Aleutian Isles 2011 Scientific Expedition : Sea kayaking, coasteering and team building activities

Extended Expedition by Sea Kayak along the Alaskan Aleutian Islands in 2011.

Expedition details so far;

Beginning May 2011 - expected maximum duration of three months

We will be using the previous Vancouver Island Record Blog - http://horrendousexperiences.blogspot.com/ - leading up to and whilst on the Aleutian Isles 2011 Scientific expedition.

Scientific studies;

Origins of kayaking - 'the Aleutian story' - evolution, and the cultural and environmental impacts
Motivation and Leadership in challenging conditions
Endurance and physical conditioning on extended trips using the location specific environment
Studying and living alongside local volcanic activity, marine and wildlife.

"Culturally and environmentally sympathetic expedition, with the overall goal of exploration, enjoyment, excitement and challenge!"

Expedition Team - Keirron Tastagh, Sam Murphy and .......

Photography and Video footage will be captured along the route.

Sponsors include;

Kokatat Drysuits, thermals, and protection from the elements!
Sea Kayaking UK, Explorer's - the ultimate Expedition Sea Kayaks
Lendal, Carbon performance Paddles
Snapdragon Spray Decks

Brief description of the environment

The Aleutian Islands are a chain of more than 300 small volcanic islands forming a volcanic arc in the Northern Pacific Ocean, extending about 1,200 mi (1,900 km) westward from the Alaska Peninsula toward the Kamchatka Peninsula. Crossing longitude 180°, they are the westernmost part of the United States. Nearly all the archipelago is part of Alaska and usually considered as being in the "Alaskan Bush", but at the extreme western end the small, geologically-related, and remote Commander Islands are in Russia. The islands, with their 57 volcanoes, are in the northern part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. The Alaska Marine Highway passes through the islands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands

A few thought provoking quotes from

Bridge to Russia - Those Amazing Aleutians

By Murray Morgan

"The explosions were violent. A hundred miles away they riffled the clouds and shuddered the earth. Four hundred miles away they were mistaken for blasting in nearby hills. Seven hundred miles away people heard thunder from a cloudless sky, and wondered. A mountain had just disappeared"

"Until the spring of 1912, Katmai was a well-behaved vol-
cano. It did not even smoke. Legends of the Aleuts who lived
at its foot told of great snows, of fierce gales which snarled
through the Katmai pass, but none mentioned eruptions. Kat-
mai slept

In the first week of June, the sleeper stirred. The earth
shook Most of the Aleuts from Katmai village were away
fishing for salmon. The two families left behind sweated out
forty-eight hours of steadily stronger earthquakes. On June
fourth, they had had enough ; hurriedly stowing their belong-
ings into their kayaks, they paddled away.

The Aleuts were barely out of sight when the face of a
near-by mountain fell away* Millions of tons of rock thundered
into the valley; a hurricane of dust swept out onto Shelikof
Strait. A still more violent temblor rattled the Peninsula. The
floor of the valley split, floods of fire poured from the cracks,

lava spurted from the near-by volcanoes, blazing boulders spun
thousands of feet into the air, plumes of incandescent lava
played like fountains, clouds of burning vapor rolled over the
forests, age-old glaciers went up in steam. At one P.M. on
Thursday, June 6, 1912, these preliminaries were over. Mount
Katmai blew its top.

In four great explosions, spaced over a period of thirty-five
hours, two cubic miles of rock were blasted to dust and hurled
so high it took months to settle. Two parties of Aleuts wit-
nessed the explosion, but few of them would talk about the
experience. The only eyewitness account was written by Amer-
ican Pete, the chief of a village twenty-one miles north of the
crater. "

"The Katmai mountain blew up with lots of fire/* the chief
told an interviewer six years after the event. "Fire came down
trail from Katmai with lots of smoke. We got fast Savonski.
Everybody get in bidarka. Helluva job. We come Naknek one
day, dark, no could see. Hot ash fall. Work like hell. . . . Never
can go back to Savonski to live again. Everything ash."

Fire and Water

The Aleutians and the Alaska Peninsula are elemental: they
were formed by fire and water. Together the Peninsula and the
Chain make up one of the series of volcanic festoons draped
along the western and northern edges of the Pacific the
Philippines, the Ryukyus, the Japanese home islands, and the
Kuriles.

Although running from the tropics to the Bering Sea, these
archipelagos are strangely similar. All are volcanic and temblor-
struck. Within their curves they hold shallow, protected seas ;
on the Pacific side they front deep ocean troughs. The geologic
cause of these volcanic scallops is uncertain. One theory is that
they have formed along a line of weakness left in the crust of
the earth when the moon material was pulled out by a passing
star.

