The worst part about paddling Uganda鈥檚 Murchison Falls section of the White Nile wasn鈥檛 the rapids, even though the 50 miles of Class V whitewater is bookended by a pair of unrunnable waterfalls. It wasn鈥檛 the threat of disease, even though during my first visit to Uganda, in 2000, I slipped out of the country just before an Ebola outbreak. It wasn鈥檛 even the Lord鈥檚 Resistance Army (LRA), the brutal rebel force that had been kidnapping, conscripting, and killing children in northern Uganda for decades and called this region home. No, the worst part was the hippos, among Africa鈥檚 most dangerous animals, thanks to their enormous size and rude temperament. They were everywhere, and they did not appreciate our intrusion into their world.

Dozens of them pooled in flatwater beneath rapids. They erupted from the depths without warning, sometimes just a boat length away, presenting the bewildering reality that a 5,000-pound animal could move with the silence of a minnow. Initially, I thought the whitewater might provide refuge, but then I watched a hippo swim straight through a Class V rapid. And there were crocodiles, too, almost as numerous and only slightly less ill-mannered. It couldn鈥檛 have been a worse place for me to start falling apart.

It was August 2007, and I was there to make a film about Steve Fisher, a rambunctious South African and world-class paddler. Fisher had been part of an expedition I led in 2002 to complete the first successful descent of the Upper Gorge of Tibet鈥檚 Yarlung Tsangpo River, which is considered one of the most difficult kayaking feats of my generation. During high school, when I first got a taste for whitewater as a raft guide in California鈥檚 Sierra Nevada, this was the kind of opportunity I dreamed of. But now, on the red banks of the Nile, at age 34, it was all becoming a nightmare.听

I felt terrible. My energy level was so low that sometimes it took me 30 minutes to get up in the morning. In 2004, after a weeklong first descent of China鈥檚 Class V Upper Salween River, my vision blurred temporarily. I had attributed it to the hangover following the usual post-expedition bender. That was the drill back then: drink when you鈥檙e up, drink when you鈥檙e down, and spend the rest of the time sending it on a giant river in the middle of nowhere. But the Nile was no place for a beer cooler, and I was still having problems seeing, thinking, and paddling straight.听

In addition to Fisher and me, there were five other river runners on this trip, including South African Hendri Coetzee. We traveled with an 18-foot support raft鈥攈elmed by legendary explorer Pete Meredith鈥斅璪ecause its size served as a (minor) deterrent to crocs and hippos. My younger brother, Dustin, sat in front, alternating between filming and paddling. Dustin and I grew up guiding rafts together in California, and as a cinematographer, he鈥檚 worked on many of my expeditions including the Tsangpo.听

Trouble started at the put-in. Crocs greeted us in the flatwater, and after only a quarter-mile, the support raft flipped. I fought back a flash of panic when I saw Dustin swim, not because he was in danger of drowning but 颅because in the water he was bait.

I paddled to the raft, where Dustin and I locked eyes, reading each other鈥檚 minds: Nothing about this feels right. We can still go back. That fleeting moment of vulnerability was quickly beaten back by a philosophy that had guided my life since I was a little boy: Harden the fuck up.听

It was a lesson I鈥檇 learned during a tumultuous childhood, and it kept me alive on the mean streets of San Bernardino, California, where my walk home from school routinely ended in either a fistfight or a thousand-yard sprint to the front door. It was a lesson drilled into me as the youngest guide on the Colorado River, and one that pushed me to bag more than 50 first descents on three continents over two decades and make dozens of adventure films. Now that mantra was going to get me down this hellacious river.听

I paddled badly over the next five days. I was tentative, avoiding every obstacle I could, searching for Class IV sneak routes rather than running the guts. Even then I鈥檇 miss my line and get flipped by some junky feature that I鈥檇 normally blast through. I never had to swim鈥攁 dangerous predicament that occurs when an upside-down kayaker fails to paddle upright and has to slip out of the boat鈥攂ut I had trouble keeping my balance. When I did find myself upside down, I was completely disoriented. My roll, the foundational technique of whitewater kayaking that rights a flipped boat, felt like a beginner鈥檚 frenzied groping.听

At one point, a teammate pulled me aside and let me have it. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e paddling like shit,鈥� he said. 鈥淲hat the fuck is wrong with you? You鈥檙e jeopardizing this whole mission.鈥� He wasn鈥檛 wrong or particularly out of line. That was just how we communicated.听

The worst of it came during a portage on our third day. Given the difficulty of carrying all our gear and the multitude of dangerous creatures along the banks, it was sometimes safer鈥攁nd easier鈥攖o run a giant rapid than to get out of our boats. But in this case we didn鈥檛 have a choice. Hippos and elephants had stomped out a network of tunnels through the dense jungle, which Fisher and I followed in search of a way around. Dustin broke down the raft for transport.听

Suddenly, we heard low grunting, followed by a crashing sound that grew louder and louder. We never saw the hippo, but from the safety of a nearby tree, we watched the brush collapse in its path as the beast ran toward the river鈥攁nd my brother. Dustin jumped into the raft, dodging the lumbering animal by inches. By the time I got to the river, I could see only the back of its head as it swam away.听

I turned toward Dustin and let out a deep sigh. I didn鈥檛 realize that my fuzzy vision and weakness were symptoms of something far more serious than the standard case of expedition exhaustion. I had no idea that this trip would be my last time in a kayak for almost ten years. All I knew was that we had 1,500 pounds of gear to haul through the jungle before we could put back onto a river full of things that wanted to kill us. I clipped on my helmet and considered that mantra one more time.听

Harden the fuck up.

I spent my childhood bouncing around California鈥檚 Central Valley, far from any whitewater. My father, Craig, was a traveling salesman who sold everything: agricultural products, building aggregate, computer hardware. My mother, Mary, raised Dustin and me. We drifted through the hot and arid inland capitals鈥擵isalia, Merced, Fresno鈥攊n a series of moves that would shape my passion for a nomadic lifestyle.听

My parents were irrefutable proof that opposites attract. Mom is the most disciplined, organized, and sensible person I know. Dad will be a wild man until the day he dies. He introduced us to the mountains, taking us skiing and backpacking for the first time. A former Marine, he lived fast and loose. He loved drag boats and kept a beautiful flat-bottom V-drive named Love Me or Leave Me in the garage. Bins of empty beer cans were in there, too, and Dad concocted a thrilling if mildly delinquent method for their disposal. Dustin and I would line them up on the street, a runway of Coors stretching hundreds of feet. Then Dad would get in his flatbed truck, crush them, and let us pocket the refund.听

One Christmas morning, after my brother and I opened our presents, my parents told us they were getting a divorce. Before we knew it, Dad was gone. I was seven.听

Suddenly my mom, at 32, had two kids to raise on her own. Eventually, we moved to San Bernardino, where she enrolled at Cal State to study accounting. The city鈥檚 early economy was built on agriculture and prostitution, and little seemed to have changed when we moved into a modest house off Church Avenue and Base Line, a strip that was infamous for drugs and hookers.听

While mom supported us on student loans and part-time work, Dustin and I were learning lessons of a different sort. In sixth grade, two of my classmates got pregnant. There was an acid bust. I got suspended for smoking cigarettes and fighting.

I had been in plenty of scraps before, but living off Base Line taught me the true meaning of savagery. One afternoon I was walking home when two kids threw me to the ground and started stomping me. As I got up, one of them stabbed me in the left shoulder with a pocketknife. I managed to escape and patch myself up so that when my mom got home she wouldn鈥檛 have a clue. Amid all the chaos, she was killing herself taking care of us. Keeping my troubles quiet was my way of taking care of her. Besides, I was having a pretty good time.

Money was tight, and Mom had to buckle down to finish her last three semesters of school. I鈥檝e always excelled at sports鈥擨 played soccer, swam, and ran competitively鈥攁nd she was concerned that I was going to find the kind of trouble that would jeopardize all that. So when I was 13, she sent us to our dad鈥檚 place in the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton. Life there was a different scene entirely. Kids had stable families and got allowances. There I was, a little hoodlum in training, dropped into a town so lovely that it literally named itself pleasant.听

When I wasn鈥檛 playing sports, I ran hustles, positioning myself as a middleman and convincing our new pool of friends to cough up their allowances to buy weed and beer. Dad, meanwhile, continued his hands-off approach to parenting, leaving us free to do as we pleased.听

In eighth grade, I was handcuffed and detained by the cops for possession of alcohol. Mom reintroduced some structure into our lives when I started high school. She鈥檇 gotten an accounting job, met a guy, and moved us to Rocklin, a small town in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada. It was our last move, and it probably saved my life.

We lived two doors down from a raft guide named Doug Stanley. When I was 15, I took my first trip with Doug鈥檚 business partner, Roger Lee, down Giant Gap, a 14-mile Class IV鈥揤 section of the North Fork of the American River. As soon as I got home, I begged my mom to let me attend Doug and Roger鈥檚 guiding school. I was barely passing my classes, and she鈥檇 only let me go if I managed a B average. That spring, I brought home my first 3.0.

I was 16 when I completed the course. No one on the American would hire me because I was too young, so I cold-called John Vail, the owner of Outdoors Unlimited, which ran trips through the Grand Canyon.听

鈥淒id you learn how to row?鈥� John asked. I told him I did, which was almost true.听

鈥淐an you get here tomorrow?鈥� he asked. I wasn鈥檛 sure I鈥檇 heard him right.听

鈥淓xcuse me?鈥�

鈥淚 need you here tomorrow,鈥� he said. Forty-eight hours later I was on the Colorado River, a 135-pound kid with barely a week of experience, pushing a 2,000-pound gear-filled oar boat down one of the most remote and iconic stretches of whitewater in the country.听

The river sang to my heart. I鈥檇 been fighting my whole life鈥攌ids, teachers, cops, parents鈥攁nd here was a force so powerful that my only choice was surrender. I recognized the river as a teacher, offering me a gateway to the world. It channeled all the energy that was going to get me locked up or killed into something productive. I couldn鈥檛 get enough.

