“Meaning?”
“Meaning someone’s playing war games in Great Bahama Canyon.”
Balcomb wanted the room to himself, so he told Dave to get himself some dinner. If the Navy had a carrier group in the Bahamas, Balcomb figured that Gisiner would be working late. He was.
“Gisiner, here.”
“Bob, this is Ken. Good news. We found a great specimen today. A Blainville’s, fresh enough to eat. And I spotted another one from the air that I’m going to collect in the morning.”
“Good. You have the Blainville’s on ice?”
Balcomb explained that the head was in a deep freeze, and that a complete set of organ sections was securely fixed in formalin. Everything would keep until the Bahamians cleared them for transport to the States.
Gisiner updated him on the team he’ d been pulling together from the Southeast Regional Office of Fisheries, from the Smithsonian, and from Woods Hole. He’ d tracked down Darlene Ketten in California.
“Ketten will be arriving in Freeport on the red-eye the morning after next,” Gisiner told him. “Can you meet her flight?”
“No problem,” replied Balcomb, searching for a graceful segue to the subject foremost in his mind. As usual, he opted for the direct approach. “What are you hearing from the fleet?” he asked.
“Nothing yet. ONR has a research ship on the ocean side of the islands, working with sonobuoys. But no word from the fleet about anything going on in the area.”
“I saw something interesting when I was up in the search plane today.” Balcomb waited a moment for Gisiner to respond. He didn’t. “A destroyer. One of ours.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve got a photo of the hull number. I can fax it to you. You know . . . a destroyer never sails solo away from port. It runs escort for a carrier group.”
“You’re way above my pay grade,” said Gisiner with a dry laugh. “I’m just a humble scientist.”
Gisiner knew Balcomb had done a couple of Navy tours, one before and one after grad school. Fresh off his first tour, with his crew cut and yessir-ing the professors, Balcomb stuck out like G.I. Joe among the long-haired grad students back in the early 1970s. But he’ d remained vague about the details of his Navy assignments, which made him something of a mystery man and a source of rumors. Now Gisiner was the one inside the Navy, and Balcomb was on the outside trying to peer in.
The Office of Naval Research was staffed largely by civilian scientists who briefed the fleet on anything science related, including marine biology. And as head of the marine mammal division, Gisiner would be ONR’s point person on any internal investigation of an atypical mass stranding.
Balcomb thought Gisiner knew more than he was willing to share. “You’ d think the fleet would know if it had a carrier group in the Bahamas,” Balcomb said, “and what it was doing here.”
“I’m focused on getting the best people on the ground for you,” said Gisiner. “So why don’t you stay focused on collecting specimens?”
“And don’t forget about the tapes from AUTEC, okay?” Balcomb added. “We need to find out what’s on them.”
Balcomb was about to say more. But Gisiner clearly wanted the conversation to be over. So it was.
After he got off the phone with Gisiner, Ken joined Diane on the beachside deck of the house. It was their favorite spot, and tonight it felt like a safe port in the storm of the past two days. But even sitting there with her, watching the half-moon rise over the Abaco pine forest, his mind was stuck on the destroyer. If the Caron had been operating in the channel three nights ago would anyone on board have seen the moonlight glint off the whales’ dorsal fins when they surfaced? Probably not. The Navy liked to conduct nighttime exercises to test the crew’s ability to operate in the dark, both above and below the water. But they could only see what they were looking for, and a destroyer wouldn’t be hunting for whales.
“It’s a good thing we had the Earthlings over at Cross Harbor today,” said Diane, “or we’ d never have gotten that Blainville’s onto dry land. And they were great sports about cleaning up the beach when we were done.”
Ken nodded his agreement but didn’t say anything. After a pause, he explained that he had to get up and out early the next morning to retrieve the whale from Water Cay that he’ d spotted from the plane. He planned to take Dave with him in one of the boats, if she could stay behind and cover the Earthlings. He told her about Ketten coming into Grand Bahama, and his plan to fly over and meet her there. But he didn’t mention the destroyer. Not yet. He wanted to figure out what the Navy was up to first. Right now all he had were questions.
