Sea Ice!

Out on the Ross Sea; Sea ice converging with a glacier.

Hustle bustle, hustle bustle, military planes flying in, dropping huge amounts of cargo and people at a little village we call the runway. Roads stretch this way and that as far as the eye can see, Mountains raise up all around you, one bellowing smoke, all covered in glaciers. The biggest bus you've seen and caterpillar bulldozers populate the surroundings like so many ants. It's hard to imagine; but here we are on the Ross Sea, fathoms of some of the coldest water on earth right beneath your feet. A body of water that looks to me to be the size of a great lake! Surely were it not ringed by mountains, it would be lost to the curvature of the earth, off in the distance. Come February this little village, the roads the people and equipment everywhere will be restricted to more permanent ice shelf or land, as the 84 inches of sea ice we are standing on will dissapear, revealing the depths of the Ross Sea, and it's summer populations of seals and Orcas.

As a result of it's size perhaps, theremal inertia, or maybe purely of climatic causes, Antarctica puts on it's winter coat of ice for seven months of the year, only for the sun to melt it back away with every passing day of summer. This yearly cycle effectively doubles the size of the continent, freezing a ceiling over the diverse and bustling communities of sea life including sponges, sea-stars, urchins, spiders, fish, jellys and krill. This amazing freezing and thawing is of course a dynamic event, and does not simply come and go, but it shrinks, expands, flows, flexes, pushes into islands and glaciers, cracks, heaves and dives; interacting with it's surroundings and demonstrating the forces of plate tectonics right before your eyes.

A glacier heaves upward as it approaches the frozen sea; Little Razorback Island, flanked with pressure ridges and cracks heaving sea ice in all directions.

An amazing sight, this also means that around every crevice, crack or ridge lies perilous danger to the common human mammal, certainly not designed for the sub-freezing waters beneath. Hence we receive as part or our training here, a specific sea-ice safety course, during which we take an entire day to drive around the sights and use really cool ice drills and tape measures to profile interesting cracks and crevices. Power tools meets sightseeing, and for the geeks in the audience, a physics lesson is offered in small helping from the instructor and in earth shattering reality by the ice beneath your feet.

Hagglund - a Norwegian vehicle that carried the 12 of us; a glacier descending Mt. Erebus, and flowing into the Ross Sea.



Two drills. One, a brace and bit; the other, essentially a weed eater with an auger attachment!

With a few extra minutes we decided to swing by the snow cave and have a peek inside.

While I had a great time in the class, my most thrilling experience came a couple of weeks later while on sea-ice patrol. This is a duty of the carpenter's shop, to check the heaters and propane tanks in all the dive sheds in the area. 20 miles out (this takes a long time on sea-ice) in a pisten bully and once again surrounded by ice and mountains we come to a group of islands where a large majority of the dive sheds are located.

Our truck - around here we call them Pisten Bully; The first dive shed, at the foot of a cliff holding back the glacier.

Mt. Erebus and the edge of one of the glaceirs cariving it.

Stepping out of the rig at big razorback island, sounds abound. Moans carry on the wind and echo around the islands and pressure ridges drawing your attention to the dark slug looking calico lumps laying all around the island. The pressure ridges that form around these islands open up sea access allowing Weddell seals to flop out onto the ice where they began giving birth about a week prior to our visit! Small seals abound! Researchers were busy trying to weigh the 800 pound mamas, and lord knows they could be the more testy of the two animals. We kept our distance! (Also, we are required to)

Researchers weighing seals, and one mama hanging out, preparing to give birth.

Our day rounded out with a last dive shed in desperate need of some more propane, and an active BBC dive crew inside probobly not in desperate need of some company, but we decided to poke our heads in and say hello anyway. Filming sea life for "Freezing Planet", the next big BBC nature documentary series, four divers were taking turns plunging into the 28 degree water wearing tons of gear and swimming around cameras in huge boxes for 30 minutes at a time. We chatted about some of their footage we had seen at a sneak preview and in previous films, as well as what they were filming that week. They are doing some very interesting time-lapse photgraphy that is really bringing McMurdo Sound to life!

sedimentary ice?

Antarctic Moose - Part Deaux!

The longest commute on earth! (save for astronauts!)

Ok, I'm sure this is not true, but in reality it has got to be close! My trip this year began on Lummi Island, WA. one ferry, one car, five shuttles, six airplanes, six airports, three countries, three continents, more than 120 degrees of latitude, 6 time zones, and one international date line later, I'm on the ice.

The trans-antarctic mountains from my porthole on the C-17

Step free of the loud C-17, and around the nice Air Force fellas; behold the view - The Royal Society mountains, Mt. Dicovery, Mt. Erebus and Ross Island, not to mention miles and miles of sea ice that I stand upon.

