Interviewed by Lee Czerniak
The Cousteau Society was approached by the governments of Iran, Russia and the other countries bordering the Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. These countries are concerned about the pollution and the diminishing numbers of sturgeon. They wanted to know whether the Cousteau Society could have a look around and maybe come up with some solutions, or just get a feeling for how much of a problem they have. The Caspian Sea is a big place and we werenât going to be able to spend a lot of time there, so it was a snapshot visit really. We had to bring the Cousteau research vessel Alcyone, which is 33m long by 9.5m wide, up from Cape Town. I joined the boat in Istanbul, and there were five of us on the crew initially. We went up through the Bosphorus just after dawn. Istanbul has to be one of the dirtiest places in the whole world. Shocking, terrible, far worse than anything we saw in the Caspian Sea. You couldnât go outside the boat because the cityâs sewer outlet was nearby, and the water was thick, brown and stinky. We went to homes miles inland, and if the wind was blowing from the sea it was still like living next to a sewage pond. It was disgusting, just disgusting. There was oil in the water. People just donât care – thereâs a good flow of tide and it all goes away somewhere else eventually, and is someone elseâs problem. Anyway, we went through the Bosphorus and right across the Black Sea, which is a big place. Thereâs a lot of sea life in the Black Sea, a lot of dolphins, which is good to see. Thereâs some plastic, but not too bad. We went into the closed city of Novorossijsk in the northeastern corner of the Black Sea. This is where the pipeline from Baku and the main oil-producing areas of Azerbaijan ends, and the tankers come in there. The Caspian Sea has the biggest gas reserve in the world, and itâs a really interesting place.
I donât think I can say âYes, theyâve got a problemâ, or âNo, they havenât got a problem.â In Baku and Azerbaijan, the harbour had a fair bit of oil in it, and there were oil rigs everywhere. However, I donât think that is the greatest of their worries. Itâs a place where there is naturally a lot of oil, and itâs coming to the surface. Some of our photographers were out just walking along a track and there was oil squelching out of the ground. A few hundred years ago, the city burned down because the natural gas coming out of the ground caught fire. From what we could gather, the greatest issue is probably the Volga River, the biggest river in Europe. It is 4500 nautical miles long, and it picks up everything as it comes through Russia and dumps it into the Caspian Sea. Itâs not just the sewage, buts the runoff of fertiliser from the farms along with general industrial waste which gets washed into the Caspian Sea.
We picked up our co-captain, an English-speaking Russian, to join the French captain on the boat, and a couple of pilots as well, and we came up through the Sea of Azov. Itâs very shallow in the Sea of Azov, a maximum of about 12m deep, and we came up a narrow channel about 100 nautical miles to Rostov. This is where we joined the Don River, which flows into the Sea of Azov. We changed pilots, got a couple more people, and got the river pilots to take us up the Don, all the way to Volgograd (previously named Stalingrad). There were huge battles here between the Russians and Germans in World War II, and millions of people died, so there are many monuments. Over the last 20 nautical miles or so, the Don-to-Volga Canal joins the rivers. We went through about 17 or 18 locks, which all had huge Stalinesque statues. It was a really fascinating place. You tend to think of the Russian people as a little bit dour, but they were the exact opposite. They are very, very friendly, some of the friendliest people we have come across anywhere in the world. At the moment in Russia, Cousteau movies are being shown in prime time on Sundays. So we were the stars, and here was this vessel which they had seen on television. They were totally enthusiastic, asking questions all the time, with our Russian captain interpreting, and were really interesting and nice people. The Don and Volga Rivers are beautiful. Theyâre sand rivers so there are beaches everywhere, and people having fun. Many were blonde, good-looking and all wearing the latest fashions.
Very easy; very nice people. There was a fair bit of political goings-on behind the scenes because we were the first non-Russian, non-Iranian vessel to get permission to go into the Caspian Sea since before the revolution, back at the turn of the century.
Partly that, and partly being asked to go there. The Cousteau Society has no political affiliations and we just wanted to go there, have a look and show off the beauty more than anything else. Itâs not a case of going there and saying âThis is wrong, donât do this.â Most of it was âWow, isnât it just really pretty.â Our aim was also to try and help them with some of the problems they might have, and that will be ongoing â to help unite the five countries to work together.
