Rangiroa, in the Tuamotus, is the 3rd largest atoll in the world (I couldn’t tell you where numbers 1 & 2 are; our guidebook doesn’t say!). We arrived after an overnight sail from Ahe, timing our entry into Tiputa Pass, one of two navigable passes on the atoll. If you miss the timing, the pass becomes a wild funnel of hard and fast current and large standing waves. We witnessed this wild energy under a full moon a couple of nights later, from the safety of shore.

The pass is famous for Bottlenose dolphins. Brooks dropped Connor and Rowan off near the pass exit to do a drift dive and they were surrounded by the dolphins. Such an encounter is a powerful and privileged one and the guys were pretty awestruck! Their experience was also shaped by facts we’d learned shortly after our arrival in Rangiroa. We visited the home of a small non-profit organization called GEMM (www.gemm.org) (in association with French and American universities), run by a couple named Pamela and Alain, that focuses on marine mammals. (The name GEMM translates as: Study Group for Marine Mammals.) Here in Rangiroa, they study the dolphins; later in the season they’ll head further west in FP, to Raiatae, where they’ll engage in humpback whale and spinner dolphin research. On this atoll, in additional to their scientific studies of the dolphins, they are embroiled, to varying degrees, with the 6 dive operators who sell dolphin encounters to tourists, and in some cases, promote touching the dolphins. While the researchers of GEMM fully appreciate and share the human interest in being in the water with these animals, they object to the lengths to which some operators go to provide a thrill for their customers. It is commonplace for people to think of dolphins as friendly mammals of the sea. Their “smile” misleads us into a sense of camaraderie, but as Pamela bluntly described: “They “smile” even in death!” Dolphins are wild animals, she stressed, and dive operators who promote and encourage the touching of wild animals are exploiting them for economic gain. While contact with dolphins is illegal in FP, there is little to no regulation or oversight way out here. During their 5 years of dolphin research, they have observed dolphin behavior changing as a result of these engagements and shared with us footage of divers touching dolphins and, in one case, being pushed around by a dolphin. They’re concerned about the long term behavioral effects, as well as with the potential for disease spread across species.

The tourism industry sells more wildlife encounters than just dolphins. Before leaving Rangiroa, we completed our Pacific Reef Check Ecodiver training, conducting a survey on a site known as “The Aquarium”: lots of fish and moderately healthy coral in patches. The dive boats feed the fish and eels at this site to entertain the tourists, so we were often surrounded by snappers and, on one trip, saw 4 large Moray eels coming out to take advantage of the easy meal. It felt somewhat like a zoo.

A short sail of a few hours took us across the lagoon where we spent two days anchored in pale blue, calm waters, surrounded by black tip sharks. At one point, we counted 15 circling Llyr! Black tips are fairly shy, so we felt safe in assuming that tour boats must feed them on this side of the atoll as they do on the other, making them approach boats more regularly.

We left Rangiroa on a calm afternoon, making our way out of the pass and circumnavigating the atoll, headed for Tahiti, and the capital of Papeete. We commented on what a pleasant sail we were having and laughed about how that was sure to change. And sure enough, it did. By 9 in the evening, the winds had climbed up to about 30 knots with very confused seas, once again pitching the boat side to side and making for a rough and uncomfortable sail.

Our trip to Papeete was about 36 hours (two nights and a day) bringing us into the capital early in the morning. Tahiti juts out of the ocean in tall jagged spires and sloping mounts. It is surrounded by a barrier reef which has protected the shoreline from storms and provided calm waters for boats. Approaching Papeete, the reef is visible only as a breaking wave. We entered the pass and motored along the inner waterway between the shoreline and reef to Marina Taina, our first marina since Panama (and our first real showers in over two and a half months!!)

We didn’t get much time to travel around Tahiti; instead, we were busy with provisioning, cleaning and repairs, doing a little visiting with other boats, and getting ready for the arrival of Benjamin, a friend and high school senior who will be interning with us for the next two months. Our few trips in and out of town by bus made us aware of the limited public transportation system and the heavy reliance on private automobiles. We hadn’t seen people or cars in this concentration for a long time!

