Back in New York, the first thing I learned was that the head of one of my entertainment robots, the ComRo Tot, had over-rotated, "Exorcist" style, during a gig. Instead of cracking robotic jokes to amuse the company, Tot's neck's umbilical wires had twisted into a smouldering short circuit, alarming the guests. The evening's entertainment was brought to a smokey conclusion. A stray radio signal must have "walked on" the six channel receiver causing chaos before Tot's human operator--an actor-comedian employed as the robot's voice and controller--could take corrective action. I tried explaining to the party's caterer why I had been on the other side of the world looking for a rare fish. He didn't buy it. Things did not look rosy for the robots.
Michael began handing over boxes of processed ASA 400 slides. He had "no idea" why he had them. Just some mix up. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the auto exposure meter on his camera had not worked properly and the underwater pictures of the "living" coelacanth were somewhat overexposed. They showed a pathetic looking creature with a rope coming out of its mouth. They would not be used for publicity.
The crates containing our coelacanths arrived at the New York Aquarium seventy two hours after we packed them in the Comoros. There was no trace of dry ice left inside, but the fish were still frozen solid.
When my own slides were developed, I gave a presentation on the "recon" trip to aquarium director, Father George and the upper echelons of the New York Aquarium staff, including assistant director Louis Garibaldi. "You guys nearly had a home run on the first trip!" George said, congratulating us.
Father George agreed to the plan we'd set up in the Comoros. Using funds available to him from the Nixon Griffis Foundation, he wired money to Charley Hortoland at the U.S. Embassy in the Comoros. Charley used the funds to build a resubmergence cage at the Embassy Warehouse workshop. About six feet long and four feet tall and wide, the cage was an immense improvement over Jean Louis Gerod's chicken wire contraption. Father George then authorized shipment to the Comoros of one of the Aquarium's two immense, insulated fish transporters, along with portable life support equipment. The unit would be there on stand-by in case a fish was caught. George again called for secrecy. He didn't want the apparent near success of our operation to leak to other aquariums. But leaks were already in the works.
Father George Ruggieri, Director New York Aquarium I recognized that everyone on the trip needed and deserved something to show for it. But Michael and I would just have to lay low as the project unfolded. Michael had great difficulty understanding why Father George and the press hadn't met us at the airport on our return. Hadn't they met David Wilkinson when he brought the cling fish up from Argentina? Michael didn't understand that to preserve our initiative, any publicity the rest of us received would have to wait until our main mission, capturing a live coelacanth, was ready to go.
Peter, however lived in Toronto. As we had four fish, I agreed that Peter could purchase one to donate to the Royal Ontario Museum in his hometown. The only proviso was that New York Aquarium not be mentioned in any publicity the fish received. Peter would say he had simply purchased the fish as a businessman passing through the Comoros. What harm could come of it? Toronto did not have an aquarium, and Vancouver's had already given the coelacanth its best shot.
Peter's fish caused a sensation at the Royal Ontario Museum. When he telephoned the Ichthyology and Herpetology department, they at first thought they had a crank caller on the line. Someone giving away a frozen coelacanth? Sure! Peter managed to convince the curator that he had indeed been in the Comoros, and really did have a frozen coelacanth for them. The staff was jubilant. As the date was verging on Christmas, someone wrote a paleological poem to the tune of "Santa Claus is coming to Town," substituting "Coelacanth" for Santa Claus.
R.O.M.'s Coelacanth Christmas song!
Soon Peter, enjoying himself beyond measure, was doing radio talk shows and newspaper interviews. I privately enjoyed his "success." But back in New York, Michael fumed over Peter's publicity, even suggesting that we fabricate some of our own, if just to impress the ministers in the Comoros. Then, on one CBC radio talk show, the interviewer mentioned New York Aquarium. Apparently, the cat was out of the bag at about the same time Peter's fish was out of the crate in Toronto. Nor did Peter's broadcasts and the R.O.M exhibit escape the attention of at least one Canadian based scientist with coelacanths on his mind.
While the R.O.M. fish, "Ruggi," went on display in a refrigerated "see thru" case, under the gaze of thousands of wide-eyed Torontonians, the other three fish huddled stone cold in the glacial vaults of the freezer rooms at New York Aquarium. Assistant Director Lou Garibaldi had a yearning to cut up the female. Perhaps she contained eggs, a researcher's bonanza. But the fish were totally at Father George's disposal, and I presumed for reasons of secrecy, he did not wish to bring attention to them.