When I wasn鈥檛 making money as a guide, I was spending it kayaking. I went to Idaho鈥檚 North Fork of the Payette when I was 20 and met Charlie Munsey, who knew where to find

some of the biggest rivers of them all: in the Himalayas. A few months later, during the fall of 1992, I went on my first trip to Asia and completed a descent of the 30-mile Class V Tamur River, where I learned a lesson that would reinforce my approach to expedition kayaking.听

By the time we got off the Tamur, I had a raging fever, a sore throat, and an ear infection. Sitting in the bus station, staring down a 35-hour ride back to Kathmandu, I told Charlie I felt like I was dying and considered staying in a hotel room for the night. But the river never stopped and neither would we. I sucked it up, and several days later we were attempting a first descent on the Thule Beri.

The nineties were a golden age of whitewater exploration. Paddlers had been sniffing around the Himalayas鈥� great rivers since the seventies, but an evolution in boat design and materials, and a natural progression of skill and ambition, launched a revolution. At the time, a gradient of 60 feet per mile was considered extreme for a high-volume river, but in British Columbia, Charlie and I were running some of the Stikine River鈥檚 steepest sections at 100 feet per mile. How much further could we push it? We鈥檇 roll out the topo maps and spend weeks debating what was doable.听

In 1994, I started a film company that would eventually become Scott Lindgren Productions. My office in Auburn, California, became a kayaking mecca because of its proximity to world-class whitewater and the potential for hungry paddlers to get in a movie. We had athletes coming in from everywhere (New Zealand, South America, Europe) and sleeping anywhere (in my closet, in my front yard, or on any unclaimed inch of couch or floor space). I negotiated six-figure budgets to make adventure films; picked up a slew of sponsors, from kayak brands to Detroit automakers; and helped my friends do the same. I even won an Emmy for cinematography. I wasn鈥檛 getting rich, but I was making a living doing what I loved, and that was enough.

鈥淗arden the fuck up鈥� became an underlying theme of my trips. I had learned to smell fear and weakness during my street-fighting days, and as soon as I caught a whiff on the river, I would crank up the intensity. On one trip down California鈥檚 Middle Kings, a friend brought along his brother, who couldn鈥檛 keep up. Rather than slow the pace, I sped up. Hard lines, long days, no rest. I knew he鈥檇 eventually make it down, but by the end he was crushed. He never paddled with me again. It was a harsh code, but the consequences were too severe to play Mr. Rogers. Too many of my paddling friends had died in river accidents, and that was a brand of suffering I couldn鈥檛 take.听

In 1997 alone, seven kayakers I knew died in a matter of months, including my best friend, Chuck Kern, at 27. Chuck was our North Star. He gave our crew direction and ran the stoutest whitewater. He was always out front, pushing our pace, our lines, our very concept of the sport.听

That summer, Chuck and I had been making the rounds at the semiannual Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City. After it wrapped, Chuck and his two younger brothers, Willie and Johnnie, drove to Colorado to paddle the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. They invited me along, but I had to get back to Auburn to edit a movie. I wasn鈥檛 home for more than a day when I got a call from Johnnie. 鈥淲e lost Chuck,鈥� he said.

I jumped in a van with my production partner, Mark Hayden. We drove 15 hours straight. Standing on the canyon rim, looking through binoculars, I could see the tip of a kayak pinned under a rock. Chuck was still in his boat. The Gunnison is dam controlled, and the next day they brought the water down. I鈥檒l never forget the sight of his slumped, lifeless body being pulled out, so different from the friend I knew. It tore all of us apart.

It also crystallized my commitment to kayaking. What else was I going to do? Push rubber down the Grand Canyon again? Get a nine-to-five? I began to fixate on the most audacious idea I鈥檇 ever heard, proposed to me by Charlie Munsey: paddling the four rivers of Mount Kailash. In a region defined by spectacular mountains, The 21,778-foot pyramid-shaped peak stands alone in the interior of the Tibetan Plateau and is considered a holy site by four religions. A quartet of great rivers鈥攖he Karnali, Sutlej, Tsangpo, and Indus鈥攆low from the mountain in four cardinal directions. No one had run all four. Charlie suggested we become the first.听

After Chuck鈥檚 death, I poured myself into the project, first making the 32-mile circumnavigation of the mountain on foot, a pilgrimage that Buddhists believe washes away a lifetime of sin. By 2002, I had descended the Karnali, Sutlej, and Tsangpo. Only the Indus remained.

My expedition teams were built with rigid rules. 国产吃瓜黑料rs were untested and therefore unwelcome; emotional weakness was stomped out, usually with a verbal dig or a physical feat. I shunned any hint of 颅vulnerability, because if the river鈥攖he strongest force I knew鈥攄idn鈥檛 hurt us, nothing else should.

To a degree it worked. I鈥檝e known more than 35 people who have died kayaking, but over the 20-plus years of leading expeditions, everyone on my team has come home alive. I pray that never changes. Still, as I watched friend after friend drop away from the sport as a result of substance abuse, trauma, or the responsibilities of adulthood, the tools I鈥檇 developed to survive on the water left me dangerously ill-equipped to navigate the challenges of everyday life.

After returning home from the hippo-dodging fiasco in Uganda in 2007, I needed a break. Adrenaline was the only thing that kept me going on the White Nile, and once I got back to Auburn, I collapsed. I planned to take three months off from the water, edit the movie we鈥檇 shot, then get back to paddling. Three months turned into nearly ten years.听

I barely recognized myself. Sometimes I鈥檇 sleep for 15 hours straight, only to wake with blurry vision and fuzzy thoughts. I hardly had the strength to lift my kayak into my truck. Was I suffering from Lyme disease? Malaria? Concussions? I felt like I was chasing a ghost. After nearly a year of medical appointments, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, a condition caused by a drop in hormone production in the thyroid gland, slowing metabolism and other critical functions.

I threw myself into researching the condition. I tried Western medicine and alternative treatments and followed a strict diet but experienced only marginal improvement. I lived cheaply and took filmmaking jobs, but I wasn鈥檛 planning projects of my own. I didn鈥檛 have the fire.听

Asking for help had become antithetical to my self-image, so when I got sick and really needed it, I didn鈥檛 know how to find or receive it. I went from being at the center of everything for 20 years to feeling entirely alone. The phone went silent. I didn鈥檛 have the energy to maintain relationships with my kayak buddies or my sponsors, and they fell away. I abandoned my dream of running the Indus and completing the four rivers of the Kailash. As my mid-thirties rolled into my forties, I figured this was how careers ended. It had been a good run.

Then, on Christmas Day in 2014, I got my first splitting headache, followed on New Year鈥檚 Eve by a triple-vision-inducing skull crusher that left me blacked out on the bedroom floor. An MRI finally revealed the source of all this misery: a brain tumor.

I never thought I鈥檇 be happy to find out I had a brain tumor, but the news lifted my spirits. I wasn鈥檛 just tired; I hadn鈥檛 simply lost it. I had a growth a shade smaller than a baseball wrapped around my right carotid artery, a vascular superhighway that carries blood to the brain. Called a pituitary adenoma, it was pressing on my optic nerves, causing the blurry vision, and my pituitary gland, accounting for my low energy. My neurosurgeon, Brian Jian, suggested it may have been there for 15 years, making it entirely possible that I carried it down the Tsangpo. Suddenly, I had something tangible to fight.听

I had surgery a month later. Jian slid a toolbox of sharp, foot-long instruments up my nose and cut through my septum and sinus into the center of my skull, where he scraped out a tumor with the form and consistency of a lump of cottage cheese. Embedded in my cranial vital parts, it was too risky to remove entirely. Eventually, he told me, it would start growing back.听

Within a month, I was experiencing sensations I鈥檇 long forgotten. Everything seemed sharper鈥攕mells and sounds, my visual and mental clarity鈥攁nd I was more energetic than I鈥檇 been in years. Physically, I was healing. Emotionally, I had a long way to go.听

I told only a few people about the tumor and swore them all to secrecy. I perceived it as a form of weakness, a giant neon sign announcing my vulnerabilities to the world. I鈥檇 already lost my identity as a kayaker鈥攏ow I was the guy with the brain tumor? Who could ever love someone like that?听

I isolated myself in a prison of my own making and hit rock bottom in September 2015, seven months after the surgery, when I was arrested for my second DUI in four and a half years. I stumbled out the back door of a bar and into my car when a cop appeared. A drunk driver had just killed someone down the block, she said. I was arrested and processed, and eventually I ended up in a 颅holding cell next to a guy in his early twenties, dressed for a night on the town. He looked crushed, slumped over with his elbows on his knees, his face resting in his palms. I noticed a rap sheet next to him鈥攈e was the other drunk driver, and now he was facing charges for vehicular manslaughter. I was fortunate that my actions resulted in only a ten-day sentence in the Sacramento county jail.

In January 2016, I met Patricia. She was strong and beautiful, worked in the wellness industry, and had spent a lifetime practicing and studying emotional growth. We fell in love hard and fast and bought a house in Truckee. For the first time in years, I thought I was in a healthy relationship, until she told me that she was struggling to stay with me.听

It鈥檚 the tumor, I told myself. She thinks I鈥檓 weak. After collecting my thoughts, I asked her why.

