Marine biology ticked all the right boxes for me. It was a serious professional career in science that also offered the prospect of conducting research at sea on marine organisms including fish. Compared with being a freshwater fisheries biologist, which I thought might restrict me to jobs within the continental United States, the idea of being free to work on all the world’s oceans seemed limitless and exciting. There was also a very important practical matter.
One of the universities listed as offering a specialized BSc degree in marine biology was Fairleigh Dickinson University, whose Teaneck campus was a mere twenty-minute drive from my house. This meant I could live at home whilst attending university. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to negotiating the notoriously unattractive highways of northern New Jersey every day for four years, but I had to take into consideration the practical benefits of going to a local university virtually on my doorstep. I was also realistic enough to know that getting accepted to an out-of-state university was probably going to be difficult for someone like me with average grades and without the money to pay the high cost of tuition and living expenses.
The other attraction of FDU’s marine biology programme was that it included a half-year semester at the university’s own private laboratory on the Caribbean Island of St Croix, in the US Virgin Islands. The university’s prospectus promised students the opportunity to study in a setting in which the classroom was a pristine coral reef, with lessons taken underwater whilst scuba diving. Although there were more prestigious marine biology and oceanography programmes dotted around the country, none of them offered such a marvellous facility in this kind of exotic location. For the first time in my life I was seriously motivated to work harder in school and improve my grades, so that I could get accepted into FDU’s marine biology programme.
My only sense of what university would be like came from a short visit to my older brother during his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. UW-Madison in the early 1970s was a hotbed of student activism, and it was also ranked by Playboy magazine as one of the top ten party schools in America. Consequently I saw very little academic work of any type the week I spent on campus. Most people I came across in the dorms were, it seemed, preoccupied with either the latest developments in the Watergate scandal or getting high, or both.
When I did finally get into university, it was nothing like I had experienced in Wisconsin. FDU was primarily a commuter school, with only a small percentage of students living on campus. It also had large international and graduate student bodies, so in general everyone’s attitude was to get your work done and get out of school rather than sticking around to party. My time at FDU in Teaneck was all about attending lectures and studying, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was working parttime several days a week in the biology department or in other odd jobs to help pay for my tuition. I saw university very much as a means to an end, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize everything I was working towards for a bit of fun. It was time to take my education seriously.
Unfortunately, my poor preparation from high school caught up with me during my freshman year. I struggled badly to keep up with the pace of lectures, and at one point my grades were so poor – my grade point average (GPA) had dropped below 2.0 – that I was put on academic probation, which shocked and frightened me. This meant I had just one more semester to turn things around, otherwise I would be placed on suspension, which I knew would spell the end of my university career right then and there. I was incredibly frustrated, because my problems weren’t for lack of trying; I spent every waking hour studying, but the results were simply not coming for me. That summer holiday I had to face the prospect that I wasn’t good enough to get the degree I wanted so badly.
I didn’t find the answer to my problem until the start of my second year, when I was placed in a microbiology lab class with a handful of bright students who all became very good friends. Whereas in my first year I’d studied by myself, now I began working in a group with my new friends, who showed me how to learn effectively and efficiently. The difference in my work, and most importantly my exam results, was immediate. In a single semester I went from nearly flunking out to getting some of the highest grades in many of my classes, especially the core science subjects that dominated my course. I still worked very hard, but armed with some new techniques and the benefit of studying in a group, I was able to put my disastrous freshman year behind me and improve my GPA to a respectable figure.
Improving my GPA became particularly important, because by the middle of my junior year I had decided to continue my education and apply for graduate school, targeting about a dozen top universities on both coasts that offered PhD and MSc degrees in marine biology. To do this I would need a 3.5 GPA – over and above the 3.0 minimally required for acceptance into graduate school – in order to be seriously competitive with the other PhD and MSc candidates vying for scholarships and the best research opportunities. I had dug a huge hole for myself with my disastrous freshman year, and the only way out of it was to get virtually perfect grades from now on.
I left for my semester in St Croix in early January, just after celebrating the new year with my family. My father had died from a heart attack the previous September, at the start of my senior year, so this was the first Christmas we’d had without him. Although he had been ill, his death was still a major shock that left a huge hole in my life. I’d been extremely close to him, having spent a large portion of my childhood helping him with his antiques business. It wasn’t an easy way to make a living. Every day he was faced with having to find and buy antiques in New Jersey and sell them later that same day in Greenwich Village, where most of his customers’ shops were based. The constant need to create these profitable market opportunities was wearing on him, and I think this was one of the reasons he was happy to have me along for company. It also helped that, with his tutelage, I had developed an eye for spotting valuable items.
Some of the best times for my father’s business were the periodic ‘clean-up’ weeks, when the nearby cities and townships in New Jersey would allow their residents to put any objects, no matter the size, out on the streets to be collected the following morning as rubbish. In the process of emptying their attics and basements of trash, people would also unknowingly throw away treasures that only we would recognize as valuable antiques. I would happily run along the sidewalk spotting and collecting the worthwhile objects whilst my father followed me slowly in his van. Working together this way we were able to cover far more ground than he could have done alone.
