Steve Katona, Susan Lerner, former COA president Louis Rabineau, his wife Mona and their daughter Elizabeth.
RENAISSANCE MAN
The Edward McC. Blair Marine Research Station at Mt. Desert Rock.
24 | COA
Fast-forward a decade or so to January 1985. Steve’s black hair is shorter and beginning to show flecks of silver; the beard will soon be gone. He is seventy miles north of the Dominican Republic on a twenty-five square-mile coral reef system named Silver Bank. Steve is leading an expedition of scientists and students on the 100-foot sailing research vessel Regina Maris. By now I’ve graduated from COA. Steve and I are on Silver Bank because it is the winter breeding ground for humpback whales, the same whales that spend summers thousands of miles north near Mount Desert Island, swimming down and back each year. We are on a smaller skiff deployed from the larger ship. As Steve settles in the bow, I sit in the stern, manning the boat with a small sputtering outboard engine. The sun is hot and high in the sky and we are surrounded by thousands of humpback whales. As we glide across the aquamarine waters, passing the colorful shadows of coral heads, seeing whale flukes and blows popping up and disappearing like surprise targets at a carnival game, Steve points towards a group of seven or eight male whales, rolling and jumping as they all converge and compete for one female. I idle the engine as Steve dons a diving mask. He carefully lowers himself into the ocean to photograph the whales underwater. After our work on Silver Bank, Steve and I began a series of forays to the Caribbean and Bermuda, tracking what at the time were truly mysterious giants. Through his leadership, a group of scientists in the Atlantic pooled their efforts and laid the foundation for understanding humpback whale distributions in the entire ocean basin. Somewhere between our moment on Silver Bank, washing glassware in the COA chemistry lab, my early days on Mount Desert Rock, diving in Frenchman Bay, the multidisciplinary view Steve gave me of the oceans and the earth—somewhere amidst this and much more, my career and life in expeditionary marine conservation science was forged.