鈥淵ou鈥檙e not emotionally available,鈥� she said. I wasn鈥檛 sure what to make of that.听

鈥淣ot emotionally available?鈥� I replied. 鈥淭ake off your clothes, I鈥檒l show you what emotionally available looks like.鈥澨�

She hit back like a 20-foot wave. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 exactly what I鈥檓 talking about, Scott. You have nothing to offer other than physical responses, to everything. You need help.鈥� In other times, I鈥檇 run from a situation like this鈥攖o the river, to the bar鈥攂ut I鈥檇 sworn off drinking and hadn鈥檛 touched a kayak in years. I couldn鈥檛 escape the truth she was forcing me to confront.听

Patricia had a strong set of emotional tools and started showing me how to develop my own. I began therapy, reading books, meditating, and writing. She suggested I take a weeklong course in Napa designed to help people build the skills I was lacking. She stuck with me and promised that if it got too intense, she鈥檇 come and get me.听

鈥淒o you know how much suffering I鈥檝e done?鈥� I scoffed. 鈥淚 can handle anything for seven days.鈥� A few hours into the program, I realized that I was starting a Tsangpo descent into my own psyche, down a river that never ends. It was one of the hardest journeys of my life, one that forced me to confront behavior that had shaped my first 44 years. I began to understand that knowing how to harden the fuck up didn鈥檛 make me strong, and that being emotionally vulnerable didn鈥檛 make me weak. Learning to talk about the pain inside helped me let it go, so I wouldn鈥檛 need to bury it in a river canyon or a bottle of booze. By the end of the week, I was hopeful that the next time help arrived, I could be vulnerable enough to receive it.

Toward the end of 2015, I got a call from an old friend and kayaking buddy named Gerry Moffatt. I鈥檇 met Gerry in the early nineties on the North Fork of the Payette River in Idaho. We鈥檇 run a number of big rivers in the Himalayas together and completed the fifth self-supported descent of the Stikine in 1995. He was turning 53 and planning to run it one more time. 鈥淚 want you there with me,鈥� he said.听

I had no illusions that I was ready to tackle a river like that again, but Gerry鈥檚 call motivated me to relearn the sport I鈥檇 nearly forgotten. I started on the rivers in my backyard in the Sierra. I was a shell of the athlete I鈥檇 been. I felt so demeaned; after two decades at the top of the sport, I was back at the bottom, the weakest link, the kind of boater I would have ostracized before. But I kept forcing myself out of bed, calling only my closest friends to go kayaking with me as I tried to puzzle my way back into the world of dangerous whitewater.听

In June 2016, I traveled back to Idaho to ramp up my training on the Payette. In Boise, I ran into Aniol Serrasolses, a 28-year-old from the Catalonian region of Spain and one of the best kayakers on the planet. He needed a ride to the Payette and, after hopping in my truck, asked about the Tsangpo. I told him about the expedition, about my dream to paddle the four rivers of Kailash, and how all those plans had been derailed. Instead of judging or ostracizing me after I poured out my soul, this guy I hardly knew did something I never could have imagined. He offered to help.听

鈥淲hat鈥檚 your fourth river?鈥� Aniol asked.

鈥淭he Indus,鈥� I replied. Aniol smiled.听

鈥淵ou know, we鈥檙e running the Indus this fall. You should come.鈥�

I wasn鈥檛 sure I鈥檇 be able to run the Stikine, let alone the Indus, but the fact that Aniol would consider inviting an old broken-down boater into his world blew me away. He was offering me something I never would have offered anyone in my condition when I was his age.听

We paddled Upper Cherry Creek and I swam. I swam on the North Fork of the Mokelumne and on a familiar backyard run on the North Yuba. It didn鈥檛 seem to matter to anyone but me. Technique had evolved over the decade I鈥檇 been away, and Aniol was relentless in his coaching. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e not paddling hard enough,鈥� he鈥檇 tell me. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e sitting too far back in your boat鈥�drive!鈥�

Aniol wasn鈥檛 the only person willing to help. The more open and vulnerable I became, the more people wanted to paddle with me. The kids didn鈥檛 just teach me how to kayak again, they helped me open my heart.听

I didn鈥檛 go to the Indus that fall, but I did run the Stikine with Gerry, a trip that revealed both my potential and my limitations. I made two runs down the 60-mile canyon, half of which is Class V whitewater, but ended up in surgery for a hernia I鈥檇 suffered on my second lap, when a boil sucked my boat underwater and tore my stomach muscles. As I recovered, Aniol reached out with good news: the Indus had been a success, he was going back in a year, and he could help me with the visa process for Pakistan. Suddenly, my dream to complete the four rivers of Kailash was back on the table.听

I spent the next 12 months kayaking five days a week. I started running barefoot, conditioning my body for impact. The training was exhausting, but no matter how sore I was, I鈥檇 go kayaking, do yoga, or hit the gym. For the first time since I was a teenager, the river filled my soul without condition. I wasn鈥檛 thinking about the next movie or a big drop that would make my sponsors happy. Hell, I didn鈥檛 have any sponsors. The only thing I had to focus on was my love for the river.听

In the spring of 2017, after a routine checkup, I got the call I鈥檇 been dreading since brain surgery. My tumor had grown, and the doctor wanted to treat it with radiation. The course would be five days a week for six weeks, and it could increase my chances of developing dementia later in life. Most immediately, it would probably end my shot at the Indus.

I skipped radiation, canceled my doctor appointments, and channeled my energy into training for the Indus.

The renewed focus came at a cost. Patricia and I had stayed together, but there were still complications. The Indus expedition forced our hand. Among other things, she thought I was going to get myself killed, either on a river or by neglecting my illness. She didn鈥檛 want to ride that roller coaster. I had to choose between the relationship and a 20-year dream. We broke up, and I went to Pakistan.

The Indus gave rise to the Harappan civilization, one of the most advanced societies in the ancient world, and today it鈥檚 the breadbasket of Pakistan, transforming arid plains into an agricultural heartland. The river falls some 2,000 miles from the Tibetan Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, and its upper reaches present some of the riskiest whitewater in the world. The Rondu Gorge section we were focused on consists of more than a hundred Class V rapids, making the river a more or less continuous 85-mile stretch of deadly whitewater.

Our team couldn鈥檛 have been stronger: Aniol, Rush Sturges, Mike Dawson, Ben Marr, and Brendan Wells. I was the graybeard of the group, 13 years older than the next-youngest paddler, Rush, who at 32 was starting to wonder how much longer he would push the edges of our sport. During my last trip to the Himalayas, to run the Tsangpo, I was the alpha. Now I was just hoping to keep up with the kids鈥攁nd grateful for the opportunity to try.听

The Indus is runnable only at its lowest flows, so we started in November 2017, once the monsoon floods had subsided. The river quickly demonstrated who was in charge. Just below the put-in, Aniol, who had run the Indus twice without major incident, was pushed into a river-wide hole that tore his helmet from his head, pulled his body out of the boat, and dragged him underwater for 40 yards. He emerged with a tweaked shoulder that would plague him for the rest of the trip. That was rapid number one.听

Everyone recognized that we鈥檇 all have good days and bad days, and that there was no shame in scaling it back when we weren鈥檛 feeling 100 percent, physically or mentally. The approach helped me measure my kayaking鈥攁nd my life鈥攏ot in wins and losses, but in whether I showed up with an open heart. If I had a bad day, I told myself it was my turn for the universe to kick my ass. If I had a good day, I enjoyed the flow of life. It was all so simple.听

As we pushed deeper into the Rondu Gorge, the canyon walls and the whitewater grew bigger. Navigating became a constant struggle between holding our lines and the river鈥檚 irresistible effort to push us where it pleased. There was one rapid, Zero to Sixty, that had been on my mind since the put-in and would test my limits.

The entire river pinches through a narrow gap, creating a three-story hole on the left that could eat a house. The only way through was to drive my kayak down a narrow ramp of water at the center and paddle like hell to hold my line. Aniol went before me, hit the bottom of the ramp, and was launched 20 feet into the air. I followed, paddling furiously to get onto the ramp. As lateral waves battered me, I slid down the ramp鈥檚 tongue, hit the bottom, got flipped, got pounded, and rolled back up. A good day.听

After a white-knuckle week, we reached the confluence of the Gilgit River, where the canyon walls gave way to a wide plain. I was overwhelmed: by the massive mountain peaks and the equally massive river; by the decades-long dream I鈥檇 just realized; by the sheer impossibility that I鈥檇 even had the opportunity to do so; and most important, by my gratitude to this next generation of paddlers for helping me rebuild my life. I leaned forward, put my head on the deck of my boat, and wept.

Three days after returning home, I was back in the hospital for an MRI, prepared for the worst. 鈥淭he tumor has stabilized,鈥� Jian told me. 鈥淣o growth.鈥� The results shocked us both. 鈥淲hat did you do?鈥� he asked.听

鈥淚 went kayaking,鈥� I replied.听

鈥淲ell,鈥� Jian suggested, 鈥渕aybe you shouldn鈥檛 stop.鈥�

At 47, Scott Lindgren () continues to fight his brain tumor and kayak the world鈥檚 most difficult rivers. Legacy, a documentary about his life directed by Rush Sturges, will premiere in 2020. Correspondent Thayer Walker () profiled big-wave surfer Mark Healey in 2016.

The post After a Hard Diagnosis, One Athlete Learns to Soften Up appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

The island of Mikomoto is a barren, windswept, wave-battered chunk of basalt infested with sharks and scoured by current, and looks as if it erupted from the fever dream of a malarial sea captain. Six miles offshore of Japan鈥檚 quiet port town of Minami-Izu, its waters are so treacherous that the 25-acre uninhabited island was chosen in 1870 as the site of one of the country鈥檚 first stone lighthouses, a 75-foot tower wrapped with black stripes. For Mark Healey, these are all the ingredients of a good time.

鈥淭his should be fun,鈥� he says as the Otomaru, our 40-foot chartered fishing boat, pulls into a rocky cove.

Clad head to toe in a three-millimeter camouflage wetsuit with fins to match, he looks like he just swam out of a Special Forces unit. He has a black GoPro camera (one of his many sponsors) strapped to his head; it鈥檚 an accessory so common in his daily life that it may as well be a permanent appendage. A knife is cinched at the hip to his weight belt, along with a trio of two-pound lead weights, custom-made to reduce drag in the water. A black glove protects his left hand. In his naked right he holds a four-foot teakwood Riffe speargun.

