Our target reef.
We needed to swim over there.
But we just hung where we were, grasping rocky knobs, gaping.
I envisioned Violet Russell's slide show, the tongues of hypoxic waters welling up onto the continental shelf, and I wondered if that was going on here, if upwelling low-oxygen high-nutrient waters had spurred the growth of this deadly algal bloom.
Whatever combination of ingredients, it had made this place a toxic cocktail.
I sucked in a deep draft of my own canned air.
Walter jammed an elbow into my arm, and pointed.
It took a moment for my vision to penetrate the cloudy water and scraggly kelp to see what he had seen.
Tolliver was looking now, too.
On our target reef, caught in one of the sunlight pencils, something silver flashed. I could not make out details but I could make out a bare-bones shape.
A metal cage.
We looked at one another and nodded. That's where we needed to go.
Tolliver made one of the hand signals he’d taught us, moving his hand across his torso in a wave motion. Current. And then he pointed to himself and then to us, positioning one hand behind the other.
As ever, he was taking the lead and, as ever, I was glad of it.
We struck out into the bowl framed by the canyon walls.
The current, actually, took us, a rather gentle flow that nevertheless lent a helping hand. It seemed to follow the curve of the bowl. I thought, it's a circular current, it's an eddy, it's the eddy that Tolliver pointed out up top when we first arrived and saw the slight dip in the water that seemed to hold the scummy algal bloom in place.
Holding us in place, in now.
It was a great circling eddy created by seabed topography, by the winds and tides and if I allowed myself to be as poetic as the ancient mariner, by the fickle gods of the sea.
I suddenly wanted to bolt, to strike out perpendicular to this swirling current, to escape.
But Tolliver just rode it like a pro, and so then did we, taking our ride to the left-hand canyon rim and then we flowed up along with the eddying current to skim the jagged reef.
We resumed control, heading for the silver cage at the far edge of the reef. We swam through spindly stalks of the degraded kelp forest, a sad lonely place. The reef was carpeted in dead crabs and shriveled worms. I would have welcomed the company of a grumpy kelp crab. The only life I glimpsed in passing was a nearly translucent snail clinging to a ragged frond, a snail whose shell was pitted as if it had been sandblasted.
I again thought of Violet Russell. Not her slide show this time, but her words. Ocean acidity is rising. Carbon dioxide is souring the seas.
This water was not simply oxygen-starved, it was growing acidic — chemically etching the shell of the snail.
We approached the far edge of the reef.
It was a little better here. The stain was fading here.
I looked up. The algal bloom was fading there, directly above.
We were beneath the outer edge of the bloom.
As we finned toward the cage we saw a blaze of color in this graveyard, a bright sulfur yellow.
It was what we had been hunting.
A bloom of yellow floats was attached to the bottom of the cage. From the tunnel we had glimpsed only the top of the cage. We saw it full-on now. The cage sat down in a hole, perhaps for protection from the currents. It was made of metal pipes, a silvery stainless steel. The frame was open at the top, closed at the bottom, anchored at the corners with heavy-looking metal feet. One of the pipes sprouted the package of yellow floats, like a kelp stalk sprouting gas bladders.
Same size, same shape as the yellow float hidden in Robbie Donie’s shrine at Morro Rock.
I looked at my companions. Cocked my head. This has got to be the source, right?
They nodded their agreement.
The cage was about five feet square — big enough, it struck me, to hold a diver — although the contents were nothing so dramatic. Within the cage, attached to the pipes, were various boxes and canisters and what looked like temperature gauges. Some sort of instrumentation. Attached to the top was a chunky camera. Attached to the base was a squat cylinder with the label Sound Link.
Monitoring the algal bloom? Monitoring the shoaling hypoxic waters? Made sense, I guessed, although wouldn’t Dr. Russell have mentioned it? Well, not necessarily. I suspected that there were many agencies monitoring the condition of the sea, and like a bureaucracy, one department doesn’t know what the other is doing.
I wrote on my slate: NOAA? I’d done a lot of research since we’d begun this case and when it came to all things ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was the top dog. I showed the slate to Tolliver.
He shrugged. Not his bureaucracy.
His patch of ocean, though. He looked from the instrument cage to the bloom overhead and then back at the stain of Target Red and he shook his head.
No dive-signal interpretation needed. This was a bad scene.
I turned back to the scene of the floats. Although the cage was anchored by its metal feet it was clearly meant to rise at some point — else there would be no floats. Some sort of recovery system, I guessed. The six floats were attached to a canister by means of braided nylon rope with snap hook fasteners. Easy on, easy off.
I thought of the bent snap hook on Donie's float. Had it broken free and found its way to the surface? And if so, is that where Donie found it? Or, he might have found it elsewhere, drifting on the currents.
First things first. The geology.
I grabbed the steel pipe and pulled myself closer to the cage to get a good look at the floats. As they bobbed in the current they scuffed against the rocky walls of the hole and I could imagine those braided ropes picking up a grain or two. The rock was Franciscan basalt, I judged, although we’d want to take a sample for confirmation.
And what of the purple hydrocoral? Where was that source?
I scrutinized the wall of the hole, thinking I was hunting for one more lifeless gray animal, and it came as a surprise when I spotted a purple nubbin in a crevice, and then I recalled Russell saying that this hydrocoral retained its color in death. Whether technically dead, it had surely been battered, losing a good quarter-century of growth, and if this had occurred during the installation of this equipment I thought that’s some damned careless work.
I pointed out the nubbin of Stylaster and Tolliver took out his camera and photographed the remains.
Walter set to work chiseling off a sample of the volcanic rock.
I swam over to the nearest stalk of kelp and snapped off a sample. Macrocystis pyrifera, giant kelp, one of the survivors in this ailing forest, still holding fast to the rocky reef.
I thought, a boat could anchor here and snag a bit of holdfast.
It was odd not being able to run through the scenarios as we worked. Hand signals just didn't cut it. Had Robbie Donie anchored here, or at Target Blue? When? Why? Squid-hunting? Float-finding? And then he returned. Squid-fishing again? Success this time? And then what? Overboard? Or pull up anchor and motor someplace else? Overboard there?
Alone? With company?
I swam back to join the others at the cage and gave a thumbs-up.
It's a start. A good day's work.
Tolliver checked his dive computer and gave his own signaclass="underline" one hand held flat, the other underneath with the tips of the fingers touching the flat hand. Time to head back.
We crossed the reef to the chasm and struck out into the eddy.
A liquid whisper: going my way?
You bet, heading back to the tunnel that would shortcut us through the ridge to the sunny side, to Target Blue, to the anchor line up to Tolliver's boat.