Past Volgograd, we went down the Volga River. From the start of the Don to the Caspian Sea is about 700 nautical miles, so itâs quite a long way. We stopped at Astrakhan, which is famous for carpets. When we stopped there, it was their holiday festival for fishermen, so we were the centre of attention for tens of thousands of people. We had a good time. Thereâs a lot of fishing done in the Caspian Sea. There is no netting allowed, but there are a lot of sardines in the south, so some of the ships at Reshteh-Ye-Kuhha are a reasonable size. But the way they catch them! To start with, we wondered what on earth these ships were. The sardines are down quite deep, 50m to 70m, and they catch them at night. They put lights down and great big vaccuum hoses, and they suck them up. The northern half of the Caspian Sea is basically fresh water, and the southern half is very saline. It used to be joined to the Black Sea, and there are still sea lions that stayed there while the geography changed over thousands of years. We went 300 or 400 miles down to Baku from the Volga delta which is 100 miles wide, and at the end of July, just after I left, itâs supposed to go into waterlilies blooming everywhere. Itâs a beautiful area. In a storm itâs a very dangerous place to be, you might have seven or eight metre waves. In the estuaries there are turtles, and thereâs a huge amount of bird life. I saw more herons in the delta than Iâve seen in the rest of my life put together, they were just everywhere and beautiful to see. But what you read about the water quality … well, you donât go swimming.
There are fewer sturgeon than there used to be, and one doesnât need to go to the Caspian Sea to work out why that happened. There has been a huge dam built upriver of Volgograd spanning the whole Volga River. The sturgeon used to swim thousands of miles up the Volga to spawn, and then come back down again. But now they canât get past the dam. Thereâs been a lot of effort to make ponding areas, and some extraordinary engineering works. They dam the river at certain times of the year to make a spawning area for the sturgeon, and the ships have to go round through the lock systems. The dam is a couple of miles long, with concrete barriers that lower into place. They must have spent billions of dollars on it. At least theyâre trying to do something, whether itâs working or not. Maybe theyâre going to have to look at some sort of ladder system up the dam. There are four fishing stations right down at the mouth of the Volga, south of Astrakhan. They operate 24 hours a day, and they probably put the nets out into the river and bring them back in about 18 times in 24 hours. Each netting will get them between 30 and 70 sturgeon. These are big fish. Some of them weigh hundreds of kilos, and some may be over a tonne. They throw the small ones back, if there are any. When they catch them, the fish hardly move. I mean, they just pick them up by the tail. Try picking a kingfish up by the tail and it will scarper! These fish are not like that, theyâre very docile. The fishermen put them into floating barges which have slots inside so the water can go through, and the fish are kept in there until the fishermen have enough. Then they take the whole lot down to the factory ship and club them. The fish are then loaded into baskets and go into the factory where they are opened up and the caviar is taken out, and the fish is cleaned. It gets packed in ice then sold at the markets.
No, they eat the whole fish. We had sturgeon for one meal and it was very nice, in fact it was delicious, and caviar in big drums on the tables at meal times. I had a bit and it was OK, but you pay an awful lot of money for it these days. The government is blaming the poachers, who take quite a few fish, but they donât take any more than the factories with their big nets. There are other reasons too. The dam is a problem, but maybe there is a way of getting around that.
I went down as far as Baku and then I had to leave because we were running very late. The vessel went on to Iran and Turkmenistan, and the rest of the team said that was fantastic. It was all wooded, with lots of reserves where they try to preserve endangered species. There was a separate team in Turkmenistan for a while, in a place called Turkmenbashi.
Theyâre trying to. But then, on the edge of the Caspian Sea thereâs some pretty big nuclear power stations, and some of the shore teams saw awful deformities throughout the population near one of them. We had Geiger counters on board, but they didnât pick up anything.
Yes, it will be a one hour documentary. I think theyâre going to send another team over the next few months to do a bit more filming, or maybe during the winter to get a contrast. The Volga River, of course, has ice in winter and thereâs snow everywhere. I guess it will be shown in New Zealand, but I donât know when.
Weâre trying to formulate now what the next ten years will hold. I think thatâs the most important part. I felt that we could have done a lot better in the Caspian Sea. It was quite disjointed, but if I hadnât been there and experienced it, I would certainly be in no position to say what I thought the future should hold. It was a very difficult project, dealing with so many governments and authorities and bureaucracy. We had a permanent shore team doing nothing but trying to get through the red tape, well in advance of us being there, and very high-up people working away for us. Politically, they said it was the hardest project the Cousteau Society had ever taken on, just because of going through so many different countries. In some places the shore team in Turkmenbashi were using camels to transport two tonnes of gear. There wasnât any other form of transport. Then they all got sick for seven days, and then the weather went bad. I think in a month they got about two minutes of filming. So it was a really difficult exercise.