Healey takes a giant stride off the Otomaru into the 80-degree water. After a few minutes of deliberate breathing, he bends at the waist and dives. His fins鈥攖hree and a half feet long for freediving鈥攂reak the water with a gentle splash, then slide beneath the surface. One, two, seven long, smooth kicks take him down to 30 feet, at which point the lead weights take over, pulling him deeper. One minute in鈥攁 point when even strong divers would head up鈥擧ealey scans the depths and glides down to 80 feet.

A 34-year-old professional big-wave surfer, Healey has built a career chasing down the dangerous and nearly impossible. He鈥檚 a perennial finalist in the World Surf League鈥檚 鈥攖he discipline鈥檚 equivalent of the Oscars鈥攈aving won the top prize in the Biggest Tube category in 2009 for a barrel in Oregon and the Biggest Paddle-In Wave in 2014 for a 60-foot monster at Jaws, on Maui鈥檚 north shore. He once won the Surfer magazine poll for Worst Wipeout, crashing on a punishing wave at Teahupoo, in Tahiti, that would have vaporized most surfers. But Healey isn鈥檛 in Japan to ride waves鈥攈e鈥檚 here to swim with sharks.

As a member of a six-person scientific expedition, he has come to Japan for two weeks to tag an endangered population of scalloped hammerheads that congregate around Mikomoto. The sharks have plummeted in numbers by as much as 90 percent, largely due to overfishing and an insatiable appetite in Asia for fin soup. The scientists hope that the data they record, such as population sizes and migratory patterns, will improve conservation policies regionally and globally.

Between Austin Gallagher, the 30-year-old marine ecologist and founder of the conservation nonprofit who assembled the group, and the other scientists, there are enough degrees on board to rival a thermometer. Yet Healey, a man whose traditional schooling ended after the seventh grade, is the linchpin of the project. He鈥檚 a champion spearfisherman and freediver who can hold his breath for an astounding six minutes underwater, and the scientists can鈥檛 tag these notoriously hypersensitive sharks without him.

鈥淗ammerheads are nearly impossible to catch on a line without killing them,鈥� Gallagher says. 鈥淭hey need to be tagged on their turf, underwater. Because they鈥檙e so skittish, they stay away from the noise and bubbles created by scuba divers.鈥�

Battling a heavy swell and strong currents, Healey will dive as deep as 135 feet, sneak into a school of up to 100 sharks, shoot a few with satellite or acoustic radio tags in the noninvasive area behind the dorsal fin, and then swim back to the surface鈥攁ll on a single breath of air.

The hammerheads the team is after, which can grow to eight feet and 200 pounds, are small fry compared with the beasts Healey has previously pursued. In 2011, he traveled to Mexico鈥檚 Guadalupe Island to dive with great white sharks for a National Geographic television shoot. On the first day, after 30 minutes watching a trio of the one-ton animals arc through the water, Healey swam away from the safety of the boat and joined them. The biggest shark in the group interrupted its meander and made toward Healey like a guided missile. Is this a bad idea? he wondered, all the while holding his ground. As the shark swam beneath him, Healey extended his arm in a terrifying handshake and grabbed its dorsal fin.

The shark didn鈥檛 flinch any more than if Healey had been a remora. He wasn鈥檛 prey鈥攈e鈥檇 become an object for the sharks to use in competition for dominance. When he was paired off with one shark, the others stayed away. When a shark began to dive, Healey would let go. 鈥淭he last place you want to be is kicking 70 feet back up through the water column. That鈥檚 when they eat you,鈥� he told me.

During one ride, Healey was piggybacking on a shark as it approached a floating tuna head. He could feel the beast begin to open its giant mouth. Alarmed at what a feeding great white might do if it felt his full weight when it broke the surface, he slid off.

But after hours in the water in Japan, Healey hasn鈥檛 yet seen a shark. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a numbers game,鈥� he says during a post-dive recovery float. 鈥淭he more time I鈥檓 underwater, the more likely we are to find hammerheads.鈥� He takes a few more long breaths and disappears beneath the surface.

Watch:听Mark Healey Tags a Shark

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Scalloped hammerheads are famous for congregating in huge schools around seamounts. Thought to be attracted to the magnetism of volcanic islands like Cocos and the Gal谩pagos, in the eastern Pacific, and Mikomoto, they may use underwater rock formations as resting and social centers during the day and as points of reference for nocturnal hunting. Their distinctive heads could help them detect the electromagnetic signals of the earth and other animals.

The scientists aboard the Otomaru want to understand the very basics of these hammerheads. Why do they come to Mikomoto, what are they doing here, how long do they stay, and where do they go next? By identifying their habits and highways, the scientists can maximize conservation efforts.

Gallagher has put together an international group for the expedition. David Jacoby, a postdoctorate at the Zoological Society of London, studies shark social networks and once bred 1,000 cat sharks in captivity. Yannis Papastamatiou, also from the UK, is a jujitsu black belt who specializes in using underwater acoustics to study shark movement as an assistant professor at Florida International University. Yuuki Watanabe, an associate professor at Japan鈥檚 National Institute of Polar Research, is our local lead. Tre鈥� Packard, executive director of a Hawaii-based art and conservation nonprofit called the , suggested the expedition to Gallagher in the first place, having dived at Mikomoto before with one of only a handful of commercial operators that run trips here.

Our plan makes the long, hot August days on a small fishing boat almost civilized. At night we stay at a traditional Japanese guesthouse in Minami-Izu, eating delicious local fare as we sit on tatami-mat floors. Each morning we board the Otomaru by 8 a.m. and hit the water 30 minutes later. As an experienced freediver myself, I often follow Healey down but have no illusions of keeping pace.

Healey鈥檚 been on a previous research expedition, in 2014 in the Philippines, where he tagged nine thresher sharks. On this trip, he鈥檒l use two kinds of tags. Satellite tags will record the sharks鈥� seasonal migration, then pop off after six to twelve months, sending GPS data of the animal鈥檚 path from the surface. Smaller acoustic tags will stay on for up to a year and transmit local data when the shark comes within a few hundred feet of an underwater receiver, which the scientists will moor to the seafloor. The team plans to return annually to swap out the receivers, collect a year鈥檚 worth of acoustic data, and tag more sharks.

Studying these animals is not simply an academic exercise. Healthy hammerhead populations help maintain healthy oceans and economies. A in the journal Science correlated a more than 90 percent decline in hammerheads and other sharks along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. with an explosion in the population of their prey, cow-nosed rays. The rays then consumed enough bay scallops to collapse North Carolina鈥檚 century-old fishery. 鈥淧eople get so riled up about sharks for the same reasons they get riled up about politics and religion,鈥� Healey says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 all about power and control.鈥�

Which we don鈥檛 seem to have a lot of thus far. Though we鈥檝e been casting Healey over the side each day like a fishing lure, we still haven鈥檛 seen any hammerheads. To make matters more difficult, two Category 4 typhoons are spinning our way, threatening to cut our trip a week short, and the conditions at Mikomoto are deteriorating, bringing wind, rain, and seasickness. On the bow, one of the scientists heaves into the pitching waves, a fluorescent yellow blend of miso soup and stomach bile. Healey, astern and at ease, pulls out a tin of chewing tobacco, packs a dip, and awaits marching orders.

The four-person Japanese crew of the Otomaru鈥攁 captain, two sailors, and a divemaster鈥攁re eager to return to harbor as the boat gets nailed from all sides by the growing swell. But the team needs a win and decides on setting a receiver.

Gallagher, Jacoby, and Papastamatiou clamber into scuba gear. They plan to set the receiver a few hundred yards from shore. Once it鈥檚 secured, they鈥檒l fire a float to the surface, where the boat can take a GPS reading to mark it. The captain, however, doesn鈥檛 want to risk bringing the boat that close to the island. 鈥淚鈥檒l do it,鈥� says Healey, volunteering to swim to the float with his handheld GPS. 鈥淏ack into wardrobe.鈥�

The float pops up 20 minutes later, and Healey swims a quick 400 yards out and back. Wind and rain lash the deck and our faces; the black ocean is colored with whitecaps. Gallagher, Jacoby, and Papastamatiou surface and are swept toward a jagged house-size rock shaped, appropriately, like a shark fin. Inching toward them, the Otomaru gets pounded by waves.

鈥淭his is bad,鈥� Papastamatiou says in the water.

Gallagher looks concerned. 鈥淎re we going to be OK?鈥� he asks.

A deckhand throws a rope to the divers as the captain slams the boat in reverse to avoid hitting the rock. The Otomaru pitches like a rocking chair. One moment the gunwale is ten feet in the air, the next it鈥檚 slamming into the water. Healey helps haul the divers in one by one, a tumble of fins, tanks, and regulators.

鈥淭hat was an education,鈥� Papastamatiou says. The scientists are shell-shocked, and the crew is angry. The captain cranks the throttle to head back to shore. Healey throws his arms toward the heavens triumphantly, a grin stretching from here to the mainland.

Standing just five foot nine and 153 pounds, with ginger freckles, narrow-set eyes, and a chiseled jaw, Healey looks like a blend of Richie Cunningham and Aquaman. Though new to field biology, he鈥檚 been turning heads in the surf world for two decades. At the age of 14, he made a splash riding 30-foot waves at Waimea Bay. He cashed his first paycheck as a professional three years later and has been a fixture in the world鈥檚 scariest lineups ever since.