To the fascination of thousands, "Ruggi" is displayed "on ice" at the R.O.M. (photos: Thea Lango)
Our next leak was potentially even more disastrous. Arn Neis was an Explorers Club member and friend of Michael. We had used his business office in New Jersey to handle the funds transfer and telex exchanges from the Comoros. Arn had business interests throughout Africa, and had much more efficient communication links than those of New York Aquarium. At Michael's suggestion he had become the official communications coordinator for our project. Unknown to me, Arn was running for a directorship post at the Explorers Club. In a promotional biographical blurb sent out to all the membership, he mentioned our project and his role in assisting with communications. The mailing went all over the country, reaching members in direct contact with John McKosker at the San Francisco Aquarium, not to mention Shed Aquarium in Chicago, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and the Museum of Natural History in New York.
I bit my tongue. Despite the leaks, I would keep as quiet as possible for as long as possible. We could not afford to generate competition this early in the effort.
In the winter and spring of '87, there was much to be done to prepare a capture expedition for late fall, the beginning of the monsoon period in the Comoros. The first step was to get the full backing of the Explorers Club, something called Support Level Three. This did not mean that the Explorers Club would finance the expedition- though they might throw in a token grant of perhaps $1,000. But it did mean that the Explorers Club name and whatever prestige it claimed could be used for fund raising, and those funds could be deposited, tax deductively, in the Club treasury. It was worth trying for.
Explorers Club Headquarters in New York (E.C. photo) I began working on a proposal to submit to the Expeditions Committee of the club. One of our principal concerns at the outset was coelacanth conservation. Any proposal to remove a rare fish from its breeding pool, even for scientific study, would have to be part of a larger conservation scheme.
From the time of J.L.B. Smith in the early Fifties, the government of the Comoros had paid a reward to fisherman for the delivery of dead coelacanths to its freezers. The purpose of the reward was both to keep the fishermen from eating or otherwise disposing of the rare fish and to keep track of the number and location of catches. This reward had become a venerable institution understood by every fishermen in the islands.But did the reward cause more of the fish to be caught than before, thereby slowly decimating the coelacanth population?
Because coelacanth catches were obviously not counted in the time before the rewards, no one could honestly say if they affected the catch rate. However, since the rewards, the catch rate remained relatively constant at 4-6 fish year after year-combining Grand Comoro and Anjouan catches. (No catches have ever been reported from Mayotte or Moheli, the other two Comoran Islands.) On our "recon trip no additional rewards to those of the government were announced, yet two coelacanths were caught in ten days, while rewards offered on top of the government reward by other expeditions that had visited the Comoros, seemed to have had no added effect on the number of catches. So it was doubtful from the outset that the rewards had any affect on the catch rate.Either way, we could not waltz into the Comoros telling the government to stop rewarding its fishermen when they caught coelacanths. But we realized we could override the government reward with a higher one for a living fish. This would be an incentive not to club the fish at the surface as was often done. In one stroke, we could begin diverting the by-catches from instant death and a trip to the freezers to our resubmergence attempts. Even if they died in spite of our efforts, something would be learned about the fish's ability to recover from capture. As our techniques improved, a coelacanth might even recover under recompression and survive in captivity. At that point, the species would have a "life boat." If its decimation continued in the Comoros, breeder populations could be moved to other suitable habitats, or even to aquariums. If there were only ten coelacanths left, I reasoned, it was time to start learning how to save them before they all wound up in the freezer. We had a solid logical lock at least on the short term conservation question. I put all this in the proposal and at the same time wired Charley Hortoland in the Comoros to advertise the higher reward for a living fish. The senseless slaughter of coelacanths would now be stopped.
Our proposal for Support Level Three also dealt with how we planned to catch a coelacanth. Traps would be impractical in the current, and we had already learned from David Wilkinson's interview at Monterey Aquarium, that in their opinion the coelacanth would be unlikely to bite on stationary bait. We would have to fish. But we would not fish in the Comoran tradition using hand lines. That seemed a rather inefficient, primitive approach.The whole point of our own capture expedition would be to overcome the factors that were fatal to the coelacanth when caught by Comorans. Otherwise, we could just wait for Comoran catches, which was in effect what we were already doing. For our active fishing approach, clubbing coelacanths at the surface was easy enough to avoid, but what about the various stresses the fish suffer on the way to the surface?
