HOWE SOUND, BC — October 16, 2013 — At 1:02 p.m. the swirl of fog lingering around Passage Island gives way to a cloudy olive hue as the three-person submersible Aquarius begins its descent to the ocean floor.
As we plunge into the dark abyss, the submersible's high-intensity lamps expose a stream of white nutrients and minutia of life known as marine snow visible just outside the bubble acrylic viewport.
"Flooding the air tanks," announces Jeff Heaton, a veteran pilot with Nuytco Research Ltd. of North Vancouver. "We'll start to get heavier." The Aquarius – 4.5 tonnes, with an inch-thick steel hull – rocks back and forth as he operates the two horizontal and two vertical thrusters to control the 100-feet-per-minute descent.
Rebreather technology scrubs the carbon dioxide from our breath and injects back oxygen to allow us to breathe safely during the 90-minute dive.
Heaton tells me not to fret about the puddle of water at the base of the viewport into which my notebook has just fallen. "The dome leaks a little bit in shallow water. She doesn't really like to seal until we get super deep. Nothing do worry about, though."
Heaton sits in a chair wedged into the back of the Aquarius, while I lie on my stomach alongside freelance science writer Anne Casselman. "It's amazing, we could be anywhere right now," she says.