鈥淎s a waterman, Mark is unrivaled,鈥� says big-wave icon Laird Hamilton. 鈥淲hen it comes to riding giant waves, diving deep, and hunting fish, he鈥檚 the total package鈥攗nique even among us.鈥�

A knack for doing the right thing in the wrong place has landed Healey stuntman gigs on Chasing Mavericks and the reboots of Hawaii 5-0 and Point Break. About a year after walking away from his longtime sponsor Quiksilver, he helped launch the surf-apparel company in February 2015 as a minority partner and the face of the brand. But despite his success on a surfboard, it鈥檚 not his first love. 鈥淧eople always think of Mark as a professional surfer,鈥� says spearfishing record holder Cameron Kirkconnell, 鈥渂ut the truth is, he surfs to support his diving habit.鈥�

Healey learned to swim before he could walk and estimates that he鈥檚 spent 鈥渁 third of the year with a dive mask on since the age of 12.鈥� He was born and raised and still resides in Haleiwa, on Oahu鈥檚 North Shore. His father, Andy, is an avid waterman who would wrap his tiny toddler in a life vest, give him a mask and snorkel, and pull him through the water clinging to a fishing buoy. 鈥淗e took to it immediately,鈥� Andy recalls.

Fishing was a way of life in the Healey household, a passion born from a love of the ocean and the need to eat. On calm evenings, they would paddle a half-mile out to a lonely rock in the Pacific and cast lines until sunrise. 鈥淭here always had to be some element of misery to it,鈥� Healey remembers fondly.

Money was tight. Andy was a carpenter who pounded nails for a living and a boxing bag for fun. Healey鈥檚 mother, Bitsy, cleaned houses so she could keep an eye on him while she worked. 鈥淚t was hard to find a babysitter who could keep up with him,鈥� she says. They shared a three-bedroom house with termites and holes in the floor. Bitsy would cover the latter with throw rugs, which Mark turned into traps, baiting friends into a chase and laughing as they fell into the mud below. Mark and his brother, Mikey, bounced between public and private school until Bitsy began homeschooling them in 1994.

Pale, blond, freckled, and undersize, Healey suffered a phenotype cursed in his poor, rural neighborhood. He didn鈥檛 crack 100 pounds until long after he鈥檇 gotten his driver鈥檚 license. Bloody noses and black eyes weren鈥檛 uncommon. He would never be able to fight all the bullies, despite boxing training from his father and martial-arts classes. 鈥淚f you didn鈥檛 confront a situation, it would fester for years,鈥� Healey recalls. 鈥淭he only way to get any respect was to do things in the ocean that other people couldn鈥檛.鈥�

North Shore lifeguard Dave Wassel heard stories of this bobble-headed young gun who was riding giants. One day, while surfing at Pipeline, he noticed Healey 鈥渏ust owning it鈥� in surf two stories tall, breaking in water two feet deep. In the parking lot afterward, Healey did something else Wassel had never seen. He pulled out a stack of phone books and put them on the driver鈥檚 seat. 鈥淗e couldn鈥檛 see over the steering wheel!鈥� Wassel says. 鈥淭he kid was 17 years old, charging the heaviest waves in the world, and he needed a booster seat to drive home!鈥�

By day five, we are in desperate need of some of that Healey magic. Photographer Kanoa Zimmerman and I float on the surface, watching Healey dive. Four stories down, he swings into a hover, scanning the murk for shadows. A stiff current nudges him off-axis, but he levels himself with a twitch of the left fin. His movements are balletic, part of a subtle dance in which the slightest shifts are made with the greatest intention. 鈥淢ost people have the ability to be calm sometimes,鈥� Laird Hamilton told me, 鈥渂ut Mark鈥檚 calm all the time. That鈥檚 very useful in high-risk situations, whether riding giant waves or diving with sharks.鈥�

From below, a shadow appears. Two more arrive, then five, then dozens. Healey stirred up a school of Galapagos sharks loitering in a cloud of fish spawn.

Six feet long and too curious for my taste, they approach from all directions, darting within inches of me, probing for weakness like a pack of street punks in a dark alley. One of the biggest sharks has a distinctive wrinkle on its tail fin and approaches with its gills puffing and dorsal fins down, a display of aggression. All I see is toothy biomass, but Healey鈥檚 reading the fine print. 鈥淭he dominant ones are usually highest in the water column,鈥� he explains later. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e the ones that will test you. If you can trick them into thinking you鈥檙e the boss, the rest generally fall in line.鈥�

The key word is trick; Healey鈥檚 well aware of what even sharks like these can do to a femoral artery. Still, he doesn鈥檛 pass up the opportunity for play. Seeing that one of the sharks has a fishhook and line in its mouth, he takes the opportunity for a little benevolent dentistry, swimming down and yanking it out.

On the boat, preparing for another round of diving, I ask Gallagher if it makes sense to start tagging the Galapagos sharks. Water temperatures are hovering around the low eighties, which makes for easier diving but a challenging hammerhead hunt. When the ocean is this warm, the sharks stay deep to stay cool. The boat has a fish finder, but it doesn鈥檛 do much good tracking the fast-moving schools. Gallagher鈥檚 assurance at the beginning of the trip that we were heading to Mikomoto during a 鈥渕iracle season,鈥� when schools of 100 hammerheads are common, was starting to feel more like a taunt than encouragement. But the recent Galapagos sighting fuels optimism. 鈥淪ave the tags for the hammers,鈥� he says.

The crew of the Otomaru don鈥檛 share Gallagher鈥檚 enthusiasm. 鈥淪torm coming,鈥� says the captain, swinging the boat back toward the mainland.

We鈥檝e been in Japan nearly a week and haven鈥檛 tagged a single hammerhead, and the conditions will likely continue to worsen because of the impending typhoons. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a very good chance that if we don鈥檛 get a tag on a shark in the next 48 hours,鈥� Healey says, 鈥渢his whole thing is a bust.鈥�

At the guesthouse after dinner, Jacoby and Papastamatiou sit on the floor preparing mooring lines for more receivers. The materials should last years, Jacoby explains, 鈥渂ut that depends on the waves.鈥�

鈥淔orty feet deep should be fine,鈥� Healey says. 鈥淭he biggest wave I鈥檝e ever seen broke in 60 feet of water.鈥�

鈥淲here was that?鈥� I ask.

Healey, who鈥檚 constantly tracking storms and taking last-minute flights in search of the world鈥檚 biggest swells, pauses, weighing how much of this hard-won information to share. 鈥淎frica,鈥� he replies.

I press. 鈥淚s that your cagey way of saying, 鈥業鈥檓 not going to tell you, because that鈥檚 where I might find a 100-foot wave鈥�?鈥� He considers a reply, then thinks better of it, shaking his head as he walks away.

Healey knows each giant ride is a life or death proposition, and he鈥檚 seen the high cost of this obsession. In December 2005, pro surfer took an awkward wipeout at Pipeline and didn鈥檛 surface. Healey ran into the water, swimming laps through the lineup until he finally helped pull Joyeux鈥檚 body off the reef. 鈥淗is brother watched the whole thing,鈥� Healey recalls. 鈥淚鈥檇 run back up the beach, and when I passed him, I could see his expression changing from confusion to shock. I was probably the last person to shake Malik鈥檚 hand.鈥� Five years later, after Hawaiian surfer drowned at Maverick鈥檚, Healey accompanied his widow to California to retrieve his friend鈥檚 body.

鈥淭here are a lot of things working against people in this sport鈥� Healey says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 becoming apparent that those odds are coming up around me. I take my preparation very seriously, but there are so many factors to longevity besides the odds of surviving something bad. There鈥檚 the mental aspect. Once you鈥檝e seen one of your friends die, can you keep going? Once you鈥檝e helped their families and have seen the grief it causes, do you still want to do it? You have to be born with a certain personality type to keep coming back. But it will never be safe. And the day that it is, I won鈥檛 want to do it anymore.鈥�

Healey trains by surfing and diving most days, doing a variety of workouts on the beach and in the pool, and hiking and bow hunting in the mountains. He recently started doing a program a few times a week called , a hybrid of yoga and jujitsu focusing on movement and breath. Still, he鈥檚 no stranger to carnage, having split his kneecap in half, broken his heel, and ruptured his right eardrum four times, which left him disoriented underwater, nearly causing him to drown. Despite the dangers, he calls life as a professional surfer 鈥渢he greatest scam on earth.鈥� But he knows the ride won鈥檛 last. Now in his thirties, he has entered the decade that most pros call retirement. 鈥淭he surf industry will bro you into bankruptcy,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 would rather light myself on fire than go begging for pennies as a grown man.鈥� Instead of doubling down on contests and sponsorships, Healey is venturing into waters most surfers don鈥檛: building businesses.

In addition to Depactus, in 2014 he launched (HWO), an operation that gives high-paying and high-profile clients the chance to explore the ocean like, well, Mark Healey. Two-week guided experiences start at $100,000 and have Healey teaching clients how to swim with sharks, surf waves far beyond their comfort zone, spear giant tuna, or partake of any other saltwater adventure conceivable. From tech moguls to Arab royalty, his client roster is a Fortune 500 list of ocean enthusiasts. (Thanks to HWO鈥檚 nondisclosure agreement, Healey is as tight-lipped with names as he is about surf breaks.)

Volunteering for expeditions is also part of his expanded career plan. Remote seas are expensive to explore, and trips like this are a way to scout locations for other adventures and deploy his skills for a commendable purpose. 鈥淚 love having the opportunity to incorporate old knowledge like spearfishing into modern conservation and scientific discovery,鈥� he says.

The sky brightened the next morning. 鈥淢ark, it would be great if we could get some data on their behavior and get close to these animals,鈥� says Jacoby, the expert on shark social networks. Healey taps the GoPro on his forehead in affirmation.

We plunge into the ocean, which is still and blue, with 50-foot visibility and little current. The bathymetry is spectacular, a jigsaw of basalt domes, craggy ridgelines, and wide channels. The water explodes with life鈥攖here鈥檚 so much to see that it鈥檚 hard to focus. Thick schools of seven-inch-long fusiliers, blue with sunburst yellow racing stripes down their backs, swim in tight formation appropriate to their military namesake. Two pilot fish, the size of thumbnails and dressed in the black and white stripes of a convict, choose me as their escort.

Suddenly, a cry comes from the Otomaru. 鈥淢ark!鈥� Gallagher yells. The unmistakable falcate dorsal fin of a hammerhead cuts the surface, but it鈥檚 a football field upcurrent from Healey. He鈥檚 got no chance.