These stresses could be broken down into three basic kinds: pressure change, temperature change, and physical fatigue leading to metabolic collapse--from the fish's struggle to resist being pulled to the surface.
The information I acquired from calls to ichthyologists around the country was that pressure change is not a primary concern for the coelacanth. Most fish have gas filled swim bladders which expand or contract like a B.C. vest to maintain proper buoyancy in the water. But unlike, say, a grouper, whose swim bladder would explode if quickly hauled up from several hundred feet, the coelacanth's swim bladder is filled with fat, which resists compression and decompression. Furthermore, there are apparently no other gasses within the fish's organs or blood which would pose a problem. Not every scientist agreed with this, but there was enough of a consensus to discount pressure change. In fact, if we had to account for pressure, the project would have been stopped then and there. We did not have a pressurized transporter in the Comoros, and if we had it could not be flown on a plane. That would be like flying with an armed bomb in the cargo hold.From 500 feet up to the surface, the average temperature change in the waters off the Comoros, discounting the thermocline, is about 20 degrees F. This is significant. The heat up must obviously affect the fish's respiration and metabolism. In fact some speculation holds that the coelacanth goes into a state of "oxygen debt" as it is pulled struggling to the surface. There in the warm, oxygen poor surface water, the fish can never recover the oxygen its tissues need. It slowly asphyxiates.
We could counter this in one of two ways. Either we could quickly drop the fish back down to the bottom in the holding cage, where it would be cool and the water was oxygen rich. Or we could immediately transfer the fish to a cooled container and apply atomized oxygen to the water. This technique had been used successfully in bringing up deep water sharks. We would prepare for both strategies, each of which would also allow us to control the fish's exposure to light, a possible secondary cause of stress on the surface.
Finally, what could we do about the stress the fish endured fighting on the line? Peter's answer was to use modern fishing tackle. That could reduce the time of pulling the fish up from the supposed two hours down to about twenty minutes. The fish would be far less exhausted. The build up of toxic lactic acids in the muscles, yet another hypothesis for the coelacanth's mortality after capture, would be reduced by the rapid pull-up time.
The speed with which we could bring up a fish using modern fishing techniques, then transfer it to a cool, oxygenated environment, argued for an active fishing approach on our part. I feared that when Comorans caught a coelacanth, after a drawn-out struggle to the surface, the fish would "bake" at 80 degrees F for hours as alerts went out and our cage was brought round.
I had another idea to expedite the active fishing approach. We would use fish finding sonar, the best we could get. That way we wouldn't be fishing blindly like the Comorans. We would locate a coelacanth as a blip on the sonar graph, then drop our lines to intersect the blip. It would be something like the video games then emerging. Peter also proposed that we use down-riggers to regulate our lines in the current. A down-rigger arrangement consists of a lead ball, called a "cannon ball," lowered at the end of a steel wire. Fishing lines are attached to the wire by clips. When a fish bites, the line is pulled free of the wire, and can be reeled in by the fisherman separate from the down-rigger. Down-riggers keep a line from rising in a current without having to use heavy sinkers on the line itself--which might make a fish's strike imperceptible.
An early sketch shows how we planned to use sonar and a downrigger. After we caught a coelacanth and were sure it was stable and healthy, we would place it in the transporter and fly it by commercial jumbo jet to Paris. In Paris, the transporter would be checked and refurbished, then loaded on a freight flight to New York, where it would be picked up by Aquarium technicians. The fish would then be carefully introduced into a cold holding tank. That was the plan.
The rest of our proposal addressed the issue of how the fish would be "managed" after arrival in New York. If it were exhibited there was no question but that attendance would go up at New York Aquarium. George estimated it would double. But New York's is a public aquarium. No one would get rich off the coelacanth, that was never the point. The facility might prosper for the public and for the greater glory of the fish. Part of the monies raised would go towards a coelacanth conservation program in the Comoros. George would also welcome an international scientific team to study the fish "non-intrusively" in the Aquarium's tank.
Beyond the fascination of the project, I had two personal motives for wanting to capture a coelacanth. The first was purely selfish: the joy and the glory of the accomplishment, the same drive that pushes men and women up unscaled mountains both metaphorical and real: the same old motive all achievers have in private but most often disguise in public. At the Explorers Club this motive is tacitly taken for granted.
