Clear Skies
We are back in Dutch Harbor now and enjoying the first sunshine since we left here three weeks ago. As I look north out of the harbor, I can see the almost ever present fog bank waiting for us. The last three weeks we used two one person submarines and an ROV (Remotely Operated vehicle) to explore two canyons around the Pribilof Islands. It was tiring work for the ship drivers. Maintaining communication with the submarines meant staying directly (plus or minus 100 meters) over them. Staying on top of the ROV is sort of a given, as it is attached to the ship with a 1000 to 250 meter fiber optic cable.=> Read more...
Fresh Start
In the early 80s, crews were often given pages and pages of printed matter to read regarding campaigns. There must have been a stack six inches high when we went out to the Marshall Islands in 1985. Two years before, when we were here in Alaska, we also had a large stack to read. It was then I read about the treatment of the Aleuts during WWII.It began when Japanese forces captured Kiska and Attu. The Navy weather observers from Kiska and the Aleuts from Attu were captured, taken prisoner and shipped to Japan. While many Alaskan officials realized the dangers of uprooting the Aleuts from their homes, no one came up with a firm plan. The Army was certainly worried about defending the country.
When a Japanese plane was spotted over Atka on June 12th (1942), Army officials hit the panic button. Giving a preoccupied Army a job it had not trained or planned for was a recipe for disaster. On Atka, villagers were told to go to their summer fishing camp. When they returned that evening, it was to find their whole village and all the posetions in flames. The military, using a scorched earth policy had burned the village so that the Japanese could not use the houses. Some families boarded the Army transport ship, some ran into the hills. Eventually, all were brought to Dutch Harbor.
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About Me
peterwillcox
USA
Greetings,I joined Esperanza in Seattle at the end of May. It has been a spectacular trip. We spent a week in June anchored under a 700 foot waterfall on the Jervis Inlet. A week later we motored up the inside passage to the top of Vancouver Island and then up Queen Charlotte Sound before crossing the Gulf of Alaska to Homer.The trip up the inside gave us a chance to see first hand how the Great Bear rain forest was doing. It was not encouraging. There was too much clear cutting still, and much of it too close to streams. When loggers cut right down to the streams, it ruins them for salmon spawning. It was one of the things we were working on ten years ago when I was in B.C. on the Arctic Sunrise. It is hard to look at such beautiful land, and see such horrible things done to it.Our first stop in Alaska was Homer. Located at the bottom of the Cook Inlet, is the the pilot station for ships going to Anchorage. It is also an area where 22 foot tides are common. Most tides around the world average between 3 and 6 feet. So while 22 is not the biggest, it is close and impressive. A general rule on our ships is that no matter how big or small the boat, and how long or short the gang plank, it never quite works out. Fortunately, our open to the public times in Homer were at high tide. For the crew coming back from shore around sunset (11.30 pm!) it was another story.This first part of the campaign we are stopping at a number of small fishing communities to lobby for Marine Cultural Heritage Zones. We are proposing these areas to give local people a chance at maintaining their marine oriented culture by trying to protect the fisheries habitats. There are several reasons why the numbers of fish are down in the Bering Sea, and across the world. But the biggest reason is just poor fishing practices. Two years ago I was in New Zealand on the Rainbow Warrior. There we saw bottom trawlers fishing at depths of four and five thousand feet! And while the industry was proclaiming that they were not destroying the habitat, we were taking videos of them often bringing up more coral than fish.Twenty three years ago when I was here on the first Rainbow Warrior, we were protesting drift netting. Then, Asian fishermen were deploying 30,000 miles of drift net every night in the North Pacific. In the 80s they were catching salmon. In the 90s, it was squid. But the nets caught anything between the surface and 11 meters down. I remember seeing a dozen fishing boats, all running their nets out on parallel courses, one and a half miles apart for 30 miles! Not much in this 500 square mile area would get by those nets on that night. In the 80s, when they were fishing near the Aleutian Islands, we removed hundreds of birds from the nets every day. Fortunately, the UN banned pelagic drift nets. I often compared high seas drift nets to a farmer who would plant a garden, and when the first crop of carrots would come up, harvest everything, while keeping only the carrots.But maybe bottom trawling is worse. The bottom trawls destroy the plant life that make up the fishes habitat. I had no idea before I went to New Zealand that coral grew at such depths, in such cold waters as the Tazman Sea.Which brings us to the second part of this summers campaign. While we were sitting under the waterfall on the Jervis Inlet, we were training visiting scientists to drive two one man submarines we are renting for the summer. With them, we will go up to two very large underwater canyons near the Pribilof Islands. These two canyons are among the largest undersea canyons in the world, and are roughly the size of the Grand Canyon. If we can demonstrate coral and sponge growth in the canyons, we can expect protection for them under the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Management Act.There are two issues in this campaign which are important for me. One is proper fishing practice. Greenpeace wants fishermen (and loggers) to be in business for another 500 years. We want them to be able to harvest the maximum protein from the sea. But it is so clear that this wont happen with present practices.And the other is the right of local communities to feed themselves by fishing the way they have for thousands of years. But they are loosing this ability as first world countries and their industrial fishing fleets travel the world, grabbing ever diminishing populations of fish. This has got to stop.Pete
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