A Fisherman-Scientist Grapples with Puge Sound Mysteries
The world keeps passing this place by, riding the daily ebbs and floods, bound for somewhere else. In the spring of 1792, Capt. George Vancouver stopped for just a couple of hours. He and a handpicked crew had packed a week's worth of supplies, left their ships anchored in Discovery Bay and set out in a boat no bigger than ours, determined to explore the foggy "inlet" that turned out to be Puget Sound. At Point Wilson, the northeast tip of Port Townsend, they beached the boat and stepped ashore, waiting for the "heavy vapour" to lift.
"The shores here are sandy and pebbly," wrote Archibald Menzies, the Scottish botanist who traveled with Vancouver. "The point we came to was low and flat with some marshy ground behind it, and a pond of water surrounded with willows and tall bulrushes. Behind this a green bank stretched to the southward a little distance from the shore, which was marked with the beaten paths of deer and other animals. I ascended this bank and strolled over an extensive lawn, where solitude, rich pasture and rural prospects prevailed."
Judging from their journals, the visitors were taken not just by the natural beauty of Puget Sound, but by its potential for exploitation. Menzies remarked on a land "where the plough might enter at once without the least obstruction and where the soil . . . appeared capable of yielding in this temperate climate luxuriant crops of European grains or of rearing herds of cattle . . ."
Meanwhile, the crew set a small seine net, trying to catch some fish, but "without the least success." So they got back into their boat and rowed on south into the sound.
Two centuries later, this windblown peninsula, with its green lawns and evergreens atop weathered bluffs, closely resembles what Menzies described. We stand on the same pebbly beach, gazing across Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound's grand entryway, watching the world go by. Inbound is the Princess Marguerite with its load of tourists, and an ominous Trident submarine; outbound is a trio of purse seiners steaming toward the Alaska salmon grounds, and a massive grain freighter - all setting course to or from the Puget Sound seaports that Port Townsend once aspired to be but never became.
But people here don't seem to care about this. They may raise a few cows, but Port Townsend's passion is the sea. Scores of businesses build or repair fishing boats, kayaks, traditional wood-hulled boats, sails or a thousand other things that link a terrestrial species to the inland sea that virtually surrounds them. At low tide on a Sunday afternoon, there must be 20 kids scattered across the tideflats, peering into pools and shouting for mom to come look. Others walk their dogs, sail along the waterfront or sit in folding chairs next to motor homes, drinking in the seascape.
Down at the boat harbor, we berth the Velella near the Brendan D. II, the weathered, 48-foot vessel from which Jim Norris conducts his ongoing investigation of Puget Sound. "I wish I could tell you what's going on out there," he says wistfully, nodding toward the broad, shallow bay that is Port Townsend's front yard. "We know more than we did 10 years ago, but that's not saying much."
Norris is not your usual scientist. He launched his career 25 years ago on the deck of a gill-net boat, chasing the elusive salmon. Ten years later, he returned to the University of Washington and fished his way to a Ph.D. in marine biology. Since then, he has refitted his boat to serve double duty as a floating platform to study Puget Sound's fisheries as well as to harvest them. Working with middle-school students and volunteers at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, Norris helps the state monitor water quality, eelgrass growth, weather and wildlife in Port Townsend's bay. Last week, he conducted his annual "trawl survey," dragging a small trawlnet through the bay, one section at a time, then carefully documenting what it brought to the surface.
After nearly a decade of surveys, "there doesn't seem to be any consistent pattern," he says. "Some species show a downward trend, but others are going up." He runs his finger down a computer printout listing yearly counts of Pacific tomcod, snake prickleback, walleye pollock, Pacific herring, sculpin and many more.
Last month, he says, some Oregon biologists came to Port Townsend looking for signs of pollock, a cod-like fish whose numbers appear to have dwindled in Northwest waters. They found fewer than 50 - not good. Last week, trawling in the same bay, Norris caught 150 pollock - the second highest recorded by his surveys. The same nets brought up more young cod than all previous years combined, he says.
"As a fisherman, nothing surprises me," he says. "We'll have great luck at a certain place year after year, so you go back the next year expecting it to happen again. And you come up empty."
Norris wonders if he isn't seeing evidence of what is called the decadal oscillation, an emerging theory that fish populations vary dramatically in long-term cycles that may be linked to ocean temperatures. A growing number of adherents believe that, for some 20 years, Mother Nature has favored fish in Alaskan waters over the Pacific Northwest, and that the oscillation, if it exists, is beginning to oscillate back in favor of Puget Sound.
So goes the theory. Alas, the same scientists warn that the most predictable law of the sea is its unpredictability, the cycles and variables they still don't understand. Like the ocean at large, Puget Sound is simply not the homogenous monoculture many people think it is, Norris says. Its habitat and wildlife vary dramatically from year to year, place to place.
Even Port Townsend's bay, only about five miles long, appears to be comprised of two ecosystems, he says. The northeast half is dominated by rock sole, Pacific sand dab, spotted rockfish; the southwest by pricklebacks, tomcod and herring. The apparent boundary is a riptide that runs north to south from the marina to Indian Island. East of that rip, Norris says, water temperatures drop by two degrees, a significant difference in the marine environment. Why the difference? Probably because the water in the southwest is relatively stable, while the northeast is in constant turmoil, agitated by the powerful currents of Admiralty Inlet.
Sorting out Puget Sound's complex ecosystem will take many years, Norris says. Scientists need long-term data in order to recognize and begin to study its biological cycles. "We need a 100-year database," he says. "And in this bay, we only have 10 years."
But if it is daunting, it need not be costly. Norris and the local marine-science center operate on a shoestring budget, using mostly volunteer assistants. Water-quality data is gathered by eighth-grade students from local schools. Norris' crew last week was comprised of schoolteachers taking a summer course. Still more volunteers conducted wildlife tours along the seashore.
Port Townsend is not the only place where citizens have become invested in the health of Puget Sound. Communities from Skagit County to Hood Canal and South Puget Sound have demonstrated that there is a payoff in making marine science accessible to nonscientists.
"You don't need a Ph.D. to read the meters, only to interpret them," he says. "I believe we're producing research-quality data at a fraction of the normal cost."
Encouraged by those words of encouragement, we cast off our lines and point our sloop southward toward the foggy vapours of Puget Sound.