While we were not able to get underwater during our time in Tahiti, Chuck had the opportunity to make a couple of dives with one of the local operators and came back to report dead coral and lots of algae.
With Ben on board, we were eager to leave Tahiti and head to Mo’orea, hoping for better waters, and the possibility of getting Gavin certified as a SCUBA diver. Reports of an incoming weather system with lots of wind also required us to leave the mooring ball at Marina Taina. Mo’orea is only about 15 miles from Papeete; we were aiming for Cook’s Bay (named after that sailor who preceded us there by a few hundred years).

Here is how the Lonely Planet Guide describes diving in Mo’orea: “Mo’orea is one of French Polynesia’s main underwater playgrounds, which is no surprise considering its high visibility and clean waters. The underwater scenery is every bit the equal of what’s on land: you can dive sloping reefs and go nose-to-nose with sharks, rays and numerous reef species.”

Here is what we have seen so far: lots of dead coral and algae.

At the nearby Hilton, the iconic over-the-water bungalows are surrounded by classic turquoise blue waters, but in between the white sand patches there is mainly dead coral and choking algae. While we’ve yet to dive the outer reef, we’ve heard it isn’t much better, and the dive operators, as in Rangiroa, are resorting to selling impressive dive experiences by feeding the sharks and rays so that they gather around in large congregations. Fisheries are reportedly finished in Mo’orea. We’ve been told that most fish now come from the Tuamotus and Marquesas, as we had observed there. We have yet to hear local accounts of the disappearance of the fishing industry in Mo’orea.

If the reefs aren’t growing and adding new skeleton aloft, storm surge will overwhelm the reef. Add to that sea level rise, and, well, these shorelines are facing a difficult future. (We’ll write more on the complex nature of coral reefs in a future posting.) We have a meeting planned with some scientists at one of the environmental research institutes here in Mo’orea: CRIOBE (www.criobe.org) and hope to learn a lot more about what has happened and is happening to these reefs.

I am reminded that when I last left off with this blog in Ahe, I was wondering how heading towards more touristed settings might affect our perceptions of environmental conditions. A picture is developing, and it isn’t pretty. Our human appetites are immense, and those of us with a few resources are eager to consume at a scale which is not sustainable. That goes for us aboard Llyr as well. Our footprints lie heavy on the planet. I’ve read that if everyone consumed like the average westerner, we’d need about 7 planets to provide for us! Out here, I’m feeling it! This planet is breaking under our weight. Whether we’re “consuming” electronics from Best Buy, or a broccoli that has traveled from France to the Tuamotus, or even an aesthetic experience on a beach or a woods hike, we can’t seem to avoid heavy tread. I’ve heard that Mount Everest is littered with oxygen bottles left behind by climbers. Today I read that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has a long term study (22 years) with over 18,000 hours of footage from deep sea ROVs (remotely-operated vehicles) showing human -made garbage everywhere off the coast of California, as deep as 13,000 feet.

While I work to be a strong advocate and help raise awareness, I’m not sure how effectively I can lighten my load or that of my children. I’m not sure if we, as a species, can do what it takes to halt the 6th wave of extinction that we humans have set in motion.

Slowly Sinking in Paradise.

Research Vessel Llyr, my sailing home for 2 and a half months this summer, is now in French Polynesia, visiting the Marquesas, Tuamotus and Tahiti groups of Islands. The Tuamotus are coral atolls, which average 5 feet above sea level, although much of the residential areas are within about two feet of current high tide. If the most widely accepted predictions about sea level are correct, the Tuamotus will become uninhabitable by mid-century.

It is wonderful and sad and a little weird to be here in this place that looks like the classic cover of a travel magazine: beaches, coconut palms, turquoise waters, women with Gauguin faces, and at the same time to be reading John Englander’s new book High Tide on Main Street; Rising Sea Levels and the Coming Coastal Crisis. Here, future sea level rise stares us in the face each day through the low shorelines. When I see a baby or a pregnant woman, I can only think that those children will not be able to spend their lives where their voyageur ancestors settled centuries ago, the islands of their culture and heritage.

The book, High Tide on Main Street, collects and explains the scientific literature on ocean level increase, and this is not a new concept to those who have been reading about climate. Nevertheless to see it all pulled together is a very sobering read, which I highly recommend.