The second motive came from an inner vision, snuggled somewhere in the far recesses of my imagination, or was it my memory? In this vision a small child peers into a dimly lit room and sees something amazing, something that reaches right into his soul and takes hold of him or her so hard that it can't be shaken off. It can mold the child's life and shape what she becomes. I imagined some children might see the coelacanth that way at the aquarium, not as an odd fish, but as a messenger from our collective past, a magical inspiration for them to learn about the world as scientists, artists, musicians, poets, writers, video-makers, even politicians. The coelacanth would speak to them in this way, some global, timeless message, utterances of which I had already heard through my fingers in the slime of the creature's flanks just a few months before. Foolish idealsim? Perhaps.
The Expeditions Committee of the Explorers Club rejected the proposal. The grounds for rejection were conservation and "grandstanding." As for conservation, did they not grasp my argument? I had to doubt it. To do nothing was to allow the coelacanth to expire by gradual attrition. But grandstanding? I was certainly not well known enough around the club to be considered a grandstander even if indeed I was. Was it Michael bragging in the club about the first expedition? Was that the problem? The friction between Michael and Charles had not abated since the weeks after the Ecuador trip. And Charles was in tight with the president of the club, while Michael had already performed various "transgressions" unknown to me that had irritated the "inner circle." That couldn't help. But in any case, if grandstanding were a valid objection to a collecting expedition, the Apollo Moon missions would never have gotten off the ground. No, the rejection was not well founded. We would have to press on.
Michael, David Wilkinson, Arn Neis and I held a crisis meeting in the board room at the club. We would beef up the scientific part of the proposal. But what else could we do?
I called Father George at the Aquarium. He was puzzled. He put me in touch with an old friend of his who happened to be on the Expeditions Committee of the club. My new contact filled me in. "Hell, one of the guys who rejected it is an ex-air-conditioner salesman," he said, dismissively referring to a former Explorers Club president, "and the other guy climbed Mt. Everest twenty-five years ago and is still talking about it. They don't know a damn thing about coelacanths." Well, that was reassuring, but what should I do now? "Wait until after the elections in April." He meant the internal club elections, after which the presidency and all the committees are reconstituted with different members. (There may have been a "curse" attached to rejecting the proposal. The two directors who opposed the project scarcely lived beyond the end of the decade!)
I prepared a new proposal, waited and then, sure enough, this same advisor became the head of the Expeditions Committee. He put our proposal through, albeit with some residual dissension. We had Support Level III. In the process, however, the Expeditions Committee had consulted E.C. member Dr. Sylvia Earle who, thankfully, gave our project her support. However, Dr. Earle, a noted marine biologist who had actually been on the McKosker coelacanth expeditions in the '70's was still in contact with him. The "word" would officially be out. We would have to pray that McKosker, a genius of the aquarium world, had indeed cooled on the fish.
I wanted to involve the American Museum of Natural History in the project. It wasn't necessary, although it might help raise funds for the scientific portion of the proposal. My real motive was sentimental. My grandfather, C.J. Hamlin, was very active in the museum world. He had helped fund a portion of the museum and had been a trustee for many years. His name is engraved on a wall near the main entrance. He had been my inspiration as a child to study "natural history," and was probably the only reason my mother let me keep snakes in the house as a kid. While "Gramps" was long gone, I could honor the family lineage by bringing the project to the museum.
There was another thing about the AMNH. It was I, among so many others, who had stood as a seven year old, peering into the old dimly lit hall of Jurassic Dinosaurs, seeing those magisterial skeletal giants, letting them grab my imagination--indirectly propelling me on my present quest as I imagined the coelacanth having a similar effect on other kids today.David Wilkinson, our science advisor, was the best one to take on the AMNH through his contact, Gareth Nelson, in the Ichthyology Department. Nelson advised that the museum could become involved only through an associate scientist. He recommended Dr. William E. Bemis at the University of Massachusetts, a young Ph.D who had already published on the coelacanth's rostral organ--a sensory receptor in its snout which he believed can detect electrical fields. Wilkinson made contact with Dr. Beemis in the summer of '87.