As all things usually are, my current season in Antarctica is going to be a little different. Not only did the NSF recieve a pile of stimulus money, here being poured into deep field research, but I remembered to bring some maple syrup! This provides the carp shop with more work (we construct and maintain all field camps), and tastier toppings for my Sunday Waffles!

McMurdo is the largest base on the continent, and the main base of operations for most NSF Grantees and projects. Here I am working in the carpenter's shop which serves both the base and most of the field camps on the continent. This chance to travel is the reason I sought work in McMurdo, and I will be thrilled to have the chance to see (and photograph!) some parts of the continent that are the most telling (speaking of the future of our climate) and least seen parts of earth! Here we go! tune in here if you like and I will try for an update every couple of weeks as my season unfolds!

Travis

So what is reefnetting?

Reefnet gears in Legoe Bay

You have probably heard of gill-netting, purse-seining, trawling, and maybe even long-lining; all of which are common commercially practiced ways of catching fish. They all have their positive and negative aspects for the fisherman, communities, the fish, and the ecology of the seas. Information about them is everywhere if you are looking.

Originally using materials such as nettles and sea grass to create the gear, reefnetting has gone through incredible changes in the past 100 years. Here lies an old disused gear from the 60's? Stowed near the bay in a reefnet gear graveyard, it is slowly succumbing.

Reefnetting is different. It is a way to catch fish, essentially only practiced on Lummi Island in Washington State, but has been practiced for generations and generations by communities, both native, and now for the past 100 years, primarily white Lummi Islanders. I will try to explain the process, but for diagrams and other pics and video see: Lummiislandwild.com

Gears set in Legoe bay. The reef lifted during a strong tide to prevent damage.

A natural fish trap of sorts, Reefnetting uses the migratory path of Salmon through Legoe Bay to produce an effective, though sustainable operation to catch small commercial quantities of Salmon. With two head buoys anchored 100 feet apart at the mouth trailing two floating platforms suspending a 20 foot wide net 100 feet back, the gear creates a funnel with lines and streamers imitating a reef covered in kelp. Some fish swim up this 'reef' and as the fisherman on the head stand sees them and calls on it, solar-powered winches go reeling in the net and deckhands jump to action pulling in the net and the fish. The fish are dumped into a live well, where they continue to swim with the current until they are identified and subsequently either released into the sound, or have their gills slit and are bled out in another tank. From here they are packed in slush ice and sent off to a local processor.

Solar panels now installed make this a wholly solar powered fishery.

The benefits of this system abound. Being an inexact science, and requiring a tide to fish, hordes of fish are never caught, either spooking their way out of the reef, swimming right past the net, swimming low enough that we don't see them, Passing by when no one is there or just plain swimming around us.

'The sea was so thick with salmon you could walk from island to island'

I guess fisherman have always told tall tales! But who knows? Salmon have been one of the most important species in the North Western region of North America, and still remain as such. It is theorized and generally accepted that their practice of swimming up rivers to spawn and then die allowed ecosystems to develop and fill the barren land left by glaciers during the last ice age. So many different species have evolved to depend on the Salmon, that it is difficult to imagine what the Northwest would look like if the Salmon had never existed.

There certainly are not enough salmon these days to traipse across the straight walking on their backs, or even across Legoe Bay for that matter. The returning Sockeye population this year was unexpectedly very small. Four years ago, more smolts (young fish) were counted leaving the streams than had been counted in a long time. Based on previous rates of return, the Salmon commission predicted 12 million to return to the area, of which only about 2 actually showed. This is horrible news for Sockeye, and of course the fishery was shut down for the season, to preserve those that made it and give them the best chance at a recovering population.

Some believe climate change could be having a role in their disappearance, but what makes the most sense to me has everything to do with why I won't buy farmed Salmon. Some folks think that the parasites the smolts are picking up when they migrate past commercial salmon farms are killing a huge chunk of the salmon before they have any time to develop natural defenses (scales, body mass) to these parasites. Factory farming has taken a toll in so many other ways, it seems completelly plausible that it could be threatening the native salmon populations here. In Norway, where all the salmon farms are owned, their native salmon have long since disappeared. Still some insist that it is not the case, but whatever the cause, it is of utmost concern.

Ready... ready... Plop! A Sockeye is realeased after an extremely brief photo op.

Enter Reefnetting. Since reefnetting allows for the identification and sucessful release of 100% of non-targeted species, it is a particularly useful tool in the conservation of any species that is at risk. In this case, we were used as a test fishery to monitor the Sockeye and obtain genetic information for study of their various populations. Since we were able to successfully throw back any sockeye caught, we were still able to fish and continue to provide information to the Salmon commission. Some of the most memorable moments involved shuttling Sockeye back into the water unharmed, wishing them well on their way up the Frasier River. Make lots of babies!

