Terrific, more news about how polluted our seas have become!
RIA Novosti - Russia - Russia set to probe possible toxic sites off Pacific coast
Imagine going for a dive in an area so secluded, that even the Russians living in the farthest reaches of Siberia consider it remote!
The port city of Magadan in the Russian Far East
Magadan is situated on the shore of the Okhotsk Sea and is home to 150,000 hardy souls.
During Stalin’s brutal reign, Magadan was the capital of “Kolyma Land” and was the administrative headquarters of the infamous Gulag or death camps. Many people were sent to Magadan but few ever lived to returned home. To read more about Stalin’s purge visit:
KOLYMA: The Land of Gold and Death by Stanley J. Kowalski
Ice covers the northern part of the sea for more than half the year and summer surface temperatures rarely rise above 54 degrees Fahrenheit. The climate is extremely harsh, with average temperatures in January plummeting below -13 degrees Fahrenheit, accompanied by strong winds. Summers are short and cold, with frequent rain showers and fog. The average temperature in July is 54-59 degrees Celsius.
In the summer of 1998 I paid a visit to the Kolyma Region as a guest of the Russian government and an Alaskan vodka importer. I produced a documentary on the local area and the making of one of the finest vodkas in the world, Magadanskaya Vodka. When I was finished filming the city, museums, mayor’s office, and distillery I was taken on a couple of fishing adventures. On one trip I had the opportunity to fly over the vast taiga forests, hilly tundra lowlands, and vast mountainous-steppe, until we finally landed in the middle of the Yama River. This was definitely the most extreme fishing location I had ever visited. And the most pristine! We caught fish after fish in an area that was indescribably beautiful.
After landing the helicoper in the middle of a gravel bar we proceeded to catch a fish on every cast.
I've yet to find someone who can tell me what type of trout this is. Do you know? I've been told it might by a Kamchatka Trout.
The vast wilderness area was more fantastic then I had ever imagined.
My last adventure was to include a dive in the Okhotsk Sea. This involved 3 hours of driving across an immense mountain range, followed by a two hour voyage on a small landing craft that had been commandeered for the day. Once we shoved off from the mouth of an enormous river, we never saw another sign of civilization. We passed several small rocky spires that jutted out of the sea, each one covered with cormorants, puffins and several other of kinds of seabirds…over 7 million birds populate the shoreline in this province alone. The sea was flat calm and the weather was hot by Siberian standards – close to 70 degrees!
We anchored up next to a small island and dropped down a few baited hooks, within minutes my comrades were pulling up small herring, pollack, smelt and cod. Crab pots were set around the boat and then quickly pulled; in no time at all they were jammed with large crabs akin to Alaskan King Crabs.
After a stern warning to watch out for Salmon Sharks I donned my wetsuit and strapped on one of their ancient double hose regulators. It looked like it could have been one of Jacques Yves Cousteau’s first prototypes…breathing through it was like sucking air through a swizzle stick.
The bottom looked a lot like the New England Coast, only the jellyfish were a strange new variety that I had never seen before. It was an underwater wilderness every bit as vast and unspoiled as what I had seen in my helicopter ride over the tundra. This had to be the one of the last unspoiled seafloors on the planet…or was it?
Now I find out that the Russians are probing the area to try and discover the source of contamination that is now evident in the area. It seems as though there might have been some dumping of nasty toxins somewhere in the adjacent waters.
When are we going to learn that there ARE NO REMOTE AREAS where we can disregard the environment and hide our dirty laundry…there are always consequences for this kind of shortsighted action.
It appears we’re not immune to it right here in Rhode Island, America’s “First Vacationland.” Just a few days ago the city by the sea, Newport, had to close beaches because raw sewage from a broken sewage line had sent millions of gallons of untreated waste into the water. Lovely!
This post has inspired me to reprint the original story I did for On The Water magazine back in 1999 titled "So Near and Yet So Far" -- look for it on my website's "Photo Essay" area.
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