This might not have been an ideal activity for a young boy to be engaged in on a school night, but I couldn’t have been happier when I found something of real value, like an oriental rug. I was making life easier for my father and contributing to the family’s finances by literally turning people’s trash into cash. Of course my mother wasn’t enamoured with our late-night excursions, as she saw it as yet another excuse for me to avoid my homework. The way I looked at it, I was just helping with the family business like a lot of children were expected to do. If we had lived on a farm, no doubt I would have been spending early mornings tending to animals or taking whole days off from school during the harvest.
I learned so much from my father and I missed him dreadfully when he died. It pained me to think he wouldn’t be around to hear about my experiences in St Croix or watch me graduate from university. Despite my grief at his death, however, I was able to meet the target I had set of getting A grades in every class, and I left for St Croix with confidence that I would be able to handle whatever workload they threw at us. Despite the fact that I was the youngest in the family, I was on track to be the first to graduate university, as my brother ultimately dropped out and my two sisters worked for years before going back to college. I had studied extremely hard to recover from my nightmare first year, and now, with all my goals back within touching distance, I was determined to make the most of this next opportunity.
The moment you step off a plane in
to a hot tropical climate, you know instantly that you’ve been transported to a foreign land, very different from where you’ve come from. The heat doesn’t just hit you in the face; it envelops your entire body and permeates all your senses. This was how I felt landing in St Croix on a blazing sunny day after flying in from New Jersey, which was still firmly gripped in the dead of winter.
If there were any lingering doubts about how different St Croix was going to be, they all faded away when I caught my first sight of the shallow lagoons just off the eastern tip of the island where FDU’s West Indies Lab (WIL) was based. The water was a colour I had literally never seen before; a brilliant aquamarine, flashing as the sunlight reflected off ripples dancing across its surface. Despite the long flight, several of us immediately ditched our bags and hiked down to a remote lagoon to go snorkelling. I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful the corals, fish and anemones would be. Everything was so spectacularly bright and colourful. As soon as I entered the water I knew one thing instantly: that I would never go swimming in the polluted and visibly impenetrable waters of the Hudson River ever again.
The locals call St Croix a paradise, and that is never more evident than when you begin exploring the different types of coral reefs that populate the waters surrounding this small Caribbean island. Fortunately, the structure of the classes taught at FDU’s lab allowed us plenty of time for scuba diving. After morning lectures, nearly every afternoon was spent in the field – generally underwater – observing and learning about the local flora and fauna. Our first assignment was to recognize by sight all the fish, coral and invertebrate species, which meant spending countless hours in the water using waterproof guidebooks and checklists written on slate to keep tabs of everything we had to identify during our dives.
Having learned to dive in a cold flooded quarry in New Jersey, where the most interesting thing to see was a stolen car dumped there after a botched crime spree, diving in St Croix was a revelation. To begin with, the visibility was spectacular and the water so warm it made wetsuits unnecessary. The main attraction, however, had to be the communities of fish that lived within the coral reefs and made them a constant hive of activity. One of the most amazing spectacles was the daily migration of juvenile grunts, a mostly yellow and blue striped fish, which leave the reef en masse each day at twilight to feed in the adjacent beds of seagrass. When we were told that these large schools of fish would swim off in single file at a specific time every evening, I remember feeling a little sceptical, but as I lay in wait for the grunts along with the rest of my class, sure enough, at exactly the predicted time, a single grunt led a procession of his mates off the reef in a perfect line that any drill sergeant would be proud of.
As fascinated as I was with the ecology and behaviour of reef fishes, as the semester wore on I grew slowly disillusioned with the idea of becoming a marine biologist. Coral reef ecology is an enormously complex subject that relies on small advances in a wide range of different fields before even a simple understanding of the whole ecosystem is possible. I felt the pace of discovery was too slow and didn’t want to devote a large chunk of my life to a field of study in which I would only make a small contribution.
For my own research project I decided to choose a topic that I felt was of greater significance to the overall health and fate of the island’s reefs, which had begun to show the first signs of the deadly coral disease that was to decimate many species the following decade. By measuring the quantity and productivity of calcium-carbonate-producing plants and animals, including corals, spread across one of the island’s shallow bays and adjacent fringing reefs, I was able to put together the first biogeochemical carbonate production budget ever established for St Croix.
I liked this project for several reasons. Firstly, it had a mixture of marine biology and geology that I found stimulating. I had taken no courses in geology until arriving at the WIL and was surprised to find how much I enjoyed this new field. Secondly, the fieldwork was very physically demanding as I had a lot of underwater acreage to cover while counting and measuring all the carbonate producers along the half-mile transect I’d chosen to survey. I was spending up to four hours underwater every day, with one long dive in the morning and a second in the afternoon. Because the water was so shallow, decompression sickness wasn’t an issue and I was free to extend my dives by means of carefully controlled breathing until I literally ran my tank dry. All the hard work meant I was probably as physically fit as I’ve ever been in my life.