Healey climbs back aboard. Gallagher and Papastamatiou, staring down a shutout, finally tell him to start targeting Galapagos sharks, too. 鈥淚t鈥檚 valid data,鈥� Papastamatiou says with a hint of desperation. 鈥淣o one鈥檚 ever done that out here.鈥�

We motor toward the fin sighting, but the shark is long gone. We drop Healey into the water at the mouth of the cove where we moored the receiver a few days ago. Fifteen minutes later, he鈥檚 swimming back to the boat. 鈥淕ot a hammer,鈥� he says quietly. The boat erupts in cheer.

While the scientists slap backs and high-five, Healey sits alone on a far edge of the gunwale. He鈥檚 all business now, hunched over, elbows on his knees, hands cradling his chin. He doesn鈥檛 even bother to take off his mask between dives. Usually verbose, he replies curtly when asked what he鈥檚 seen down there: 鈥淪harks and darkness.鈥�

We head to the east side of the island. Zimmerman, Healey, and I jump in near an exposed rock and begin our drift. Zimmerman probes down to 40 feet where, beneath the layer of murk, he sees the spectral outlines of hammerheads. He follows the sharks and signals us to follow him. Healey鈥檚 only halfway through his rest cycle, but the current will blow us off the school if we don鈥檛 move now. He dives, pauses to scan the water column four stories down, and continues toward the bottom. I trail, a minute behind and 30 feet above him, straight into a school hundreds thick.

They鈥檙e beautiful animals of inspired design鈥攕late gray with a white underbelly, sleek and powerful, and wonderfully freakish. Their long, undulating brow is broken by right angles鈥攖hey have a 鈥渄ivergent body plan,鈥� as Gallagher describes it in one of his papers. The term hammerhead, if evocative branding, seems a misnomer. Flat and wide, the shark鈥檚 cephalofoil is more reminiscent of a chisel. Its mouth, usually the focus of hysterical phobia, is comparatively small and set downward, just north of its stomach, in the perfect place to feast on squid.

They move in concert, swaying through the water with silent grace. They are creatures that want to swim together and be left alone. Toward the center of the school, one of the larger females rolls on her side, flashing her pale underbelly in a mating display. Healey glides into the back of the school, takes aim at a seven-footer, and fires.

It鈥檚 a direct hit, right behind the dorsal fin, but it bounces off. With a few quick flicks of the tail, the shark disappears into the crowd. Healey grabs the tag as it sinks toward the bottom, then heads to the surface. He鈥檇 fixed the tag to the tip of the gun with a rubber band, which didn鈥檛 break. The setup needs tweaking, but Healey gets a second hammerhead before the afternoon wraps.

The last two days are an exercise in target practice. Healey tags Galapagos and hammerheads with both acoustic and satellite transmitters. The scientists set three more receivers, and by the time the typhoons wash Mikomoto in surge, we鈥檝e tagged ten sharks and set five receivers鈥攁 successful tally for a year-one expedition being cut short by nearly a week.

The scientists鈥� plan for their remaining time in Japan: temples in Kyoto, ramen and skyscrapers in Tokyo. Healey鈥檚 got other ideas. Just about every big-wave surfer in the western Pacific has been watching the buoys, and tomorrow is calling for 30-foot surf near Chiba, about 40 miles southeast of Tokyo. Healey has a friend flying in from Hawaii with an extra nine-six. There鈥檚 a train leaving in an hour. His hair isn鈥檛 even dry from diving, but if he hurries he鈥檒l be in Chiba by midnight. It鈥檚 the biggest swell Japan has seen in five years.

国产吃瓜黑料 correspondent Thayer Walker () is the cofounder of .

The post Mark Healey Is the Greatest Athlete You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

When you think of film producers whose movies have grossed $1 billion, the usual suspects come to mind: James Cameron, Ron Howard, Jerry Bruckheimer. Add to that list a humble surfer dude from Southern California named Greg MacGillivray. In 1963, MacGillivray cofounded the documentary studio MacGillivray Freeman Films. Since then, Laguna Beach鈥揵ased MFF has made 35 large-format features, including and , which has been running at the Smithsonian for 36 years. Today, Greg鈥檚 32-year-old son, Shaun, is carrying the Imax banner as MFF鈥檚 producer and managing director. In 2010, Shaun helped launch , an environmental campaign using the power of film to inspire people to protect the seas. The project鈥檚 first Imax film, , premiered in April. Walker recently caught up with Shaun in Laguna Beach, just after the filmmaker returned from an underwater shoot off Costa Rica鈥檚 remote Cocos Island, to talk about the future of Imax and hear the stories behind some of MFF鈥檚 most exotic shoots.听

submersible, Cocos Island, Costa Rica

The DeepSee submersible, Cocos Island, Costa Rica

submersible, hammerhead sharks

Viewing hammerhead sharks from the submersible

Svalbard

Shooting in Svalbard for To the Arctic 3D

How was Costa Rica?
Amazing. Cocos Island is a marine reserve in the Pacific, 340 miles off the coast. I shot from a submarine for the first time, and the film crew went down more than 1,000 feet. Most people don鈥檛 realize it, but that鈥檚 where most underwater life exists. Occasionally, a ragged-tooth shark, hammerhead, or manta ray would dart through, but the most amazing thing was these brilliant flashes of bioluminescence that would light up every 20 minutes or so like fireworks displays.听

Tips on shooting below 1,000 feet?
Don鈥檛 drink coffee before going in a sub.

You鈥檝e worked in all kinds of environments. Why the massive commitment to ocean filmmaking and conservation?
The ocean sustains all life as we know it. It produces more oxygen than all the rainforests combined.听

One World One Ocean is billed as a 20-year effort. That鈥檚 a long haul.
A lot of ocean campaigns last six months or a year, and then everyone forgets about it. We want to do something people can鈥檛 ignore. In the next five years, we鈥檙e making three Imax films, a feature film, an eight-part television series, and hundreds of online segments. We鈥檙e investing $10 million ourselves, and profits go toward ocean-focused educational grants, conservation, and fellowships. We鈥檙e going to be slammed, but that鈥檚 what we want.

Your dad towed you around the world while making films. What鈥檚 your first memory from a set?
I was three, and my dad was shooting a scene with a trained tiger in Northern California. When the cat saw me, he got this look in his eyes. He wanted to eat me. The trainer saw what was happening, so he screamed at someone to lock me in the car. I don鈥檛 know if I was more upset about nearly being eaten or missing out on the scene.

Why do you guys shoot everything in Imax? It鈥檚 such a challenging format.
It鈥檚 a love-hate relationship. Imax cameras are by far the best way to capture images for the giant screen. But they shoot only three minutes of film at a time, they take 15 minutes to reload, and they weigh 400 pounds. An Imax film costs $1,000 a minute. Every time you press the record button, it鈥檚 hundreds of dollars. This isn鈥檛 conventional wildlife filmmaking, where you press record and see what happens. You learn to anticipate, or you lose a lot of money.

I鈥檓 guessing you鈥檝e seen some pretty scary FedEx bills.
Seriously. You ever ship 5,000 pounds of film equipment to the Arctic? Twenty-five grand. That鈥檚 just for one shoot.

What鈥檚 the average production cost of one of your movies?
Ten million dollars.听

How long does it take to get the footage you need?
It depends. In the Arctic, we鈥檇 spend ten hours filming caribou from the air and be lucky to get 15 minutes of footage, of which we鈥檇 use 20 seconds.听

Then comes the editing. When do you know you鈥檝e got it right?
We鈥檒l test 20 different rough cuts with audiences before we settle on a final cut. Telling a good story is an art and a science.

You spent eight months shooting To the Arctic. What鈥檚 most memorable?
Trailing a polar bear and her two cubs for five days. She fended off four attacks from males who wanted to eat her cubs. Being a mother is a tough job. We also spent four weeks on a boat in Svalbard with 11 guys, a broken water filter, and no showers. Your nose can get used to anything. Except walruses. They are the worst-smelling animals on the planet.

Any close calls up there?
One of the most difficult things about the cold is filming under ice. It was so cold the regulators froze. Our cameramen would be 100 feet from the hole with no air, carrying an Imax camera.听

Then you sent them down to film swimming polar bears?
Yeah, but we never saw the polar bears dive below seven feet. We felt like the crew were pretty safe if they were below that. But I鈥檇 never do it.听

Your movies are in places like museums and aquariums instead of multiplexes. That鈥檚 a curious distribution model for a studio that鈥檚 generated $1 billion.
In a museum, most of our films enjoy a run of six months to years. To Fly is still playing at the , and it came out in 1976. It plays every half hour, every day. When one of our movies goes into a multiplex, it runs for three weeks.听

So no urge to go to Hollywood?
No. A $10 million documentary can change people in ways that a $300 million blockbuster can鈥檛. That鈥檚 why I get out of bed every day.

What鈥檚 the best thing you鈥檝e learned from your father?
Quality, quality, quality. Keep working at it until it鈥檚 the best it can be.

You鈥檙e married, with a 14-month-old son. How do you balance filmmaking with family life?
It鈥檚 constant evaluating and compromising. I want to be a really good dad, but I also have to be on location when it鈥檚 a major priority. Growing up, I loved being on location with my dad. I really want to be able to share that with my family.

Minus the tiger?
Definitely minus the tiger.

The post Rare Heir appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

PARAGLIDING IS A TRICKY LITTLE SPORT. You've got your wind, you've got your mountains, you've got your gravity, and then, in instances like this, you've got your stubborn Indian bureaucrats whose sole purpose on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning is to ensure that you don't go paragliding.

McClurg above camp 360

McClurg above camp 360

听

“This license does not have a stamp,” a bespectacled official informs one member of our group of 15 as we pack into his windowless concrete office. “We cannot allow you to go paragliding without a stamp.”

