NOWRAMP
2002
The
End of the Chain
Written by Carlos
Eyles
Underwater Photography by Jim
Watt
September 25, 2002
"Midway
is beginning to feel like home," said Brian Hauk Documentation
safety diver, "I think I'm getting soft from this good
life." Hardly "the good life", but his point
is well taken. At midnight we pulled out, and over relatively
calm seas (judged calm by those who actually fell asleep
during the passage), and made the fifty-six mile passage
to Kure Atoll in six hours. A few hundred more miles and
we would be crossing the International Date Line, which,
at this point, has little or no relevance to those of us
who have no idea what day it is, never mind what day we
may or may not lose or gain in the course of this journey.
Both sun and moon suspend at opposite ends of the sky and
hail the new day. Like orbs rebalancing the yin and yang
of our overdue arrival. There blows a brisk wind out of
the north that teases with malice, but the wind, sister
of the moon dies with her fall. Clouds, broken and twisted,
run with the false wind on quick rails, towing their empty
cargos southward. Kure appears flat with a wide sandy beach
sporting a crown of green vegetation; she is an atoll fifteen
miles in circumference and has two islets, Green Island
and Sand Island. Green Island has 236 acres of sand dune
and vegetation and is what I am looking at this morning.
Its low profile, and the island's rather uncertain position
on charts, along with the sudden and violent winter weather
due to its location along the southern edge of the Aleutian
low pressure system, is responsible for a number of shipwrecks,
(one, the USS Saginaw, a wooden-hulled side wheeled
gunboat, is the object of our Marine Archeologist Hans Van
Tilburg's pursuit.). After World War II President Harry
Truman inadvertently returned Kure to the Territory of Hawai‘i
rather than the U.S. Department of Interior. Kure was eventually
made a state wildlife refuge under the jurisdiction of the
Hawai‘i Fish and Game Department of the City and County
of Honolulu, 1,367 miles away. Today it is under the management
of the State of Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural
Resources. Kure is farther from the equator than any other
coral atoll in the world.
This morning the Documentation Team with Keoki Stender at
the helm are the last to leave after a terrestrial team
of eleven personnel have been taken to the atoll to investigate
its status and spend the night. Because of its northern
storm-ridden location much of the underwater topography
is barren and rounded, much like boulders at a sea shore
that have been pounded for centuries by waves. We don't
expect to see much and after having spoken to Randy Kosaki,
who suggested we try south and east, then talked with Alan
Friedlander who thought west and north would be good, we
started as all explorers eventually do, from scratch. We
went west not in deference to Alan it just seemed to be
the way we went. I knew there would be a lot of scouting
on this one and was prepared to do some extensive free diving.
The first jump was as barren as Doc Overlock's bald head
and similar to its contour. A single Galapagos shark appeared,
larger than any I had seen on 
the
other islands, but that was it, a few fish, and still fewer
corals. We moved on, looking for any sign of life, or some
relief in the reef system, a place that fish might hide
in storms or from predators. Which oddly were absent as
well, no sign of ulua. On my second jump in about fifty-five
feet of water, nothing caught my attention other than some
relief in the smooth reef system that rolled like endless
sand dunes across the ocean floor. I dove down into a bowl
that looked like the only promising place to try, and under
several ledges were lobsters. We hadn't seen many lobsters
at all throughout the course of the expedition, these were
a pleasant surprise. The ocean holds many secrets, more
than any entity on this planet, but they are not revealed
to the casual observer, all on this ship, in their chosen
disciplines are anything but casual observers, and what
a joy it is to listen in on their observations of the day
revealing the subtle and obscure to one another in delights
of solved mysteries, and new discoveries.
I informed the team of my own discoveries and they suited
up. The sighting reminded me of a time in my youth when
I was down in the Sea of Cortez in the 1960's, for the first
time diving in a sea that had rarely seen a diver. We came
across this reef about the size of a Winnebago that conservatively
had a thousand lobsters. There were not enough holes in
the reef for them; they were walking around by the hundreds
in broad daylight. It was a sight I would never see again.
So to see these lobsters today was encouraging, it is a
sign that man has not laid his sullied hand upon these pure
reefs, and the lobsters are free to come and go upon their
dwelling place. A few more lobsters are found by the team
down the sand alleyways of the reefs, we expected to see
more, but came up empty. Five good sized Galapagos make
a showing then four vanish leaving one as a sentinel. Later
a black ulua comes powering out of the blue directly for
me. It has every intention of hitting me and I flinch as
it veers away in the last foot. Its black skin is scared
white around the head with bumps and open nicks across its
body, a gangsta ulua running amuck challenging each and
every diver who dares to intrude on his territory.
As
this expedition has reached its most northern point, we
have quite naturally moved out of the tropic zone, yet the
tropical fish are here, perhaps not in great abundance but
here nonetheless, the kumu are here, the prized eating fish
in Hawai‘i, and they are three times as large as any
I have seen on the Big Island, the knifejaws are here, the
Moorish idols, manini, potters angels, weke, or goat fish,
damsels, actually many of the fish we see in the main islands
but these guys are over a thousand miles away, perhaps not
in abundance as they are further south, but here nonetheless.
As we are here, despite the hardship of this mode of travel,
we are here at the very end of the Northwestern Hawaiian
Islands. Few of us it is true, not as many as in the Main
Islands, but here to see for ourselves and say 'howzit'
for all of Hawai‘i who cares about this pristine and
beautiful water, and desires to do everything they can to
keep it this way.
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