Diane knew he had served in the Navy. But that was a storyline out of his distant past, long before they’ d met. She would have been in kindergarten when he entered flight school. To a schoolgirl in the Bahamas, Vietnam and the Cold War were a distant galaxy. He’ d never told her what he did in the Navy, and she’ d never asked any probing questions. For a quarter century, he’ d been able to keep his undercover work for the Navy under wraps and out of sight. Until the USS Caron showed up in the canyon.
Six months after his divorce from Julie, Ken met his future third wife, Camille, at UC Santa Cruz. They were both studying marine biology, she as an undergraduate and he as a graduate student. After serving as a naval officer with 100 men under his command, Ken found it hard to be back in school as a student. He was 30 years old, and most of the other grad students were still in their early twenties. After two restless semesters, he heard from a Navy buddy about an assignment working undercover in Japan, and decided to reenlist.
Officially, there were no American military advisors on Japanese naval bases, so Balcomb’s mission was sensitive. He worked in Top Secret Special Category, tutoring the Japanese navy at Yokosuka on how to use the latest generation of American listening equipment to track Soviet submarines heading out of Vladivostok. Balcomb’s “cover” was posing as a bearded American biologist doing field research—which, in fact, he was, on his own time, touring Japanese whaling stations in search of Baird’s beaked whale specimens for his PhD thesis. A year into his tour, Camille joined him in Japan, where they were married. She fit in perfectly as Balcomb’s wife and fellow researcher, since she was studying the dolphin drive fishery in Taiji for her master’s thesis.
Hitchhiking with half-brother Howie Garrett (left) on Highway 101 along the Washington coastline, summer 1972.
Ken’s second Navy tour ended in 1975, and he and Camille resettled in Puget Sound. When he launched his orca survey that first summer back, Camille proved to be a stalwart research partner. But then the Regina Maris appeared on the horizon, and his marriage was soon on the rocks.
The Regina Maris was a floating dream of a boat, a tall ship straight out of an Errol Flynn swashbuckler: a three-masted, 144-foot barkentine driven by 16 canvas sails and a square-rigged foremast. George Nichols, Jr., a retired medical researcher from Harvard and a great-grandson of J. P. Morgan, had retrofitted the Regina as the flagship of his newly launched Ocean Research and Education Society. The Regina’s mission was to track and study Atlantic humpback whales while instructing college students in marine biology. Nichols hired Ken as his chief scientist and paid him $1 a day. From Ken’s point of view, it was a great deal. He’ d saved up $10,000 from his Navy tours, and the Regina provided him free room and board and the chance to survey whales from the deck of the most fabulous ship under sail on any sea.
The Regina Maris under sail in April 1979, off Magdalena Bay, Baja California, Mexico. Balcomb was chief scientist on this research ship for twelve winters, from 1976 to 1988.
Camille was less enchanted by life aboard the Regina. The wooden deck boards leaked when it rained, and she soon grew weary of sleeping in dank, mildewed sheets. During their maiden voyage in the North Atlantic, the Regina sailed headlong into a winter hurricane and almost sank. When they finally made port, Camille jumped ship, and their marriage.
After the exit of the thir
d Mrs. Balcomb, Ken wasn’t exactly bereft of female companionship. The first generation of whale researchers in the fifties and sixties were almost all men. But by the late 1970s, there were more women than men studying marine biology. Every winter, another crew of mostly female grad students would board the Regina Maris at Gloucester, Massachusetts, for a Semester at Sea program. Ken taught them marine mammal biology and oceanography, currents and tides, and all things cetacean.
Ken enjoyed the seasonal ebb and flow of “boat girls.” It was the 1970s, after all, and he’ d come of age a decade before the sexual revolution and had spent the late 1960s in the all-male Navy. But for Ken, the main attraction of life on the Regina were the whales. For 12 winters aboard the Regina, he tracked the humpback whale migration from the coast of Newfoundland to the Silver Banks of the Dominican Republic, working with researchers at the College of the Atlantic to compile a photo catalogue of humpbacks in the North Atlantic. The highlight of the Regina’s winter tour was the Caribbean leg, where the beaked whales lived. From Bermuda to the Bahamas to the Silver Banks, he could count on six or seven sightings of various species—which for beaked whales was a lot of sightings.