Once water covered the entire Aleutian area. There were
no mountains then, only a rolling ocean bed of sedimentary
rock. Then, yielding to distant, mysterious pressures, the sea
bed rose and buckled, mountains formed, land appeared in
the restless ocean. More ages moved by and new pressures
built up deep with the earth. Along the four hundred miles of
the Peninsula and the nine hundred miles of underwater
mountains whose crests are the Aleutians, liquid fire flowed
and bubbled. The outpourings cooled into volcanic cones. So
the two mountain systems lie today a crumpled, water-formed
range with clamshells in its summit, intermingled with a line
of new volcanoes breathing fire."

"Wild berries are abundant in the eastern Aleutians. First
to ripen and most important is the crowberry, a type of low
heather found in the thin soil of the uplands. Its berries are
black, abundant, and slightly bitter. They form a large part of
the summer diet not only of the Aleuts but of the foxes and
fowl."

"They are cold, but not as cold as New York State.* They
are barren, but not as barren as western Kansas. They are
foggy, but no more fogbound than Maine. They are habitable
white men have lived in them for nearly two centuries,
natives for at least ten."

"The best evidence indicates the Aleuts are cousins of the
Eskimos; in fact, that they once were Eskimos."

"The Aleuts were communists. Without benefit of dialectic or
dictatorship they practiced a primitive form of socialism. A
man could possess private property his clothes, his tools, his
trinkets, his weapons, a winter house. But his right to them
hinged on use: an Aleut who could not paddle his bidarka,
throw his harpoon, bend his bow, had to yield them to a hunter
who could. Nor could an Aleut who owned a kayak inherit
another unless he really needed two.

Nearly all production stemmed from the hunt, and the
hunter did not kill for himself alone but for the community.
He had first choice of the meat and skins from his kill; he
could see that his friends received choice cuts ; but what he did
not use went into the community storehouse and thereafter
belonged to anyone who needed it.

There was no compulsion, but all Aleuts were expected to
work. The man who did not labor was fed but publicly
despised, The system produced few goldbricks."

"It was regarded as disgraceful to fear inevitable death;"

"It was good manners for a man to loan his wife ,
to a newly arrived stranger, and hunting partners swapped
spouses continually. An Aleut would lie under his furs un-
perturbed, while three feet away his wife and best friend
copulated. A man might sell his spouse for a bag of fat"

"The islands produced little game, the sea much. The Aleuts
in their tiny bidarkas and their big umiaks hunted everything
from the salmon to the whale, from the herring to the sea lion."

THE PEOPLE

"No better paddlers ever lived. Aleut mothers exercised their
babies by manipulating their arms in the push-pull stroke of
the double-bladed paddle. Boys could handle a bidarka as soon
as they could walk, and the short-legged Aleuts would rather
go a hundred miles by boat than five by land.

The bidarkas kayaks made of skins stretched over drift-
wood frames are acknowledged to be the most seaworthy
smallcraf t ever constructed. When the williwaw was blowing,
tearing the surface off the smoky sea, hurling huge waves and
sheets of spray over the jagged reefs, an Aleut would slip into
his waterproof jacket of transparent sealgut, lace the bottom
of the glistening, stinking garment into the opening of his
kayak's cockpit, and have his friends throw him off a cliff into
the foaming Bering. Once afloat he feared nothing.

When whales were sighted, the hunters put on their best
clothes in honor of the guest who had come to be killed. The
whalers, most honored of hunters, brought out their poisoned
lances and took their position in the bows of the umiaks.
Young men manned the driftwood sweeps and the thirty-foot
umiaks, convoyed by flotillas of twelve-foot bidarkas, set out
after the eighty-foot behemoths. When possible the paddlers
ran the whaleboat alongside the monster, as near to the head
as possible, and the harpooners struck from less than a yard.

Unlike the Indians to the south and the Nantucket whalers
who came later, the Aleuts seldom tried to ride the tiger ; they
did not keep their umiaks fastened to the whale. The Aleutian
solution to the problem of what to do with eighty tons of
harpooned horror was to drive as many poisoned harpoons
and heavy lances, with seal-bladder buoys attached, into him
as possible. Dragging the buoys slowed the big fellow and
kept him near the scene of the attack; the poison killed him.
Usually he washed ashore within three days.

Only the harpooners knew how to make the whale-killing
poison. They kept their art surrounded with mystery; Aleutian
rumor, widely credited, had it that they distilled the death
juice from the fat of human corpses in rites conducted in the
sea caves at the time of the new moon. It is more probable
that they used the highly poisonous root 'of the monkshood,
abundant along the Chain"

"In summer, clothes were unimportant. Men and women went
naked except for little aprons to cover their genitals. The
aprons were a concession to the gods, not the Grundys, for
evil spirits were thought to attack through the sexual organs.