When I submitted my final paper, I received the A grade I so desperately wanted and needed, but even that was less important to me than the comment made by our marine geology professor, who wrote that the quality of the paper was so good, it actually deserved to be published in a peer-review journal, something that was extremely rare for a student paper. My work resulted in the first quantitative snapshot of the state and health of this important environment, which would also serve as a comparative baseline for similar studies in the future.
When my final GPA was calculated, however, I still fell short of the 3.5 score many of the graduate schools were telling me I needed to qualify for places and scholarships. Despite getting straight A’s in every class in my senior year, the highest I could pull my GPA up to was 3.34. In truth, I never really had a chance after my disastrous freshman year. However, I was proud that my GPA in the core science subjects that made up 60 per cent of my overall curriculum was 3.71. I prayed this was enough for at least one graduate school to take a chance on me.
When I heard that the University of South Florida (USF) were upgrading their small St Petersburg-based Institute of Marine Science to department status, with the addition of about a dozen new faculty and thus many more places for incoming graduate students, I made sure they were on the list of schools I applied to. I had been advised to apply primarily for PhD programmes on the basis that prospective PhD students had a much better chance of getting the research funding and/or financial scholarship I would need to further my education. Unfortunately, this advice proved to be misguided, for the simple reason that I wasn’t a strong enough candidate to compete for these highly coveted places. This became distressingly clear to me as the rejection letters started arriving in our mailbox.
I was getting to be quite an expert at sniffing out rejections with just the briefest of glimpses at the first couple of sentences. After reading the full contents of the first few letters, which left me with an awful feeling of having been kicked in the stomach, I would thereafter only open the top fold to glance at the opening paragraph. If the phrases ‘After careful consideration’ or ‘We regret to inform you’ showed up, there was really no point in reading the rest of the letter. This routine continued with sickening regularity until the letter from USF arrived.
At first I couldn’t tell whether I was in or out, because the first paragraph did include some of the phrases I had learned to dread. But as I began to make sense of the letter, it was clear that USF, while not accepting me outright as a PhD student, had thrown me a lifeline. In short, the letter explained that they would be happy to take me on for an MSc degree, following which I could pursue a PhD if I wanted to continue at USF. To say I was overjoyed would be a huge understatement. After so many rejections, I was relieved that any school was giving me a chance, and the fact that marine science was an up-and-coming department at USF – having recently been made a state-wide Center of Excellence and with ambitions for becoming nationally prominent – made my acceptance of their offer one of the easiest and happiest decisions I ever had to make.
Although I entered the MSc programme at USF as a marine biologist, it wasn’t long before I decided to change to marine geology. I had spent part of my first year at USF improving the research paper I had written at WIL, and my interest in marine geology was increasing at the direct expense of marine biology. I could also see that the marine geology students had more seagoing research opportunities and that they were a more tightly knit group than the biologists, who, because they pursued
such different research projects, didn’t collaborate as much. In addition to what my heart was telling me, my head also liked the fact that marine geologists were far more employable than marine biologists, so making the switch was unlikely to hurt my job prospects when I finished with graduate school.
In order to change courses, I had to have one of the marine geology faculty take me on as their student, and I was very fortunate that Al Hine agreed to do just that. Al was an assistant professor who had a growing reputation as a talented sedimentologist specializing in shallow carbonate environments. Most importantly for me, he was a proper seagoing scientist, meaning that I would have plenty of opportunities to go to sea myself and get hands-on experience with the high-resolution geophysical instruments that were the tools of his trade. Al believed in taking all his graduate students to sea and giving them full responsibility for operating the expensive and scientifically powerful equipment. On my first training cruise with him, he put me in charge of a high-frequency side-scan sonar system that we used to image the sea-floor geology, and it was without question an experience that transformed my life forever.
The sonar was a decrepit EG&G 259–4 unit that was in such bad shape I had to spend a week breaking it down and repairing it just to get it working to about half its rated capability. The 259–4 was one of the earliest commercially available side-scan sonars and was notoriously difficult to operate. However, when I finally got it going and it started to produce sonar images of the West Florida continental shelf as we slowly steamed away from the coast, I knew immediately that working with this type of equipment was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
The images of sand waves and rocky outcrops, even taking into account their relative poor quality, were an absolute revelation to me. I felt this was probably the most perfect mix of science and underwater exploration that I could ever hope to find. What I found particularly powerful was the ability of the sonar to scan wide strips of the sea floor to reveal both geology that was millions of years old and sedimentary patterns created during the most recent change of tide. Before our short cruise was finished, I had already decided to learn everything I could about this amazing technology and become an expert in its use.
The Shipwreck Hunter Page 2