Michael, recovered from his attack of the fish crazies, was still on board as "political officer." He had met with the Governor of Grand Comoro while the old gent was on a two day visit to New York. He had also met Amin Moumin, the Comoran Ambassador to both the United Nations and the United States. Michael arranged for the Ambassador to attend the Explorers Club Annual Dinner, a grandiose affair with exotic foods, self-aggrandizing toasts, live animals, and expedition films, held every year in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel's Grand Ballroom in New York. The Ambassador was spotlit for a moment and stood up for a round of applause, though few actually knew why he was there. In the fall, he would also attend the Explorers Club Ball, an annual dinner dance. The Ambassador took an interest in Arn Neis's attractive girlfriend, co-worker and wife-to-be, Lucy Cangor (this Lucy was no primitive hominid). Soon our relations with the United Nations Comoran Mission, and even the Comoran Foreign Affairs Ministry itself, were tied up with Lucy and whether or not she would be coming to the Comoros on the future expedition. Lucy delicately extracted herself from the situation, slightly cooling the diplomats on our visit.
Over the months, I had honed the overall fishing capture strategy to a fine edge. We would field a series of overlapping teams that would cover the entire monsoon period from November through March in the Comoros. And, if necessary, we would do this three years running. But how would we get the people for the job? We would now have to officially go public.
I wrote a rather muted announcement for the Explorers Club Newsletter, requesting volunteers, describing conditions, and including the cost of the trip to offset any idea that we were paying for free trips to the Comoros. The volunteers' role would not be too difficult. He or she simply had to be on hand in the Comoros, operate the fishing gear, get help from Jean Louis Gerod to resubmerge the coelacanth in our cage if they caught one, then cable for help to New York. Technical personnel would arrive in a couple of days to do the professional work. Each team would comprise a mix of abilities. This dispersed approach seemed far more realistic to me, given the experience of earlier coelacanth expeditions, than a concentrated up front effort. But there was only one response to the announcement.Michael suggested we send the notice to a fishing "newsletter" he'd been ordering coelacanth pins from in Florida. I agreed with the suggestion. He sent a blurb there. I made the mistake of not reviewing the notice copy. I never saw the publication, but it would come back to haunt us "big time." There was again one response, a captain, in Hawaii, who was taking some sportfishermen to the Indian Ocean. His commercial approach didn't seem right for our project. The monsoon coverage plan would have to be modified.
Michael and David Wilkinson were growing restless about the three coelacanths in the freezer rooms at the New York Aquarium. We had paid for them, although the aquarium had paid for their transportation from the Comoros. What did Father George plan to do with them? Apparently nothing. At a dinner meeting with Father George in July '87, he agreed to release the fish to appropriate institutions for dissection. "The aquarium is a place for living fish not dead ones," Father George determined, formulating a policy. We would locate the institutions for his approval.
At the same dinner meeting George told me that Peter Gimbel, my "hero" of the Andrea Doria, had cancer with only a short time to live. "So that's it then", I thought, "He couldn't have done it."
In late summer, I met Dr. William E. Bemis with David Wilkinson in Greenwich, Connecticut. We had lunch and a general chat. A stocky, soft spoken fellow, in his middle thirties, Dr. Bemis was nearly unctuous in his appreciation of our contacting him. This was my first encounter with a professional ichthyologist, and I was fascinated to see his eyes light up over arcane details of fish anatomy. Dr. Bemis was very fired up about coelacanths and other primitive fishes. He had done field work in Australia on lungfish. His enthusiasm was infectious. I liked him. David and I agreed he would be good to have on board as our link to the scientific community.
Dr. Bemis would prepare a scientific proposal on how he would handle the frozen coelacanth specimens at the Aquarium, and a draft proposal for science to be done on any fish caught during the capture expedition. As yet we had no feedback on the spreading news of our expedition from either aquariums or the scientific community. In preparing his proposal, David asked Dr. Bemis not to contact other scientists--as a lingering service to our "low profile."
After the meeting, David and I agreed that if his proposal looked kosher we would give him at least one of the frozen fish to work on. As planned, Bemis would also form our link to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.Then more trouble. Michael had chatted up a member of the Explorers Club who put him in touch with a prominent marine biologist, Jack Musick, at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. Musick was also eager for the frozen coelacanths. New techniques, such as computer assisted tomography--C.A.T. scans--would be available for studying their anatomy. Michael thought Musick's interest was a coup. But David Wilkinson pointed out that any marine biologist with half a brain would want to get his hands on a frozen coelacanth specimen. "Keep this coordinated with David ," I cautioned Michael on his answering machine. "David is the science man on this project. We need a control hierarchy." As the weeks went by David and I wondered why he had not heard from Dr. Bemis. I needed Bemis' proposal to begin fund raising.
