Gulf of Alaska, Aboard the Alpha Helix---This Ain't No Fishing Boat
For all its rocking and bobbing, I'm tempted to define it as my personal torture chamber. But it ain't that either. The Alpha Helix is a ship dedicated to science, a floating lab for those who study chemistry, biology, physics or geology. Just give the crew a couple days and they can convert the ship's science quarters for whatever a researcher needs.
Instead of crab pots and floats, the Alpha Helix carries a $100,000 sea water sampler the size of a refrigerator, a series of fine nets to capture zooplankton and an elaborate fish finder. A half dozen scientists--from one who studies birds to one who studies creatures not visible without a microscope--are aboard to study the waters and creatures of the Gulf of Alaska.
This mission, which I was invited on by UAF oceanographer Tom Weingartner, is number 203 for the Alpha Helix since UAF's Institute of Marine Science took over the ship from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1980. The ship is owned by the National Science Foundation and is used by scientists who write successful proposals to use it as a floating laboratory.
The Alpha Helix has covered a pretty good portion of the planet. In the late 1960s, scientists used it in Antarctica, the South Pacific, and hundreds of miles up the Amazon River. Since UAF began operating the ship, it has primarily sailed in Alaska waters--Southeast, here in the Gulf, and in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Researchers have sampled the ocean for radioactive runoff from Russia, studied sea otters, and scanned the Aleutian trench, an underwater canyon that could hide Mount McKinley. While escorted by a Russian icebreaker in 1995, the Alpha Helix was the first U.S. vessel to enter the East Siberian Sea since the early 1960s.
The ship, 133-feet long, is not an icebreaker, but it does have a reinforced hull that allows the captain to operate in cracks that open in loose sea ice. On the Alpha Helix, scientists can, and do, go on missions that keep the ship out of its home port in Seward for 40 days. In 1998, the Alpha Helix will float for 172 days on various bodies of salt water surrounding Alaska.
On this trip, we're out for a seven-day trip to points about 125 miles south of Seward on the Gulf of Alaska. From here, you can't see land, just green camel humps of water with froth hissing on top. So the scientists can work without thinking about anything but their experiments, captain Bill Rook and a crew of eight sail the Alpha Helix, fix anything that breaks, and help the researchers with computers, equipment, and planning how best to use their time at sea. The ship also features a full-time cook, Trish Kaminsky, who has fed scientists and crew members alike since 1986.
Now 33 years old, the Alpha Helix is the annual recipient of the Order of the Ancient Albatross, signifying the oldest and longest-operating research vessel in the university national oceanographic laboratory system. This system consists of dozens of ships operated by universities and docked at ports throughout the Lower 48 and Hawaii.
The Alpha Helix is home for the next week, during which I'll try to recover my sense of balance enough to detail what all the researchers are doing on this ship and why I think there's probably a better word to describe this experience than a scientific "cruise."