I would like to wait and see when we get the new vessel, because it will have to be a special vessel, this next Calypso. I would like to do a two-year circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean, looking at the continents we go past, the sea life, bird life and everything above and below the ice. There are a lot of problems with the water quality in the Arctic, which are only just being understood. It has been a dumping ground for nuclear arms. And what happens to the water from the Arctic? It comes to New Zealand. It circulates round, so while we sit here thinking weâre away from everyone else and it isnât going to affect us, I can say it is and it will. There are some areas that we are really keen to look at, but as well as being there for scientific reasons, we are at the same time in the entertainment business. If we make a television programme which is purely scientific and says âThis is the problem,â everyone is going to turn their television off and go and do something else. Youâve got to make it exciting, adventurous, with great images. We want to get into doing a full length major film.
I donât think I need a title, that doesnât matter. The role is a multi-faceted thing really, trying to give the Society some direction, trying to get the money in for the new vessel and then organising the whole thing. Iâll be trying to get some direction into it. Francine Cousteau is fantastic at dealing with UNESCO, United Nations, World Bank, and governmental people at all levels. You have to have that. We flew the United Nations flag on Alcyone through the Caspian Sea, it was a UNESCO sponsored effort, and they were in behind us as well, so that helped and opened up a few doors. We will continue to do that sort of work, but one person cannot run the whole thing. Itâs like Team New Zealand, you canât do it. Thereâs just not enough hours in the day, so you have to delegate and Iâm one of the people itâs going to be delegated to.
I think one of the reasons I liked watching Cousteau was because of some of the fancy equipment they had in those days. There are now, of course, many companies who develop dive equipment full time for commercial and sport diving. So I think we should be using the latest gear that there is, and helping develop that. I was disappointed at the equipment we were using. My dive gear purchased in New Zealand was much better, much safer. I think we have to be seen to be leading the field in ecology and safety measures. The way we operate and the type of equipment we use has to be the best of the best. If young people are going to be inspired to dive because of our programmes, itâs a bit like making a movie where thereâs a car chase and the heroes arenât wearing seat belts. I think itâs very important to demonstrate safe practices.
Absolutely, and I think we need to be into underwater communication. You get fantastic underwater communication these days. We should be able to show all that in the movie, and I think that again we will get people going âWow, look at thisâ, as much as they would be looking at sea life.
It does. If we donât entertain the viewers or we donât encourage them and make them interested, theyâre not going to want to know about the Cousteau Society and they wonât really get the message. Weâre looking at quite a big involvement with the Internet. Iâm not an Internet fan at all at the moment, but I think long-term the idea is for us to have live television communications from the vessel. What Iâd like to do, and we really have to get into the schools if we can, is to have a set time, maybe twice or three times a day for an hour where people can go onto the Internet and there they are on board live with us. They can ask science questions and they can actually see what weâre doing, where we happen to be, maybe weâll show them a bit of video that weâve shot in the last day or so and actually get them involved, like for school projects. We might be up in the Arctic, we might be in the Amazon, we might be inside an iceberg, whatever. So I think that getting the message out is very important, and with the advent of these low orbit satellites weâll be able to do that very cheaply and easily. That will be in conjunction with good television and good movies, and encouraging more people to join the Society for the right reasons. If weâre only going to carry on with one boat for the next 20 years, then weâre not going to have much of an effect really. I think weâre going to have to say âOK, do we want to make a difference? Well letâs have Calypso II, Calypso III, Calypso IV, Calypso V, and have them working in different parts of the world at the same time.â Now maybe thatâs too grand a scheme, but if we actually believe what weâre trying to achieve, weâre going to have to do that. Weâre going to have to have a small navy, effectively.
I think so, and again if we keep it entertaining as well as educational weâll gradually get to a lot of people who hopefully will then realise what we are trying to achieve and want the same thing. I went to a place in Spain last year, and the city dump is just over the edge of the cliff, they just bulldoze it off into the sea. Hopefully we can stop that sort of thing happening. It does make a difference, and I think âOK, the difference I can make will be infinitesimal, but youâve got to start somewhere.â
I canât do much work with the Cousteau Society now, but I think itâs important planning time, so I can do that in between. If I just had to sit in my office here all day, Iâd go nuts. I need to have other things to think about. I was lucky to have the time to get away and go to the Caspian Sea, because itâs given me a good insight into the Cousteau Society and the future, but I canât do that again until after the Americaâs Cup. Thank you very much, Peter. Itâs nice being able to talk to you on the subject of the Cousteau Society. Our readers will be more than happy to hear more from you, and I hope that next time we have this conversation it will be about another adventure youâve done for the Society. Weâll see what happens. |