Going Deeper

What do you call a scuba diving trip to a coral-reef-ringed Caribbean island in the middle of winter?

a.) A dose of Vitamin D

b.) A Fun Vacation

c.) Professional Development

We’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

Of course, we can’t deny we enjoyed the warmth and ability to walk about in flip flops, the tropical sunsets rimmed by picturesque palm trees, and the taste of the new-to-us culture of Roatan, Honduras in mid-February. But the entire motivation to travel to this particular spot on the globe and spend days as students learning a new skill was because scuba diving will help us in our watery work here in Kodiak.

So, while we relished the mild temperature of the Caribbean seas and the beauty of its fishes, turtles, rays, corals, and nighttime bioluminescence, our minds kept turning to the day when we will dive into the cold Alaskan waters of our home. First we’ll have to invest in some warm wetsuits or dry suits and requisite training, but once we get ourselves all outfitted, we know this skill will come in handy in many situations.

The most obvious use of scuba is to rescue lost anchors and untangle underwater snafus. Our nets are held in place with about 15 to 20 anchors, from 150 to 300 pounds each. Despite our use of heavy duty ¾ inch crab line, the currents and jagged rocks conspire to chafe through the anchor line. The seafloor below our nets must be strewn with many old anchors, lost over the years, just waiting to be recovered. In addition, sometimes the big boats around the bay, seiners or tenders, get a piece of line wrapped around their massive propellers and need a diver to free them. We’d love to be able to help our neighbors out in this regard.

But the most interesting reason to learn to dive is that we expect to soon be kelp farmers in addition to fishing for salmon (we’re just waiting on the final permitting phase to take place). We’ll need to harvest a few pieces of brood stock from the wild kelp growing in our bay, which will then be turned into seeded twine for us to plant on our growing lines. Scuba could be very helpful in finding the hardiest, best specimens. Additionally, we’ll have acres of lines and anchors creating an underwater grid on which to grow kelp, and being able to dive on this setup will help us fine tune the correct tension and take care of any chafing or other problems before things break.

So, did you pick C? It’s true. We considered this to be a “business trip.”

The ocean plays such an enormous role in our life and work, yet to this point we have only been able to interact with its skin. It’ll be deeply satisfying to slip more completely into this element we are so intertwined with. Perhaps someday, in the course of our dives, we’ll encounter salmon swimming freely, sea lions doing in their graceful underwater ballet (hopefully from a relaxing distance), or simply drift with the currents, held strong by the salty sway of our ocean.