Reflections of an Equatorial Oceanographer
111
FSU, Jay McCreary and Mike McPhaden from Scripps, and Phillipe Hisard, Jacques
Merle, Joel Picaut, and Jean Marc Verstraete from France. At the end of the summer
Jay McCreary defended his thesis, and I hired him to join the faculty at Nova. By the
time he got there, the Office of Naval Research had already agreed to fund his work.
In February 1978 there was a NORPAX meeting at Mt. Hood. Jay and I attended
from Nova. Klaus Wyrtki was there from Hawaii, and was the chairman of NORPAX
by this time. One evening Klaus and I were sitting in the heated outdoor pool, and
he asked me why I had not applied for the job that they had been advertising in
Hawaii. This was the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR)
Director position. I did apply, paid a visit to the University of Hawaii (UH), and was
eventually offered the job. I agreed to start in March 1979, with frequent visits in the
interim.
Some of my most pleasant memories are associated with various educational
undertakings. One of these was lecturing at a series of “Expert Lectures on Ocean
Circulation Modelling” that Jim O’Brien organized at the Ecole Polytechnique in
September 1978. I attended for a week, and was training for a marathon at the time.
One morning I ran from the Ecole Militaire, next to my hotel, all the way to the Ecole
Polytechnique, about 30 kilometers. It took a bit longer than I expected, and I was
late to class.
Back at Nova, Jay McCreary had constructed a linear model for the equatorial
undercurrent, and I encouraged him to talk about it at the fall AGU meeting in San
Francisco. We got Jack Frost, the machinist and jack-of-all-trades at Nova, to make
a plexiglass model showing the equatorial section and five perpendicular sections,
as a three-dimensional visual aid to understanding the model. Jay’s AGU talk was
well received. Jay still has the plexiglass model. The paper (McCreary, 1981) was
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
I went directly from San Francisco to Hawaii, where I was scheduled to run
a marathon. I spent an hour on the phone with Bob Harvey on Saturday morning,
talking about plans for JIMAR. We broke off the conversation when he had to leave
for a weekend cruise on the Holo Holo.
I ran my marathon on Sunday, slower than I had hoped. I went in to UH on
Monday, expecting Harvey to appear later that day or early Tuesday. He was supposed
to get off on Monday morning and return to Honolulu. The Holo Holo never made it
in, and was not heard from or seen again. Ten people were lost at sea on this cruise,
including the owner of the vessel, three UH scientists, two NOAA scientists from the
Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL), and four others. The Coast Guard
searched for more than a week. Because of my earlier experience with the loss of the
Gulfstream, I was in the center of the UH effort to help with the search. Eventually one
instrument box washed up on a beach on the big island. Nothing else was ever found.
This tragic loss, occurring just 4 years after the Gulfstream disappearance, should
never have happened. The Coast Guard concluded that the vessel was not sea-worthy.
The University of Hawaii was (and still is) a member of UNOLS, but the people
responsible for chartering the Holo Holo knew nothing about the safety standards
111
FSU, Jay McCreary and Mike McPhaden from Scripps, and Phillipe Hisard, Jacques
Merle, Joel Picaut, and Jean Marc Verstraete from France. At the end of the summer
Jay McCreary defended his thesis, and I hired him to join the faculty at Nova. By the
time he got there, the Office of Naval Research had already agreed to fund his work.
In February 1978 there was a NORPAX meeting at Mt. Hood. Jay and I attended
from Nova. Klaus Wyrtki was there from Hawaii, and was the chairman of NORPAX
by this time. One evening Klaus and I were sitting in the heated outdoor pool, and
he asked me why I had not applied for the job that they had been advertising in
Hawaii. This was the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR)
Director position. I did apply, paid a visit to the University of Hawaii (UH), and was
eventually offered the job. I agreed to start in March 1979, with frequent visits in the
interim.
Some of my most pleasant memories are associated with various educational
undertakings. One of these was lecturing at a series of “Expert Lectures on Ocean
Circulation Modelling” that Jim O’Brien organized at the Ecole Polytechnique in
September 1978. I attended for a week, and was training for a marathon at the time.
One morning I ran from the Ecole Militaire, next to my hotel, all the way to the Ecole
Polytechnique, about 30 kilometers. It took a bit longer than I expected, and I was
late to class.
Back at Nova, Jay McCreary had constructed a linear model for the equatorial
undercurrent, and I encouraged him to talk about it at the fall AGU meeting in San
Francisco. We got Jack Frost, the machinist and jack-of-all-trades at Nova, to make
a plexiglass model showing the equatorial section and five perpendicular sections,
as a three-dimensional visual aid to understanding the model. Jay’s AGU talk was
well received. Jay still has the plexiglass model. The paper (McCreary, 1981) was
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
I went directly from San Francisco to Hawaii, where I was scheduled to run
a marathon. I spent an hour on the phone with Bob Harvey on Saturday morning,
talking about plans for JIMAR. We broke off the conversation when he had to leave
for a weekend cruise on the Holo Holo.
I ran my marathon on Sunday, slower than I had hoped. I went in to UH on
Monday, expecting Harvey to appear later that day or early Tuesday. He was supposed
to get off on Monday morning and return to Honolulu. The Holo Holo never made it
in, and was not heard from or seen again. Ten people were lost at sea on this cruise,
including the owner of the vessel, three UH scientists, two NOAA scientists from the
Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL), and four others. The Coast Guard
searched for more than a week. Because of my earlier experience with the loss of the
Gulfstream, I was in the center of the UH effort to help with the search. Eventually one
instrument box washed up on a beach on the big island. Nothing else was ever found.
This tragic loss, occurring just 4 years after the Gulfstream disappearance, should
never have happened. The Coast Guard concluded that the vessel was not sea-worthy.
The University of Hawaii was (and still is) a member of UNOLS, but the people
responsible for chartering the Holo Holo knew nothing about the safety standards