• • •
By the time Diane sailed into his life, Ken was 41 years old with three failed marriages in his wake. A loner since childhood, Ken had never shown much aptitude for the shared decision making and compromises that come with marriage. He’ d always enjoyed the company of women, but until he met Diane, his only true romance had been with the sea and with the whales.
The first thing Ken noticed about Diane when she came aboard the Regina was her Bahamian accent. A second-generation islander of British and Canadian extraction, Diane grew up in Nassau, went away to boarding school in Canada, and then returned to the islands because she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. After spending her teenaged summers working aboard chartered catamarans and renting ski boats to vacationers off Nassau, Diane knew she didn’t want to babysit tourists all her life. While studying marine biology as an undergraduate in Florida, the best career path she could envision was training dolphins to perform in marine parks. But when she met Ken aboard the Regina, a wide world opened up to her. In Ken she saw a marine biologist whose field station was as boundless as the seas. There wasn’t anything in the ocean he couldn’t name and explain. And he was totally comfortable on the water, even in the middle of a storm. That, to Diane, seemed like the ultimate freedom.
Ken was almost 20 years older than Diane. But when they met, he felt like a teenager again. He was swept away by this Caribbean island girl who seemed altogether at home tracking humpbacks through the Arctic ice north of Labrador. Whenever he went above deck, he found Diane—who’ d grown up wearing a bathing suit and flip-flops year-round—wrapped in an oversized down parka, laughing into the headwinds like a beautiful bowsprit sculpture. She knew how to sail, how to tie knots, how to spot barely visible whales surfacing in the dark gray ocean. He was convinced that she must be part mermaid.
When Diane returned to school at the Florida Institute of Technology, Ken’s life aboard the Regina faded to black and white. He courted her from afar with letters he illustrated with drawings and photos of whales he’ d sighted from the deck of the Regina. After her months at sea, Diane felt trapped inside the lecture halls and labs. She could barely breathe. And the men who flirted with her in class—the ones she used to date and sail with—now seemed like clueless boys.
The week after she graduated with a degree in environmental science in the spring of 1989, Diane showed up at Smugglers Cove to volunteer on Ken’s orca survey. By the end of the summer, Diane and Ken were deeply in love and plotting their next move together.
Diane wanted to take him home with her for Christmas in the Bahamas, but Ken was leery of meeting her parents. What would they think of their daughter showing up with a middle-aged American trailing three scuttled marriages, an itinerant whale-chaser with no fixed address and no visible means of support? To his shock and delight, they embraced him as one of the family. So did Diane’s five siblings.
That winter, after Ken resigned from the Regina Maris, he and Diane toured the Bahamas in an inflatable Zodiac, camping on the beach or sleeping in the boat. They interviewed fishermen about local marine mammals and distributed sighting report flyers across the smaller cays. When they heard reports of “weird-looking dolphins with horns growing out of their heads,” Ken figured they must be referring to the stalked barnacles on Blainville’s beaked whales. Diane was well schooled in the local marine wildlife. She knew all about the dolphins and the sailfish and every creature on the reef. But she’ d never seen or even heard of beaked whales in the Bahamas. The afternoon they had a three-hour encounter near Abaco with a group of Blainville’s whales that circled their boat, they knew they had found their research home.
Diane conching during a camping trip to Schooner Cay, Bahamas, February 1991.
Beaked whales aren’t the most charismatic of marine mammals. They’re not nearly as sleek and beautiful as the black-on-white orcas. They can’t compete with the spectacle of a breaching humpback or a spyhopping gray whale. In truth, beaked whales do look a lot like “weird-looking dolphins,” on the rare occasions when they show themselves. But for marine mammal researchers in 1990, beaked whales were a virtual tabula rasa. Other than the large Baird’s species of the North Pacific, beaked whales were too small and elusive to interest whalers, so no one had ever bothered researching their behavior. The academic study of beaked whales was essentially a “dead” science, based on skeletal remains reconstructed by museum-based paleontologists and a few obsessive beachcombers such as Balcomb. Only one population of Atlantic beaked whales had ever been studied systematically—the northern bottlenose whales of Nova Scotia.1 No one had ever surveyed the beaked whales in the Bahamas.