Things have not gone smoothly over the past two weeks in Bir, a paragliding haven on the front range of the Indian Himalayas. Hang gliders discovered this place in the early eighties, and paragliders caught on a decade later. The sport began as a way for climbers to descend quickly from peaks and has overtaken hang gliding in popularity due to its ease and lower risk factor. Between the end of September and late November, calm weather, steady thermals, and ideal topography make Bir one of the best places to fly long distances, and today it draws hundreds of international paragliders.

听

But this year, paragliders, harnessed to a thin nylon wing and powered only by the wind, have been falling from the sky like bricks. One pilot survived a crash, but during the two-day extraction a rescuer fell to his death. Another pilot flew too deep into the mountains and simply vanished. And just yesterday, the day I arrived, someone broke his back during a botched landing. Fearing more accidents, the government has suddenly demanded that every pilot have a copy of his paragliding license and insurance, a 180-degree departure from the normal laissez-faire protocol. It's hard logic to argue with, but we're arguing anyway.

“We are the best team on the mountain,” howls Eddie Colfox, co-founder of Him颅alayan Sky Safaris, steamrolling over the fact that some of his clients don't have all the requisite paperwork copied in triplicate and buried under a mountain of stamps and passport photos. Colfox, 41, is a bear of a man, with fiery red hair and a thick beard. He's one of the best long-distance pilots in the world, and has reached heights of 24,600 feet in Pakistan. Before he started flying, in 1993, he built and crewed sailboats; now, when he's not guiding paragliders around the world, he teaches geography to middle- and high-schoolers in Beaminster, England.

For the past three years, Himalayan Sky Safaris聴composed of Englishmen Colfox; John Silvester, 50, considered the sport's Babe Ruth for his 93-mile solo flight deep into the Karakoram; and 40-year-old Oxford Sanskrit scholar Jim Mallinson聴has safely led experienced pilots on trips around the Himalayas, and none of the recent carnage involved their clients. In fact, Colfox was the first on the scene in yet another recent rescue, an all-night affair that required getting a man with a compound leg fracture off an exposed face at 10,000 feet.

All this talk of broken bodies has made me reassess my purpose here. I've come along with the group of 15 experienced clients to be a guinea pig for Himalayan Sky Safaris' new tandem trips, in which the guides take nonfliers leapfrogging from peak to peak, camping in remote locales. The prospect seems to be getting dimmer by the moment.

The office soon fills with a United Nations of fliers聴Russians, Swiss, Ukrainians, Brits, Indians, Americans聴many of whom are suffering from similar paperwork inconsistencies. Tempers boil over, and four-letter pleasantries flutter about in three different languages. No stamps, no flying. Finally, Colfox, our team diplomat, ends the discussion with a coarse sprachgef眉hl. “You're all f!@#$%聢!” he roars and storms out.

On the road, our team has a confab. Those with their paperwork in order, like me, will head up the mountain; the rest will stay below to sort it out. I hop into a jeep and make my way to the launch, where the real circus is unfolding.

听

听

THOUGH EVIDENCE suggests the contrary, Bir is usually a quiet little town. For decades this community of tea plantations and rice paddies in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, 250 miles north of Delhi, was little more than an afterthought on the road between McLeod Ganj, seat of the exiled Tibetan government, and Manali, a bustling Himalayan tourist town.

听

听

During peak paragliding season, however, there are around five operators and several hundred fliers. The carnage level this year is pretty typical, but it has been increasing as the sport becomes more popular. While only three people have died here over the past seven years, injuries are routine聴with twisted ankles and broken arms comparable to rock climbing's.

The Colonel's Resort, a tented camp and guesthouse owned by a retired Indian colonel, serves as our headquarters. We drive up the mountain every morning at 9:30, launch around noon, and touch down about three hours later. We plan to launch from Billing聴just up the road from Bir聴most days, and will take one overnight trip. (Future trips will include multiple nights out.)

My first morning at the launch downshifts to the languid pace one might expect from people who spend their free time talking about the weather. Fliers stand around drinking tea and staring toward the heavens, but when the first raptor swings into a thermal聴meaning the ground has heated up enough to generate rising columns of hot air聴the lollygagging turns to chaos.

More than 100 people crowd the launch, a cleared hilltop that drops steeply into rhododendron and pine forest. A local TV crew conducts interviews, rubbernecking Indian soldiers chat up female pilots, an amputee with a hook for a hand spreads out her gear, and a Russian guy flits about wearing a T-shirt that reads, YOU'RE NOT CRAZY ENOUGH FOR ME.

Pilots clothesline each other with rigging lines in their rush to take off; someone manages to tear a wind sock out of the ground during an adventurous launch; and those are the success stories. Aborted launch after aborted launch, wings go down like pheasants during hunting season, and everyone seems more interested in snatching the vacated patch of grass than checking to see if their comrades are OK.

Colfox, Silvester, and Mallinson have stayed below, so I'm flying with former Indian national champion Debu Choudhury. Half Italian and half Bengali, Choudhury, 30, began flying when he was 14, running off of small hills in his hometown of Manali. Today he splits his time between India, Nepal, and Austria, working as an instructor and tandem guide. He speaks six languages, though he's not much of a talker. “It looks like a good day to go out the back,” he offers, fixated on the cloudless sky.

Bir sits at roughly 4,700 feet in the Kangra Valley and owes its superlative flying conditions in part to the 15,000-foot Dhauladhar Range, which slams abruptly through the ground like a giant granite sucker punch. No foothills or other geologic foreplay stands between the Kangra and these “White Mountains,” so the thermals are steady and well groomed. Most fliers stick to the first ridgeline, overlooking the wide valley; only the best pilots venture “out the back,” into the heart of the Himalayas, where the weather can change instantaneously.

I earned my novice license months ago in the San Francisco Bay Area but have never flown in a setting like this. We find a launch spot and cinch into our respective harnesses. To ease my apprehensions about flying straight into the largest mountain range on the planet with nothing but a wing made from nylon, I'll be hitched to the crotch of a man I met just three hours ago. On Choudhury's command we start running, and the next thing I know I'm spinning my feet in the air like Wile E. Coyote. We're flying.

I lean back in the harness and swing my legs forward, as if I'm reclining in an easy chair, and Choudhury does the same. Warm rising air fills the wing, and Choudhury works the ridgeline with mathematical precision. We launch at 7,800 feet, bounce to 10,000 feet so we have enough altitude to glide over to the next ridge, hit a thermal elevator up to 11,500 feet, and turn out the back.

A wide valley stretches beneath us, framed by a skyline of rock and ice stacked to the horizon. Our snow-frosted destination stands in the foreground, just another 14,000-foot peak no one has bothered to name.

In most sports, giving a novice this kind of experience is purely theoretical. But flying with Choudhury, I am reaching places accessible to only the most skilled pilots, and the scale is difficult to comprehend. Giant riverbeds look like pebbled footpaths and 80-foot trees like blades of grass, but the mountains rise unrelentingly, bigger and bigger and bigger.

We buzz the nameless peak one thousand feet below the summit when clouds move in聴our cue to move out. Clouds are the equivalent of a black hole, and fliers who get sucked into them can freeze to death, crash into a mountain, or take a violent ride through the upper troposphere.

Perhaps the most infamous example came in 2007, when champion paraglider Ewa Wisnierska was sucked into a storm cloud in Australia and pulled from 2,500 feet to more than 32,000 feet in about 15 minutes. She passed out for half an hour while her wing continued flying, until she finally regained consciousness and safely landed. She was incomprehensibly lucky; another flier was killed in the same storm, his body recovered 47 miles from his launch site.

We turn around and head toward Bir. Once we're above the landing zone, a fallow rice paddy behind a Tibetan monastery, Choudhury swings the glider back and forth like a pendulum with a trick called “wingovers.”

“Why do we do that?” I inquire nervously.

“For fun,” Choudhury chuckles.

“Right. Fun. Well, that scares me. Just so you know.” He promptly straightens the wing out and we resume a gradual聴and suddenly very boring聴descent.

“Debu,” I ask, “can we do that again?”

THE REST OF OUR CREW has its paperwork sorted out by my third day, so we take to the skies for an overnight trip to 360, an aptly named campground of terraced rice paddies 12 miles away, with stunning and unobstructed views of the Himalayas. Today I'm girdled to Colfox, while dozens of pilots soar in the launch thermal, circling like fish in an aquarium roundabout聴only not so organized. We climb quickly to avoid the traffic and glide to the next ridge.

Each guide keeps an eye on two or three of the solo flying clients, and one of Colfox's charges, an Icelander named Thorr, is having problems staying up. He's only a few hundred feet above the trees when a voice over the radio crackles, “Thorr, you might want to think about landing.”

“I got him,” Colfox replies. He pulls the right brake, increasing drag on the right side of the canopy, which causes us to corkscrew downward, turning the earth into a green-and-brown vertigo spiral until we're about 100 feet above the struggling pilot. Colfox聴part Sherlock Holmes, part Orville Wright聴sniffs out a thermal above a flat patch of sunbaked ground and yells, “Follow me!” Thorr happily obliges, and soon we're all back among the birds.

We bimble along the knuckled ridgeline for two hours, but it's taxing work for Colfox, because the thermals aren't strong enough that we can punch through the inversion layer to get high. Created when warmer air sits atop cooler air, an inversion layer is like a piece of plastic wrap across the sky. In strong thermals, you can pop right through; anything less and you end up getting bounced back like a kernel in a popcorn cooker.

What paragliding lacks in physical requirements it compensates for with its demand for mental acuity. Pilots chase an invisible and dynamic medium through a three-dimensional playing field and are required to understand both weather and topography. It helps to keep in mind that air moves in currents, just like water. When water hits a rock, it creates a disturbance in the form of a ripple or wave or rapid. When an air current hits a ridgeline or a mountain or even just a thermal gradient, it does the same thing. The difference is, the kayaker can see his hazards, while the paraglider has to visualize and anticipate them. This can be extremely difficult even for skilled pilots. Anyone can get into trouble.