Fish! A school is spotted from the Head stand.

This year was, however, a huge year for pink salmon. At one point during the season I heard the words "the biggest haul since 1954" in reference to net full of 300-400 pink salmon. One Reefnetter referenced the largest school they had ever seen, maybe 1000 fish in the net, way too many to attempt catching for fear of breaking equiptment or even scuttling one's own boat.

One fairly large bunch of pink salmon being pulled aboard.

While these numbers were promising, what was even more promising was an evening I spent with Angela watching the sun set over Vancouver Island to a symphony of jumping fish. I counted well over 100 jump out of the water and splash around the rocks we sat upon. Over that week and the next, after all fishing had already been halted by the Salmon Commission the bay and shallows of the island were alive with millions of pinks on their way to the Frasier River to spawn. Sitting on the beaches you could feel the world alive all around you.

the sound breathing with every crashing wave, Bull Kelp drifting in the kickback of the tide.
seaweed decomposing on the beaches, feeding back into the sea the elements it composed.
clouds beginning to drift over the land like a blanket for protection from the cold winter ahead.
winds pushing throught the tops of the trees and toppling seed rich fruit onto fertile ground.
salmon splashing in the shallows all around pausing on their long journey upstream to home.

The feeling of my place in the world was so clear and fit so well into the context of Lummi's beaches at the end of summer. Like crunching the colorful leaves underfoot in full autumn walking on trails hunting 'chicken of the woods' or pawpaws, or just plain walking enjoying the seasonal change and the feelings that come with it.

On Lummi Island

Lummi Island from Clark Island.
Mt Baker and North Cascades National Park in the distance.

Lummi Island, WA Population ~1000

Consisting of the second tallest peak in the San Juans, and a rich culture of fishing, farming, and fruit trees, Lummi Island is north-eastern most and, as far as I can tell, the most forgotten of the San Juan Islands.

I happened upon this islan while visiting my friend Becky, who took a job managing a farm for the only Inn on the island. While there, I was invited to come out and fish in the local traditional style of Reefnetting - practiced here on Lummi, and essentially no where else on earth.

Another beautiful sunset.
And since Becky is sneaky when it comes to my camera,
a pic of me playing in the dirt at the farm.

How could I have said no? Of course I will come live on your beautiful island in the middle of it's beautiful summer to fish for some of the most beautiful fish in the world! The bleeder (the job) lead (boss) Angie called me a few weeks later and it was a deal.

The Reefnets on Lummi Island make up an amazing fishery, unlike any in the world. It is important enough to make another post, following this one to tell you all about them.

So what on earth does one do on an island all summer? Of course there are the beaches, the west coast sunsets, and of course the berries, but all places have their own version of these wonderful things about them! What nearly always makes a place special to me is the people. And in this case the Puget Sound.

Reefnet Gears on Legoe Bay, and Bladder Rack, tasty and delicious for breakfast!

I've never really gotten to live near a large body of water in my whole life, never run a boat with a motor, haven't fished since I was a kid, haven't ever gone crabbing, had a ready supply of seaweed to eat at my disposal, or lived in a place where I had to get on a boat to go anywhere else. (a long swim!) So here I am, totally green and trying to be a good choice to take along commercial fishing for the season! It worked! I only fell in with ALL of my gear on once! (Early morning+rough water-coffee=very wet)

So here i was, plunging into a culture built around the sound, with only an idea of what I would be doing. Luckily I caught on fairly fast, and by the end of my summer I was cleaning crab, tying monkey fist knots, and falling in love with the Reefnetters.

One Roger and two Bobs. Various senior (in achievement not condition) Reefnetters in their natural habitats. A bunt, inside and head stand respectively, all on Legoe Bay. All three have been doing this for much of their combined 220 plus years!

The older men who are the Banks of knowledge for a nearly forgotten fishery perch in their head stands, talking, but never letting their gaze off the water, should they miss a fish. They joke about the fish school-size setting on their fancy polarized glasses, talk a little bit of politics, talk about people they have all known their entire lives, and best of all remember old times spent on and around Legoe Bay. When they are out there on their perches, an old tradition flows strong around them. They are as familiar with this trade as anyone ever has been. Their 70-82 year old eyes can pick fish out of the depths that to me might have looked like a shadow or a reflection off the surface, if I saw it at all. They speak of old rivalries on the bay - tricky fish counting; taking on water, to appear 1000 fish richer on the day; 5 gallon water bucket wars; and my personal favorite - one that lives on today, getting tricky with each others lunch pail while they aren't looking!

It is a combination of improv comedy, an adventure book you loved when you were young (and should probobly re-read right now!), and the movie grumpy old men.