Michael, it turned out, had written Jack Musick, inviting him to write a proposal for the frozen fish, at the same time placing no restrictions on his contacts. Musick was calling Bemis' potential connections. Bemis got wind of it, and assuming we had written him off, did not proceed with his proposal. David explained the situation to Michael, who wrote a clarifying letter to Jack Musick. We got Bemis back on board, but the confusion delayed his proposal by several weeks and strained our relations with him.
I thought Michael had cooled Jack Musick off, but he had apparently again solicited a proposal from him for the fish. Michael was progressively driving me nuts. I felt relieved when he suddenly announced that because of business commitments he would not be part of the capture expedition in the fall. I could be faulted for not maintaining a firmer handle on Michael. Michael had put David Wilkinson and me in the position of seeming unable to back up our original offer to Beemis. Michael for all his help and enthusiasm, was a bucking bronco, only taking us in the right direction half of the time.
Two fish proposals arrived, one from Dr. Bemis, and one from Jack Musick. Both were excellent, the products of extensive research and referencing. Bemis' proposal covered both dissection of the frozen fish and non-intrusive studies to be done on living specimens from future expeditions. Musick's included elaborate plans for multiple dissection procedures and CAT scanning of the frozen fish. It would have been totally unfair to let Musick's go unrequited in spite of the uncoordinated way in which it had been solicited.
Two "competing" scientific proposals arrive. Both would lead to important scientific papers. I now had the awkward problem of deciding how to divide three fish among two scientists. The criterion could not fairly be completely scientific, as that would play to Jack Musicks's advantage in having already contacted his and Bemis' entire research network. The only balance I could find was between quality and quantity. I chose to give Bemis the one fresh specimen "Ahmed," and Musick the two "Cairo mummies" from the Moroni government freezer, one of which might be a pregnant female.
Musick was thrilled, but Bemis, though having to thank me, again thought he had been derailed. Part of the problem had do with their respective positions. Musick was a tenured professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (V.I.M.S.), while Bemis was still working towards tenure at the University of Massachusetts. Bemis had to have some certainty he could publish on the coelacanth if he got involved. Meanwhile, Musick was preempting Bemis' scientific contacts by reaching them first. That was the problem. Musick agreed to work things out with Bemis.The new monsoon season in the Comoros was fast approaching. I had to think fast and hard about fund raising to support the costs of the equipment we would need, Bemis' science proposal, and at least some of our air fares and living expenses in the Comoros. The Rolex Foundation, a corporate member of the Explorers Club, had politely rejected funding for my proposal with no particular explanation. David Wilkinson's company, an insurance underwriter, which had secretly funded part of the Voyager round-the-world flight project the same year, wasn't in the fiscal mood for another "adventure" undertaking.
Father George said he could probably raise the funds for the capture phase of the expedition, if I sent him a proposal by mid September '87. I sent him a special "capture edition" of my original proposal to the E.C.
If George covered expedition expenses, I had just to concern myself with the science funding. Bemis' draft proposal contained plans for filming and otherwise utilizing any caught coelacanth in any condition living or dead. It would particularly maximize the scientific value of any coelacanth that died in our possession.
A sudden opportunity to raise $20,000 in funding from a private foundation came my way. I had to act fast as the foundation's review panel was about to meet to consider submissions. I needed Bemis' final draft in a hurry. And I needed to know if the American Museum of Natural History was ready to receive the funds on our behalf, as the foundation was not keen to donate them directly to the E.C. Unable to reach David Wilkinson, I talked to Bemis directly. He put me in touch with the treasurer at the Museum. The man was taken aback by my inquiry. He apparently knew nothing of our project, and he could not receive funds without more preparation.
Things were heating up fast and time was running out for a November '87 expedition. Now I would have to turn directly to the Aquarium as a fund recipient. But as I prepared to do so, I learned a shocking piece of news. Father George Ruggeiri was himself dying of a rare cancer. He was not expected to live more than a few weeks.