Three Graces

Wychemere Harbor

Wychemere Harbor was smaller than I expected. If I hadn't told the map app on my phone to give me loud, verbal directions, I certainly would have driven past it. In fact, I had missed Harbor Road once already and had to turn around at the Episcopal church on the corner. Grassy, flowery lawns surrounded summer homes. Tourists in bright designer dresses and pristine white sandals peered into shopfront windows just a block away. As I pulled into the tiny parking lot of Wychemere Harbor, I could hardly believe this was where a commercial fishing boat called home. 

Three Graces was lashed to the front face at the end of the pier - her boxy frame was too long for a standard slip. The diesel engine puttered, and a dark-skinned man moved boxes around the back deck. I approached on foot and tried to find the boat's name on the hull, but the captain spotted me first. I guess a feminine scientist is not something you see every day in Wychemere Harbor. 

It took us 30 minutes to load my gear, 5 minutes to talk through the plan, and 12 hours to steam to our first study site. I tried to sleep. The captain, Bradley, let me choose a bunk below deck, which I was grateful for, but a 60 ft fishing boat is just not the place to go for a solid night of rest. When we reached the first site at 4 am, Bradley called down the hatch that it was time to get up. Here we go, I thought. 

A screenshot from the ROV video at one of our study sites.
You can see a bright orange scallop on the seafloor. The green
piece on the left is a sediment sampler attached to the ROV.

At every station, we had a to-do list. First came the water sample. Then the zooplankton. After that, we deployed my lab's tiny remotely-operated vehicle over the side to record video from the seafloor. Then we dredged for scallops. I worked outside with the deckhand, whose named I learned was Cesar, while Bradley drove the boat and ran the winch. I gave Bradley a stack of papers - premade data sheets with clear instructions and items to fill in at each station. He kept notes while I filled jar after jar with samples. 

Bradley wanted to time the whole operation - at sea, time is money. The first station took us a full 2 hours to complete, but by the final station, we were down to just 30 minutes. We got the procedure dialed in, and Bradley was nothing but proud.

What blew my mind the most is how variable the stations were. Our scallop dredges at each site turned up extremely different communities. Our first site had no scallops, only sea stars - a common scallop predator. Our second site, just about 10 miles away, had hundreds and hundreds of tiny scallop recruits. The babies would normally have slipped through the dredge, but we had a special permit to collect them with a finer mesh. I gleefully counted out 100 tiny scallops and preserved them in a cooler for analysis back in the lab. At some stations, we had a net full of sand dollars; at others, crabs and monkfish. Every station we visited was a new and surprising catch. 

When we finished our last station and headed back to land, I laid down to sleep - to no avail. We had flat-calm seas for the whole trip, right up until we turned to steam home. Three Graces bounced in the waves, and I had a hard time even getting comfortable on my bunk. I ended up laying on the deck, as close to the boat's center of gravity as I could, and trusted Bradley to drive us home. Cesar kicked my boot to check if I was alive, and I gave him a weak thumbs-up. I could no longer tell the difference between seasickness and sleep deprivation - I was the most nauseous I have ever been in my life. 

We reached Wychemere Harbor at midnight. Through some magic unbeknownst to me, my seagoing compatriots seemed completely unaffected by what we had just experienced, not to mention the late hour. I was grateful for the samples in the back of my truck, sure, but more than anything in the world, I just wanted to go home. 

My trip on Three Graces was a learning experience from start to finish. We had to make adjustments to collect my samples, but that's not actually what I mean. Commercial fishermen are a different breed. Bradley mentioned at one point that he spends ~200 days a year at sea, which I absolutely cannot fathom. My one day on Three Graces was the hardest I have worked in several years, but it was just a normal day to everyone else on board. They endure waves and wind and sun and diesel fumes and fix their gear and dredge the seafloor and give everything they have just to make a living. Tell you what, I will never take a scallop for granted again.