly back to the boat, wondering if I had even remembered to take a picture.

Mark Conlin

Strange Discovery

Phil Dustan was a young marine biologist when the world-famous explorer, the late Jacques Cousteau, invited him on a landmark expedition to film and document the coral reefs of the Caribbean. Phil’s task as “science guide” was to inspect the many reefs visited by the research vessel
Calypso
and help the ship’s camera crew document coral reef ecology. During the expedition, Phil dove along the Meso American barrier reef or Belizian barrier reef with the Cousteau team, making new friends and new discoveries. But as he discovered one evening as the ship anchored at a small atoll off the coast of Belize, even the
Calypso
occasionally had its off-days.

After a delicious dinner in the
Calypso
galley, the crew prepared to film a nighttime segment on a coral reef. The stern of the ship blazed with light as a dozen divers entered the water. “The idea was to have a very dramatic show, especially our descent,” Phil said. “We had four sets of lights—all connected topside by two hundred feet of cable to the
Calypso
’s generators. Falco, the chief diver, led the descent, with our cameraman, Joe Thompson, filming from below and Captain Cousteau filming from behind.”

Things went from bad to worse almost immediately. First, the crew found itself surrounded by swarms of stinging jellyfish that had been attracted by the bright lights. Next, as
Calypso
held steady over the reef in about sixty feet of water, a strong wind came up and yanked the light cables away from the camera crew as
Calypso
began to swing on her anchor. The divers became “leashed fish,” and the camera crew was forced to film wherever the lights went. “My job was to swim around looking scientific,” Phil said, “but we kept running out of cable. Every time this happened, Falco would tap me on the fin, and we’d have to turn around and go back.”

Then a great discovery was made. A crew member had located a strange new species of brain coral covered in small green spheres. The crew moved the lights in for a closer look. Phil studied the spheres carefully. Was the coral reproducing? Was it shedding eggs into the sea? Phil noticed that the eggs were wrapped in strange digestive filaments. He wracked his brain. He felt as if he had seen them somewhere before, but couldn’t figure out where.

The team arranged for a scientific shot. Lights and cameras were set up, and all the divers crowded around the coral. The strange new discovery would soon be documented for the entire world to see. But something still nagged at Phil. He studied the spheres again. Where had he seen them? Finally, with the cameras running, he picked up one of the eggs and squished it between his fingers. “That’s when it hit me,” he said. “It wasn’t a new undiscovered species. What we had ‘discovered’ were
petits pois
. . . the peas from dinner. The cook had thrown them overboard!”

Steve Creech

“It was a dark and stormy night . . .”

Reprinted by permission of Harley Schwadron.

Close Encounter of the Squid Kind

While shooting the footage for
Creatures of Darkness
and
Venom!
for PBS, Howard Hall, Bob Cranston and I were working in one of our all-time favorite places, Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. We were going to be filming for weeks, so our boat captain had put out the word to his friends to keep their eyes peeled for anything unusual.

One by one, local fishermen motored near our boat to tell us they were catching big squid at night. “Muy grande,” they said. We had filmed squid for many years in California, so my mental picture of “big” squid ranged from six inches to about a foot. One night, we followed the fishermen to try our luck at locating the squid. The fishermen’s “secret” to locating squid consisted of drifting in the middle of nowhere, over nothing in particular, in areas where the water was more than one thousand feet deep. While I loaded film in the camera, Howard and Bob lowered some bait over the side and set up the “squid” lights. These twelve-hundred-watt bulbs created a pool of light around the boat, turning night into day.