Ken and Diane launched the Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey in 1991. Even for most field researchers, it would have been tedious work: waiting and watching the water’s surface for hours at a time, holding camera and field notes at the ready for a fleeting glimpse of a dorsal fin or fluke. But for Ken and Diane, it was a custom fit. They shared the requisite combination of patience, keen observational skills, and a bottomless appreciation for the exquisite ecology of the Bahamas. And they never tired of each other’s quiet company on the water. It’s not an accident that so many marine mammal field researchers are husband-wife teams, and often childless. Ken and Diane became a hand-in-glove research couple, and the beaked whales became the object of their passionate, tireless attention. Over time, Ken and Diane learned subtle ways to enter the whales’ domain without scaring them off. By trailing along behind the boat with a mask and snorkel, Diane could spot the whales as they prepared to surface. Meanwhile, Ken built customized underwater microphones to gather audio cues of the whales’ movements.
In 1994 Ken proposed to Diane. They were married that summer on the beach in Snug Harbor on San Juan Island, and again for good measure in the Bahamas that fall.
Diane and Ken in Lichtenstein for her sister’s wedding, 1993.
By the winter of 2000, ten years into their survey, Ken and Diane had catalogued and studied the entire population of marine mammals in the northern Bahamas, including 150 Blainville’s, Cuvier’s, and Gervais’ beaked whales in residence. It was always a scramble to find enough funding to keep the boats on the water and film in their cameras. During the lean times, they ran bird-watching expeditions and eco-tours to pay the bills. Ken had finally found his true love and an equal partner in his life’s work. For the first time, he felt at home and at peace.
DAY 3: MARCH 17, 2000
Early the next morning, Balcomb and Ellifrit set off on the 65-mile trip to Water Cay in one of their inflatable boats, hoping that the carcass Balcomb had spotted from the air would still be salvageable. Three hours later, they anchored the boat 20 feet from shore and waded through the shallows to the beach. What was left of the whale was lying just out of the water on the sand.
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p; It didn’t look like a very promising specimen. Sharks had ravaged the Cuvier’s, taking all of its tail and large chunks of its trunk and head meat. Balcomb took some measurements and calculated that it would have been a four-ton whale before the sharks hit it. While taking a skin sample for DNA, he realized they’ d caught a lucky break.
“It’s totally exsanguinated,” he said to Ellifrit. “Thanks to the sharks.” Ordinarily, the blood in the whale’s tissue and blubber becomes rancid as soon as the carcass is exposed to air. But because of the shark attack, this whale had completely bled out before it died, leaving its tissue and organs remarkably fresh. Best of all, its braincase was still intact!
With the sun approaching its apex, Balcomb was in a hurry to get the head off the carcass and into a freezer. When he made his first cut, some fluid seeped out of the whale and trickled down to the water. Within minutes, two tiger sharks had appeared offshore. Balcomb did his best to ignore them while Ellifrit stood guard in case a more aggressive bull shark showed up.
Ten minutes later, the head fell away from the trunk. “Okay, we’ve got it,” Balcomb said. “Let’s get this into the boat.”
Only then did it dawn on them that the tide had receded. The boat, which weighed about 2,500 pounds with its engine, would run aground if they tried to bring it closer to shore in the shallow water. Then they’ d be stuck until the next tide, and the head would be exposed to the elements for another five hours. They had no choice but to muscle the head through the shallows—which were now aswarm with sharks—and lift it into the boat.
The head weighed close to 300 pounds, and was so slippery with slime that they could barely grab hold of it. After a few practice lifts, they hoisted it to hip height and waded into the water. Floating the head out to the boat would have been relatively easy. But lowering the oozing specimen below the waterline wasn’t an option. Not if they hoped to get it past the sharks. Balcomb eyeballed the distance to the inflatable—only about 15 feet, now that the tide had receded—and made a quick count of the half dozen sharks swirling in the shallows. While he tried to calculate their odds, the head grew heavier in their arms. There was nothing to do but make a go for it. If things got out of control, he figured they could always chuck the head and run back to shore.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 8