The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor. Bradley G. Stevens

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      Mark Blakeslee with remotely operated vehicle Rosebud.

      For two days, the Anna D sat in Icon Bay as Mark drove the ROV around on the bottom. We intentionally anchored the boat as far into the bay as we felt was safe, given the poor chart of the bay and our knowledge that it was full of sharp, rocky reefs. We watched on the video monitor as the ROV passed over sandy bottoms, rocky outcrops, and kelp-covered reefs. Unfortunately, we could not determine exactly where the ROV was at any time. The Trackpoint system worked well in moderately deep water, but in this shallow bay, with many reefs and channels, the signal bounced around a lot, and it was difficult to determine exactly where the ROV was at any time.

      As Mark drove, I constantly scribbled notes about depth, distance, and bearing, and made a crude chart of where I thought the ROV actually was. Another problem with using ROVs was that while looking at a video screen, you have no depth perception or scale. Is that rock large or small? Is it close or far away? The narrow view provided by the camera results in tunnel vision. You might pass right by something without seeing it, and if you turn the ROV around, you lose all sense of direction. How far did we turn? Which way are we facing now? In a submarine, you still have a sense of spatial orientation. But staring at a video screen can be very disorienting.

      In the end, we could only make a general picture of the bay bottom. There were at least two channels that ran from southeast to northwest into the bay; each had a bottom depth ranging from 50 to 90 feet, and were mostly covered with sand. Running roughly parallel with the channels were rocky reefs that came up to within 20 to 30 feet of the surface. We might also have detected some hidden basins inshore of the reefs that dropped down to deeper depths, but it was difficult to say exactly where they were. We could even have passed over parts of the Kad’yak wreckage and not been able to identify it from the ROV video.

      By the end of the second day I concluded that using an ROV was not the best way to explore the bay. I would just have to dive there myself and use my own eyes if I was going to see what lay on the bottom, if anything. Dan started up the engine and pulled up the Anna D’s anchor. Then he put her in gear and began to turn around. As the boat turned to starboard, we heard a loud thunk and felt the boat lurch.

      “What the heck was that?” I asked, not wanting to say what I really thought.

      “Crap! We hit the reef,” Dan said. He threw the engine into reverse then neutral, and ran out of the wheelhouse. Looking over the side, we could see rocks a few feet below the water that we had not seen before. (Maybe these were some of the mysterious rocks that spontaneously “grew” in Kodiak waters, as suggested by our Russian predecessors.) We must have been anchored right next to them. Dan came back inside, opened a hatch, and climbed down into the engine room. Mark and I listened to the clunks, bangs, and curses emanating from below as Dan rummaged around, checking the bilge, various compartments, and valves.

      When he reappeared, he seemed satisfied. “No major damage, as far as I can tell. We’re not flooding. It must have just been a minor bump.” With that, he carefully backed away from the reef, then turned and headed back to Kodiak.

      An hour and a half later, we nosed into the dock. As I was packing up my gear, Dan noticed that his engine temperature seemed a bit high. He climbed down into the engine room to check it out. The Anna D’s diesel engine was cooled by a keel cooler; coolant circulated from the engine into the keel, where it was cooled by exterior seawater, then returned to the engine. When Dan took the cap off the coolant reservoir, a geyser of seawater rushed out. He struggled to get the cap back on before it flooded the engine room.

      “We must have damaged the keel cooler,” he said. “That’s gonna be expensive to fix. I’m going to have to put the boat in drydock and get it checked out.” He shook his head. “I’ve got a week before my next fishing trip; I just hope I can get it repaired before then.”

      A few days later, he had the Anna D lifted out of the water and discovered that when she hit the reef, welds in the keel cooler had been forced open, letting seawater in. Fortunately, he had made enough money from my charter fees to cover the repairs and still make a profit.

      But the whole experience was a bad omen. We had hit a reef in almost the same place where we thought that the Kad’yak had sunk. It wasn’t the same reef it had hit, but who knew whether this reef had stopped the Kad’yak from washing ashore. Maybe the ship had been right underneath us all the time. And certainly we had not sunk the Anna D, but if we had hit a little harder, perhaps we might have.

      NEVERTHELESS, MY INTEREST IN THE Kad’yak did not suffer from this setback. If anything, it intensified. If it was that easy to get to Icon Bay, and the water was that clear and that shallow, it should be simple to go diving over there. Just get a boat and a few divers, and go do it. But I had to know where I was going, otherwise we would just be wasting a lot of time and effort. I pulled my dog-eared folders out of my filing cabinet and once again pored over the translation of Arkhimandritov’s log that Mike Yarborough had sent me. I drew lines on navigation charts, trying to trace each waypoint and landmark that had been mentioned. I carefully reconstructed every hour of СКАЧАТЬ