Breakfasts with walruses
This morning started a bit before three, sure to give me enough time to make a round of the ship, fill my coffee cup, and grumble up to the bridge for a four-hour watch. After striking a few lines with the dividers on the chart and spinning some knobs on the radar I passed a salute and took the watch. I like 4-8’s. Devil to some, I think it’s the watch that lets you see the day start to finish, and almost always sets you up to see any sunrise there might be. And, most importantly, it’s when the magic of the day is least wary of onlookers.
As we settled into the dark morning the lookout yelled from across the bridge “hey sir, come see this!” It was like we had steered into the middle of a glowstick. Bioluminescent plankton was rolling in the wake of the ship so bright I could see the light on the faces of my bridge team. It glowed a glistering blue-green port and starboard, and off the stern as far as we could see. For almost two hours, we floated through a galaxy of agitated little organisms.
Since leaving Dutch Harbor we had been sealed in a grey envelope between cloud and sea. But as the sun spilled light into the day it broke through the seal to reveal a series of snow-capped volcanoes. From the bridge, we reveled in the orange-pink glow of them as they stood stoically above a layer of low-hanging clouds. The highest, Mt. Shishaldin, is still active and stands more than 9,000’ high. It emitted a stream of steam and gases high into the atmosphere, resembling the whale spouts that broke the surface just off the beam.
Time passed quickly enough after that and the next deck officer grumbled onto the bridge and took the watch. By now the sun burned away most of the clouds and the Aleutian chain ripped and rolled across the full width of the horizon. It’s a landscape that made me think of photos from the Icelandic coast or the Russian Kurils, but it is uniquely Alaskan. I took my bowl of oatmeal and a third cup of coffee to the ship’s waist. We had slowed for the day’s operation, and we weren’t going anywhere fast at all, so I set my chair right at the edge of the deck. I was absently stirring my bowl of oatmeal when a group of walruses surfaced for a breath. They peered suspiciously at the big black ship before deciding they could continue diving for their own morning meal. They wondered close enough that I could make out their long ivory tusks and the wide curving whiskers on their pug-like faces.
