The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor. Bradley G. Stevens
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Название: The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor
Автор: Bradley G. Stevens
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781513261393
isbn:
Nonetheless, I began to make plans for an expedition. If I were to go look for the Kad’yak, I would need at least a week of time and would have to charter a boat. I couldn’t use one of the boats from our lab, since I wouldn’t be doing the work on government time. I’d need some new scuba gear, and we’d need some food. At a minimum it would cost about $10,000, probably $15,000. Where was I going to get that kind of money? I had approached the Undersea Research Program with my idea, but it was just too risky for them; after all, there was no good evidence that the Kad’yak still existed or was where I thought it was, and I didn’t even know where that was. But you don’t get anything if you don’t ask, so I wrote up my plan as a proposal and began shopping it around. I sent it to National Geographic, but they wouldn’t fund it unless I could guarantee them that we would find the ship and make an hour TV show out of it. I sent it to Rolex Corporation (yes, they actually fund exploration), but they weren’t interested either, despite being a well-known supporter of exploration and adventure. I sent it to several other small nonprofit foundations, all with the same result. None of this is unusual; less than 10 percent of research proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation is successfully funded, and most scientists have to revise and resubmit proposals several times before they get funding. The major hurdle seemed to be that I was not an archaeologist and did not have any credentials for marine archaeological research.
But I also felt that I was missing something. I wasn’t convinced of the Kad’yak’s location, and it would be impossible for me to convince anyone else unless I was 100 percent certain of my own argument. I still didn’t understand how Arkhimandritov had recorded bearings to some landmarks, which, according to my reading of the chart, would have been extremely difficult to see from a kayak. If I could see it from his point of view, perhaps I would understand.
That was it, I thought. I had to go over to Spruce Island in a kayak and retrace his journey.
CHAPTER 6
A VISIT TO
MONK’S LAGOON
AUGUST 2002: ON A LATE summer morning, I set off in a kayak from what we now call Miller Point, at Fort Abercrombie State Park, at the northeast end of Kodiak Island. My wife, Meri, and my twelve-year-old daughter, Cailey, accompanied me in a double kayak. During WWII, Fort Abercrombie held the location of two 8-inch guns, put there to protect the Navy base at Womens Bay, 10 miles to the south. The guns were originally battleship guns and were installed on top of special rotating carriages, on top of a 100-foot-high bluff looking out over Monashka Bay. The guns were never fired, and after the war they were destroyed in place. Now, a military museum occupied what was once the ammunition battery. But if you stood where the gun emplacements were, you could look out across 4 miles of open ocean to Spruce Island and see the entrance to Icon Bay along with some islands. On one of those islands, Arkhimandritov had stood to take his bearing on the Kad’yak over 140 years ago. That was our destination.
Paddling a kayak in the open ocean is always a dangerous activity, whether you are 2 miles or 200 feet from shore. Anything can happen, and you need to take precautions. I had never gone kayaking before coming to Kodiak, but Meri was an experienced kayaker and had introduced me to the sport. Every summer we used to make day trips or overnight camping trips in our kayaks. After Cailey came into our lives, those trips became shorter and less frequent, but by the age of five or six, Cailey had her own life jacket and a toy paddle. Now, at the age of twelve, she was capable of handling a standard paddle and doing half of the work in a double kayak.
The kayaks were stuffed to the gills with camping gear: a tent, three sleeping bags, foam mattresses, a camp stove and cooking gear, food for four or five days (because you never know how long you will need to stay), and a first aid kit, plus fishing rods and cameras. Sitting in the kayaks, we were completely covered by spray skirts that hung over our shoulders and snugged up around the edge of the cockpit. We all wore life vests, each one of which carried a whistle and strobe light. In addition, I carried a VHF radio and an emergency position indicating locator beacon, or EPIRB, strapped to the outside of my kayak.
Paddling at about 2 miles per hour, our journey should take us two to three hours to cross the open channel between Kodiak and Spruce Island, depending on winds and currents. The day was partly overcast and there was a light wind from the southeast. Although there was little surface chop, a gentle 2- to 3-foot swell rolled underneath us. We paddled with a steady rhythm, stroking on one side then the other, rotating the paddle in our wrists to get the correct angle and keeping the blades close to the water so they would not drip onto us. With little to focus on except the waves, you could drift into a zenlike state and forget all about regular life, work, and all its associated stresses.
Ten years earlier, I had made this trip with a group of friends. Humpback whales were feeding in the channel then, so we had paddled over for a closer look. For a few minutes the whales were all underwater, so we stopped paddling to see where they would surface. Suddenly, one came up about 100 feet from me, heading straight in my direction, like a freight train bearing down on my kayak. I paddled as fast as I could to get out of the way. But the whale also changed course too and came up again, this time closer to me. I tried paddling away, but it was too late. About 30 feet from my kayak the whale dove, turning his body vertically in the water and raising his flukes up in the air before sinking beneath the waves. The flukes were as wide as my kayak was long, and I felt the water splashing off them. Before I knew it, the whale sounded and glided beneath me. I was stunned. It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime encounter, and few would have believed it if it hadn’t been photographed by another kayaker downwind from me, who later gave me a copy of the photo.
Getting “fluked” as a humpback whale dives beneath my kayak.
I thought about that experience now as I paddled and wondered if we would see more whales. I didn’t really want to get that close to them again, especially with my family in tow. For most of the trip we kept the kayaks within a few yards of each other, but sometimes we would separate a little farther if one of us took a break from paddling. Occasionally, a swell came up between us, and all I could see was Meri’s head above the water as her kayak settled into the trough on the other side of the wave. But it didn’t worry me because the water and wind were fair. The middle of the channel was over 600 feet deep. I know, because I had spent a week cruising the bottom of it in the Delta back in 1991. As we got closer to Spruce Island and the water shallowed, the swells died down and a light chop arose. About a mile from Spruce Island, Meri woke me out of my paddling rhythm.
“What’s a rock doing out here in the middle of the channel?” she asked. “And why is it moving?” I looked to my left where she was pointing and saw a gray pyramid rising from the water. It was indeed moving at the same speed we were.
“That’s no rock,” I said. “That’s a shark.”
A second later both Meri and Cailey were holding their paddles over their heads and shrieking.
“Stop screaming,” I shouted, adding to the din. “It’s not going to attack us. Put your paddles in the water and start paddling.”
They took off so fast I could almost see a rooster tail rising from the back of their kayak. I stifled a laugh. Then the shark began circling closer and cruised by just 6 feet away from my kayak, or at least it seemed that close. I could see that it was a salmon shark, her deep black eye looking right at me. It was a female, I knew, because only females come to Kodiak in order to feed on salmon returning to the streams to spawn. The males all stayed down in Washington or California somewhere, hanging around an offshore bar, the lazy bums. Salmon sharks came every summer and were commonly seen in Monashka Bay, near where we started СКАЧАТЬ