But in winter, when the snows were deep, the winds violent,
and the dark waters of the Bering cold enough to kill a swim-
ming man in twenty minutes, clothes were all-important. The
basic garment for both sexes was a loose, hoodless smock,

made from otter pelts or the skins of birds. It reached below
the knees. Aleuts seldom wore pants; most of the legs were
covered by elephantine sealskin boots."

"Often the bodies were embalmed by being placed in a cold,
fast-running stream for several days, then gutted, and the
intestinal cavity filled with moss and herbs. In the cool caves
near the bases of the drowned fire mountains sit hundreds of
entombed Aleuts."

Siberian Expedition to map Aleutians in 1741 led by Dane -
Vitus Jonassen Bering, then aged 60

"On June fourth the expedition's two ships, St. Peter and
St. Paul, put to sea from Petropavlovsk. And sailed south by
east.

Bering's bad luck held. Two weeks out, in the watery area
which on the Academy's maps showed the mountains of Gama-
land, the two ships were separated, never to meet again. After
a futile search for the St. Paid, the commander mutinied
against the committee's orders. He had had enough of hunt-
ing islands that did not exist Changing course, he swung up
to the northeast. Still his fortune remained foul, for the new
route carried him roughly parallel to the upward sweep of the
pastern Aleutians. The deep water gave few hints of near-by
land.

The trip was torture. Water went bad, rations were cut,
the men grew morose ; within them were the seeds of scurvy,
the sickness of rotting gums, loose teeth, failing strength, and
deep mental depression. Bering, on the same short rations
as the younger men, had no reserves to draw on. After twenty
years of preparation for this final voyage, he was tired out,
as stale as an over-trained athlete."

"Before the St. Peter could clear the Shumagins, a new
storm blew up an Aleutian special with high winds and a
driving fog. For a week the ship lay in the lee of the island.
The delay was disastrous for it held them back until after the
start of fall storms to the westward. But it did set the stage
for the first meeting between Aleuts and white men.

On the fifth day of their enforced layover the Russians
were surprised to see two small canoes approaching through
the mist. "When yet about half a verst distant from us both
men in their boats began, while still paddling, simultaneously
to make an uninterrupted, long speech in a loud voice of which
none of our interpreters could understand a word," Steller
recorded in his journal.

"We construed it therefore as either a formula of prayer
or incantation, or a ceremony of welcoming us as friends,
since both customs are in use in Kamchatka and the Kurile
islands. As they now came nearer constantly shouting while
paddling, they began to talk to us intermittently, but, as nobody
could understand their language, we only beckoned with our
hands, that they might come nearer without being afraid of
anything. They, in turn, however, pointed with the hand
towards the land that we should come to them there, besides
pointing with their fingers to the mouth and scooping up
sea water with their hands as if to indicate that we could have
food and water with them. . . ."

"After having killed near a thousand otters and made a few
experimental voyages, the survivors piled into the open boat,
which they called Little St. Peter. By guess and good luck they
reached the Kamchatka coast. And when at last they sailed
into Avatcha Bay, bearded, starved, clad in clothes made from
poorly cured, rough-stitched pelts, their arrival caused tre-
mendous excitement.

But it was not the reaching of America from the west which
stirred the imagination of the Siberian homefolk. Nor was it
the story of terror at sea. Instead they wondered at the gar-
ments of the returned voyagers, the rude coats of rich brown
fur which had a silvery sheen when stroked. Here, thought the
fur-conscious promyshleniki on seeing the otter skins, is some-
thing better than sable.

They asked the way to Bering Island.

They Also Sailed

Captain-Commander Vitus Bering has named in his honor
the Commander (Komandorskie) Islands on which he was
wrecked, Bering Island on which he died, Bering Sea on which
he sailed, Bering Strait through which he passed, and Bering
River and Bering Glacier which he never saw."

"Attu, unlike Bering Island, was inhabited. As the Yevdoika
moved slowly into the harbor, a fleet of one- and two-man
bidarkas sped out from shore. The Russians grabbed muskets
and raised screens of hide around the gunnels as protection
against arrows and spears. But the Aleuts were friendly.

They waved and shouted and circled the ship at a safe
distance, obviously amazed at its size. A few came alongside,
but none would climb aboard. Finally convinced of the natives'
good intentions, some of the Russians lowered a small boat and
rowed ashore. There was trading knives for fur, doth for
fur, rings for fur. And then, somehow, a scuffle started. An
angry trader raised his musket. A spark in the pan, an echoing
roar, a lingering puff of smoke: civilization had come to the
Aleutians.