Angie and I from a paddle trip to Clark Island with Pig (the dog),
Clamming shovels strapped to kayak.

So here I am in the Puget Sound, living a decidedly of-the-sea life. I was lucky to find not only a great boss, but also a great friend in Angie. We adventured all season: clamming, crabbing, kayaking, hiking, running, bouldering, traveling, chasing after Pig, eating delicious food, laughing with porpoises, smiling with the shooting stars. Oh yeah, and Smoking TONS of fish.

A smoker: genuine Puget Sound hewn handles!

So what else is there to tell? Except I'm leaving for Antarctica right when Silver and Chum season is starting!

Some pics from the last two posts!

Negative 75 the day I left, just so I could remember how it was when I first arrived
- our wonderful Kricket to send me off!

Sorry for the delay, I've been busy, and internet is expensive in NZ. But here are some pics - the last from the ice, as I left and re-entered this "real" world? Strange it feels to be in what seems to be one of the most touristy places I've ever experienced just after the pole. odd. Don't get me wrong, NZ is also an amazing place. The juxtaposition is odd. Kind of makes me miss the cold desert. (Maybe because I had to make so few decisions for the past few months?)

Without further adieu,

The flight crew was excellent, and let me sit on the flight deck! The intense sun makes for a tough picture - the map they had stuffed in one window improved the situation!



They were excellent on descent, they even had the book open to the right page as we dove down to do some Killer whale watching in an open channel made by the ice breaker. We probably saw about 50 of them!


McMurdo in mid-February - the sun beginning to dip in the sky. Not setting yet, but creeping in that direction. They have about one month of sunsets and sunrises in every direction. Pole only has one which lasts 30 hours. The sun sets next week - the last full week in March.



From Mactown to New Zealand, again on the giant C-17. This time we rode with a helicopter in the next seat! Here they prepare the hour-long process of loading the thing. This is a permanent ocean ice airfield. After we travelled the 20 miles from McMurdo, we had to wait several hours till the Air Guard was fully ready. In order to lift off with the chopper, they mounted JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) Rockets to the outside of the plane. These solid-fuel, one time use rockets help get the load off the ground. We didn't notice the difference.

That's all for now folks! Next - New Zealand mountain tops and Kiwi oddities!

Now the trip gets really tough...

greeting from the Southern Alps!

So all my airplanes did what they were supposed to do and got me back to the real world without too much event. I even got to ride with a helicopter - sitting beside me. That was definitely a new experience in an airplane.

Christchurch was a great re-introduction to the world, it's botanical gardens in full swing with a rose garden you could smell from over a wall and several meters away. Ducks and dogs, other birds, and the hostel cat were all something of novelty as was something they call beer that isn't 7 years old... We tried to remain restrained but that is an awful lot of wonderful stimuli and it was easy enough to get carried away! We helped one of the local pubs achieve their best day ever!

So out of CHC and into the wonderful wilds or semi-wilds of New Zealand. I write from Wanaka, but have also been spending time on the Banks Peninsula. Sheep. Sheep Sheep. everywhere. It's not an exaggeration. But also lots of cows! A pebble beach which aside from being too dangerous to enter (rips) is quite possibly my favorite to date. It's light outisde still , so I will end this blog entry there and with a few pictures as I must go hike around and up a peak and possibly throw a fly line in the water with my buddy I'm traveling with... Till then - (An update on why American kids are so unruly coming soon.) Travis

On my way back into rotation.

Here I go again - landed in McMurdo yesterday and am heading out of here in a matter of hours for Christchurch. My plane is allready in the air on it's way here. I stopped here for the night to... interview for next year! I guess this place is kind of addicting.

My flight in was a thrilling ride with a great crew of guardsmen in a LC-130, the skiing transport. We did a little whale watching on the way, as we could see the space where the ice had been broken up by the ships brining supplies to Mactown. They also let me ride on the flight deck all the way through landing! A pretty great way to say goodbye for the year.

Now I will be met by hordes of polies making there way in today, only to be whisked off again all the way to NZ without a break. Oi. Glad I opted out of that plan! I also got to run into a few friends I was surprised to see were still here, and do some country and swing dancing with them in the first bar I've been to in months.

It's been a great experience, and I'm ready to get out of here for the time being. Leaving a pile of great folks behind to winter in isolation is a really interesting feeling. I hope to keep up with them, though currently am not in envy of their position. I'm in for forests, beaches and the night sky, but only in so much as the sun comes up every day still.

I'll try to keep up with some of my travels from here, but will not have a computer or regular access. See you east coasters in a few months - West coasters a bit sooner I think!

OOps - McMurdo won't let me put pics on - coming soon!