We come to the location at around 3.30am on Friday morning. Ceres is right with us (they caught up with Vaka-Lele on Tuesday afternoon, and have been sailing close by ever since). From a distance we can see Orphee at anchor, its mast light swinging and rotating slowly on the swell. After so long on the move it is strange to see a boat at rest.
We are near the southern end of the eastern side of the northern part of the bank. 9 degrees 12 minutes South, 60 degrees 20 minutes East. Saya de Malha is the largest shallow bank in international waters in the world, home to one of its most remote coral communities. It is also among the least known and least studied. Our location is on one of the shallowest parts of the north bank, an area that averages 15 metres (46 feet) deep. There was land here during the ice ages.
The crews of Orphee and Vaka-Lele get together for a celebratory drink (those on Ceres go straight to sleep). After all the dreaming, planning and work that has gone into getting here, we share a sense of expectation, excitement - and, weirdly, arrival even though we are way out in a huge ocean. In the middle of nothing, 'arrival' is our creation. The skippers feel odd about dropping anchor many hundreds of miles from land. It's something people simply never do.
Some say they feel like they are a mission to the moon. For me, the feeling is a little like bivouacking on a tiny ledge very high up on a rock face: a tiny patch of normality surrounded by danger. If something goes wrong we have nothing except ourselves to fall back on.
Pete, Wolf, Gaby and Frank have been busy since they arrived in the middle of Thursday afternoon. They have already found the small triangular structure which Tom and Wolf installed on their first visit in March 1997 - just a hundred metres from where we're now anchored. We discuss plans goals for the rest of today, Friday. The first is to get a bit of rest.
I am up at 6.30 am. I want to see a good start on the day, and the first priority is to assemble Euridyce, the large semi-rigid dinghy that is the expedition workhorse. Nobody's about, but we need the small dinghy on Pete's boat to get a team across to the Ceres, which carried the components of Euridyce here. The Orphee is anchored less than 100 yards from my boat, the Vaka-Lele, so I decide swim across and stir some life on the Orphee. The current is not a strong and in the worst case it would take me back past Vaka-Lele and Ceres. Later, my enthusiasm and impatience is said to be foolhardy.
We undertake two underwater surveys today. The first is a thorough inspection of the structure installed in 1997. Back then Tom and Wolf had placed a simple pyramidal shape made from steel bars on the seabed, and attached a range of coral fragments to it. A solar raft - photovoltaic panels strapped to a simple floating platform - had been connected by cables and secured with lines. The solar cells provided a small direct current to start the process of mineral accretion and coral growth. Caroline says that within just four days they had seen calcium carbonate forming on the metal and the corals looking very healthy.
There is no trace of the solar raft. This is no surprise. It was not expected to last through storms, and probably remained attached for only a few weeks or months. The 1997 installation had been largely symbolic - simply to show that what could be done at such a remote location.
Without a steady source of electrical power, most of the corals attached five years earlier have fallen off or died, but small new ones (including Pocillopora verucosa) have started to grow on some of the metal bars. Without an electrical current, there are no visible traces of calcium carbonate, and the metal is encrusted with a thin layer of pink/red calcareous algae.
The good news is that the structure, comparatively flimsy as it is, remains largely intact. This indicates that some 15 metres (46 feet) down wave action during storms is not great. A new, more substantial structure should be able to survive without problem.
The second survey is for a site on the seabed to deposit steel bars which, it is hoped, will be used either on this expedition or at a later date to commence a tower structure rising out of the water. A sandy area, free of coral, is found around thirty metres (95 feet) from the old structure.
In the late afternoon, Steve begins bathymetrical work on the Orphee. He's looking for raised areas and knolls that would indicate a well-developed reef.
After dark, one expedition member takes a small dinghy from Vaka-lele, which is lying at anchor, to the Orphee, which is still ploughing transects some distance away. He misjudges distance and speed and finds himself out of range on the open ocean in the dark. What started as an innocuous little trip suddenly becomes a situation in which someone could easily die. By chance, the Orphee has its radar switched on, and they pick up the small boat.
Overnight the sky is amazingly clear. A knife-edge new moon appears. Because the air is so clear, the shaded part of the moon, lit by reflected glow of the Earth, is very visible with an intensity you'd hardly every see in the northern hemisphere. 'The new moon holds the old moon in her arms'.
Caspar Henderson
© GrainOfSand Ltd 2002 | To see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower,
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