I recently sent a note to family and friends quoting a recent study observing that for each degree Celsius of temperature increase, the sea has risen to reach an equilibrium of 65 feet higher. My old friend and fellow environmental warrior, Peter Bachman, who pays close attention to stuff he reads, challenged me on that, because the prediction in this century is for maybe 2 degrees Celsius increase (we already have .8) and the main line scientific consensus is for only 4 to 5 feet of ocean increase. But my report was accurate from the perspective of geological time, because it is referring to ultimate equilibrium. Here’s the quote from Englander’s book:

In 2008, Dr. David Archer showed what happens over longer periods of time when temperatures, ice sheets and sea levels reach a new equilibrium. Using the work of glaciologist Dr. Richard Alley, his analysis showed that sea level has changed by a stunning 20 meters, (65 feet) for every degree of change Celsius (1.8 degrees F. Since the oceans and atmosphere have warmed almost one full degree, it is just a matter of time before sea level adjusts according to this historic relationship.

Englander points out that this study shows, with the .8 degree increase we already have, “based on 40 million years of actual history, not theoretical projections, sea levels will rise more than 50 feet, …once the ice has had time to melt. “ The melting of Antarctica and Greenland ice caps will be responsible for about 95 percent of sea level rise ultimately and the process will take at least centuries (if the predictions about tipping points come true) or perhaps millennia, but the RATE of melting is many thousands of times more rapid than the Earth has experienced in previous naturally-caused warmings.

2 years ago, Steve Piragis, Martha Brand and I were standing at the calving edge of the Illiulissat Glacier in Greenland, the largest outside of Antarctica, which is moving now at several times the rate of a few decades ago and accelerating. (Its dramatic calving was the feature of James Balog’s documentary, Chasing Ice. ) Thinking back about that view of the massive 2 mile high ice sheet oozing down into the fjord and out to sea, I now understand that we were witnessing the birth of a new era in the earth’s history, one that will last for thousands of years, and the first to be actually caused by our species.

I am sailing west across the Pacific with a unique family on the Research Vessel Llyr, a 53-foot ketch sailboat, on a 2 fold-mission for 2013: first, to observe, document and analyze social and economic changes from such environmental insults as climate change and overfishing as they impact coastal communities and coral reefs ; and second, to do diving surveys to document the health of coral reefs for Reef Check, a citizen science program for reef monitoring worldwide. The Dad/Skipper, Brooks McCutchen is a former practicing psychoanalyst. Janis Steele, the Mom, is a PhD. Anthropologist and former documentary filmmaker. Both are now Maple Syrup Farmers in Massachusetts, and focus on the cultural politics and economics of small-scale, sustainable food production and marketing. The 3 boys, Connor, 18 (the First Mate), Rowan 15, and Gavin 10, all at home underwater, could not be more enthusiastic about being a real part of the project. I’ll add what I can as a survey diver, an environmental advocate, recovering lawyer, aspiring underwater photographer, and writer. In 2014, they also expect to be based in Vanuatu as a service vessel, assisting communities to adjust to the impacts of a changing environment.

Upon reflection, it does not seem strange that the natives here are not shouting to the industrialized countries to stop burning fossil fuel, because neither are most of the citizens of Miami, New Orleans, New York, Norfolk, and Sacramento, other costal areas which will be devastated by the end of this century, although some defensive measures are finally being taken. As a nation, we too continue our struthious (ostrich like) outlook, taking care of immediate needs while ignoring those of our grandchildren. We live in the moment: this week, this month, this year, not this century.

Yet, Englander does not close with total gloom and doom (which of course doesn’t work and destroys hope). While recognizing that adaptation to sea level rise is inevitable, and will cost many billions, he of course notes that reducing carbon producing energy sources is the only hope of bending the rising curve of atmospheric and ocean carbon. He closes with a famous quote from Winston Churchill as England and the free world faced the terror of the Third Reich:

If we fail, then the whole world. …Including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age….. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if we last for a thousand years, men will still say, “this was their finest hour.”

The wartime quote highlights the reality of our situation. We need a commitment equal to that which was required to fight and win a world war and we don’t have it. The other night, on board, we watched Les Miserables and I thought, perhaps those of us who are trying to build a real movement are like the young French revolutionaries on the barricades, expecting the multitudes to rise in support, which doesn’t happen. I hope that’s not true, and I am hopeful that the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way as evidenced by the responses to Hurricane Sandy and President Obama’s recent climate speech. Perhaps the reality of sea level rise will be the thing that finally wakes us up to the need for more commitment to action. Momentum, momentum, momentum.

But, don’t buy any waterfront property.