The natives raced for the shelter of their dug-in huts. The
Russians splashed back into their boat. A bleeding Aleut lay
on the beach.

That was 1745.

Fourteen years later the fur explorer Stef en Glottoff reached
the big islands of Umnak and Unalaska at the eastern end of
the Chain. From one end of the Aleutians to the other the
natives had learned what guns were and what they could do.
No longer did the Aleuts paddle out to meet the ships which
stood in from the west; at sight of a sail the natives took to
the mountains.

Each year the ships were bigger, each year they brought
more men. Sometimes the Russians hunted, killing ferociously
and leaving the seal and otter herds decimated. Sometimes they
traded. Usually they stole. The following is a Russian account
of a skirmish between the promyshleniki and the islanders at
Kanaga: "

"The Russians under the protection of their ship opened
fire from their guns and turned the Aleut to flight. At the
battle site there remained two skin-boats with two seriously
wounded Aleut in them, and in one of the skin-boats was also
found an Aleut boy. He was taken to Kamchatka, baptized
and later became a cossack under the name of Ivan Cherepanov.
Three days after the skirmish, the father of the boy accom-
panied by relatives came to propose a ransom for the boy. The
Aleut refused to land, fearing vengeance. But by some ruse the
elder Aleut and another man were lured to the Russian ship.
There they were put on the deck and, with their arms and legs
stretched out by thongs, subjected to tortures; scalding-hot
tar was poured on their bodies. After that the elder was be-
headed. Some time later Bashmakov sent to the village his
laborers, who committed an awful butchery and then plundered
and burned the village."

"When the white strangers came from out of the setting sun
and spoke of the yassack, the tribute in furs which all must
pay, the Aleuts of Unalaska fought. The Russians defeated
them and seized their furs, but the next year, 1762, when five
more ships came, the natives were ready. Of the five only one
the Andrean and Natalie returned to Siberia.

By every trick of aboriginal war, the Aleuts decoyed the
Russians back into the hills, into the tall grass of the ravines
into ambush. In a series of surprisingly well co-ordinated

attacks they virtually wiped out the Russians ashore and
destroyed three of the four ships at the island at that time.
Later they burned a fourth, off Umnak, and only the unex-
pected appearance of the Andrean and Natalie, returning from
the discovery and attack of the island of Kodiak, prevented
the Aleuts from achieving total victory by their blitz.

Failing to wipe out their enemy in the first blow, the Aleuts
lost everything. The promyshleniki, veterans of native war,
struck back more savagely than the savages. They destroyed
the villages one at a time, defeated all attempted counterblows,
and at last herded the survivors onto a plain where they sur-
rendered to the Siberian commander, Feodor Solovief .

Solovief was a sadist with a scientific turn of mind and a
dictator's instinctive knowledge of the social significance of
terror. He enjoyed teaching the natives a lesson and he wanted
to learn something from the experience: he wanted to learn
how many men a single shot could penetrate. Tying the Aleuts
into bundles, he fired into them. When he found that a bullet
went through only two men, he tied pairs back to back and shot
them through the stomach. Along with the killing there was
incidental rape and torture. Three thousand died. Eighteen of
the villages on Unalaska were wiped out, every village on
southern Umnak, every village on the islands of the Four
Mountains, most of the villages on Unimak.

The Aleuts who survived the slaughter were convinced.
Never again did they rebel. And when the Russian priests ar-
rived, years later, the natives joined the Church. "Any religion
which can save the Russians," they said, "must be very strong."

When Dealing with Bears... from http://www.shadowofthebear.com/

When one does encounter a bear in the wild, it is important that you DO NOT RUN! Stay calm and let the bear know you are human. Waive your hands over your head so the bear can see you and talk in a loud, calm tone to the bear, do not shout or scream at the bear as they may perceive sharp shrieks as an injured animal.
A bear standing on its hind legs is not being aggressive, nor is he/she ready to attack. This action is the bear getting a better look and trying to smell you, similar to you or I standing on our tiptoes to see something better.
Bears have been known to make false charges. They may stomp the ground or kick up dirt and come within 10 feet of you. If this happens, stand your ground and often the bear will go away.
If the bear does not go away and comes within less than 10 feet of you, lay down on your stomach and cover the back of your neck with your hands PLAY DEAD!
Do not try to fight a brown bear (they are the world's largest, carnivore) if you find yourself in the unfortunate position of being attacked...SURRENDER!
A bear will typically break off an attack once it feels any threat has been eliminated. If the bear sees or hears you move, the attack may be renewed. In this case, PLAY DEAD AGAIN!
In rare instances, particularly with black bears, an attacking bear may perceive a person as food. If the bear continues biting you long after you assume a defensive posture, it likely is a predatory attack. Fight back vigorously.