We all land at 360 to find our ground support from the Colonel's Resort already setting up camp. Gavin McClurg, an American catamaran captain who's been paragliding for five years, takes off for one last ridge soar. He launches effortlessly while Colfox and photographer Jody MacDonald gear up for a tandem flight to take aerial shots. A band of thin lens-shaped clouds called lenticulars has spread across the sky, signaling incoming weather, and the wind is picking up uncharacteristically for this late in the day. “I'm not sure about this,” Colfox tells MacDonald. “The conditions are looking pretty weird.”

As if on cue, a dreadful fluttering fills the air. McClurg's wing stalls 300 feet above the ground and he's spinning, spinning, spinning down. He disappears below the ridgeline with a muffled thud, followed by silence. Colfox, MacDonald, and I sprint toward him and come to an unexpected sight: McClurg calmly packing up his paraglider. A few feet from impact, the wing miraculously found purchase and McClurg landed gently on his feet.

Over whiskey, dinner, and a roaring campfire, the fliers parse the incident. How did the wing stall? Was it turbulence? How did McClurg recover? They press to understand what happened in order to assess the risk for themselves. Concrete answers, however, are elusive. Sometimes these things just happen.

WHEN THINGS DO HAPPEN, Suresh Thakur is usually one of the first to know. A former paraglider himself, the 32-year-old local co-founded the Bir search-and-rescue team six years ago. The volunteer team tracks all search-and-rescue accidents and is involved in many of the rescue and recovery missions. It's been a busy season, so after four days of paragliding, which ended with a smooth return trip from 360 to Bir, I visit Thakur at his modest Internet caf茅, which doubles as team headquarters.

It's 4:30 P.M. and a call has just come in. A Ukrainian pilot named Igor went down an hour ago. We don't have any GPS coordinates and know only that before losing radio communication, Igor said he could see a bridge. It's not the most helpful description, considering the multitude of rivers draining these peaks, but if we don't look, no one will. Five Indian searchers, two Ukrainians, and I pile into a jeep and drive into the evening.

We try to move quickly, a goal often at odds with reality in India. The roads, tight and treacherous, are peppered with spooked donkeys and broken-down buses. It's getting darker, so we pin the tail on a random hill and begin to climb. We should at least break a sweat before sentencing this man to a night alone in the mountains. “Igor!” we yell. It's a symbolic effort.

We return to Bir at midnight and leave at eight the next morning with little more information than yesterday. We share no lingua franca with the Ukrainians, a barrier that has already proven problematic. Since it's too cold and early for paragliders to fly, and the government isn't getting involved, our best plan involves driving around, hoping to pick up Igor's radio signal. Every 20 minutes someone bleats out a call, always answered by silence. “I hope his battery is not dead,” Thakur says.

By noon, paragliders are in the sky and we pull out at an overlook. Igor's voice briefly crackles over the radio. Thakur pantomimes to one of the Ukrainians to tell Igor to make a fire, but without a common language we can't exchange any more information. A paraglider flies overhead, tells us he sees something, and then gives us erroneous coordinates聴that we ignore聴pointing to a location 50 miles away. We sit around the car waiting for the injured man to make a fire that we may or may not be able to see.

“It's like looking for fish in urine,” Thakur says, scanning the mountainside, arms folded behind his back. “It's impossible.”

Still, we drive up a side canyon to the confluence of two idyllic rivers that suffer the unfortunate fate of being in a fine location for a new dam. The workers haven't seen any paragliders, but we park, hopscotch through their blast field anyway聴over sticks of dynamite set to detonate in a few hours聴and scramble into the mountains.

We climb to a plateau around 9,000 feet, where our signal fire and radio calls yield nothing but melancholy. It's too dark to climb down now, so seven of us cram into an abandoned shepherd's mud hut and bed down on straw for the cold, long night.

The next morning, half the team stays in the mountains; the rest of us return to Bir, and I head to the airport to catch a flight to Delhi. Several days later, news will filter through that Igor's family hired a helicopter team that found him alive, with spinal injuries, after six days in the snowy mountains. But as my plane takes off, that stroke of miraculous luck is still unthinkable. I stare out the window to watch the world's tallest mountain range sweep by in miniature. Suddenly the view doesn't feel so novel.

The post Paragliding trips in the Indian Himalayas appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

THERE IS A STORY THAT engineer Graham Hawkes tells to explain why he began building strange winged submarines, and it takes place, quite naturally, in a cloud of muck on the seafloor.

Hawkes at Hawkes Ocean Technologies

Hawkes at Hawkes Ocean Technologies, Point Richmond, California

The Super Falcon

The Super Falcon

The Super Falcon

The Super Falcon

Hawkes with the Super Falcon

Hawkes with the Super Falcon

In 1984, Hawkes engineered a submarine called Deep Rover I. The one-person sub was cutting-edge technology, and Hawkes, then 37, had already established himself as a prominent ocean engineer. Deep Rover I’s giant, five-and-a-half-inch-thick acrylic dome provided its pilot with a galaxy of perspective鈥攏early 360 degrees of horizontal view鈥攁nd its manipulator claws were robust enough to carry hundreds of pounds of rock yet delicate enough to cradle an egg. The sub looked like a giant fishbowl mounted in a skeleton of metal and had a maximum depth of 3,280 feet. To this day, Hawkes calls the Deep Rover series “the most advanced conventional submarines” he has ever engineered, though he lingers over the term “conventional” with unguarded disdain.

Deep Rover I was tested in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a Canadian company called Can-Dive, and the sub made headlines in the quiet fishing port. For its public unveiling, a stage was erected on the harbor, and a band played for local dignitaries. Flashing a streak of showmanship, Hawkes rose from the harbor in Deep Rover I wearing a tuxedo.

But Hawkes, a charming Brit with a sharp avian nose befitting his last name, had already put the sub through sea trials and come away with an unsettling conclusion. His vessel, like the scientific submarines that dominate deep-sea exploration to this day, took its propulsion cues from hot-air balloons: It traveled vertically through the water column with ease鈥攂ut moved along the horizontal plane with the haste of an ant crawling through Jell-O.

During one test, Hawkes had his epiph颅any. After sinking 50 feet through Halifax Harbor, he met a plucky crab standing its ground. The crustacean waved its pincers aggressively. Hawkes looked at his submarine’s giant manipulator claws, then back at the crab. “At that moment,” he recalls, “I realized that Deep Rover was just a big crab. We were both scurrying around on the surface of the planet, and neither of us were actually able to get up and move in three dimensions.”

That revelation has dominated his life for more than a quarter century and is one that, he hopes, will shake the very foundations of marine science, change the way the world manages the oceans, and help steer humanity off a dangerous and misguided course.”My God,” he said to himself, sitting at the bottom of the harbor and the top of his profession, “I’ve been doing this all wrong.”

A HUGE GULF SEPARATES the act of identifying a problem and actually solving it. The verdict on Hawkes鈥攁 transformative visionary or simply a bombastic engineer?鈥攊s still pending.

Hawkes wears the obscure crown of world’s most famous submariner. He co-holds the record for the deepest solo dive in the world (3,000 feet), played a submarine-driving henchman in the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, and made an appearance in the Dan Brown novel Deception Point as a “genius sub designer” whose plans were stolen by a maniacal engineer. He’s since become the guy the world’s most prominent businessmen and explorers call when they want a submarine.

James Cameron used a Deep Rover model to film the 2005 Imax documentary Aliens of the Deep. Before Steve Fossett died in a 2007 plane crash, Hawkes was building the multi-millionaire retired trader the first one-person submersible intended to dive to the ocean’s deepest point, 36,201 feet, in the Mariana Trench. This February, he announced his newest star client, Richard Branson, who is launching Virgin Oceanic, an ocean-tourism venture, with one of Hawkes’s machines, and is also interested in taking up where Fossett left off.

Now 62, Hawkes has spent the past year trying to get the rest of the world to embrace his vision of ocean exploration, a campaign that began in earnest on a cool San Francisco evening this past spring, when Hawkes presented his case to a packed lecture hall at the California Academy of Sciences.

“We largely think Earth is explored, and we have the vehicles we need to master this planet, [but] that’s only our terrestrial third,” Hawkes said, scanning the crowd of business moguls, scientists, and enthusiasts through round-rimmed spectacles. The ocean is the “core of all life, and for some reason this deep space is the last we set about tackling.”

To illustrate his vision of the future鈥攁nd the vehicle that will take us there鈥擧awkes is rolling out the DeepFlight Super Falcon, a machine he claims will “put marine science back on track.” On temporary exhibit downstairs, the sleek silver craft is fast, light, and relatively cheap鈥攁nd looks as if it zoomed out of an Isaac Asimov novel.

Hawkes has built more than 60 subs since graduating in 1969 from London’s Borough Polytechnic Institute, and standing at the podium, he takes the audience on a brief historical tour of his inventions. His first winged submarine, the single-passenger DeepFlight I, launched in 1995 with a maximum depth of 4,000 feet. In 2002, he built a two-person version, DeepFlight Aviator, to reach 1,500 feet, and in 2005 he began DeepFlight Challenger, designed to take Fossett to the ocean’s bottom. He sold his first Super Falcon, a $1.5 million, 4,300-pound craft that can dive to 1,000 feet, to venture capitalist Tom Perkins in 2007, then promptly finished the one he was building for himself.

Compared with the staggering depth Challenger was designed to withstand, 1,000 feet is shallow, but Hawkes insists that the Super Falcon is the more advanced machine. Challenger was built to dive deep and come back up; the Super Falcon was built to explore, and because it’s so light, it doesn’t demand an expensive, crew-intensive ship for transport.

Hawkes takes exception to conventional scientific submarines鈥攊n particular Alvin, which is operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, responsible for some of the world’s most important scientific discoveries, and is one of just five submarines in the world that can dive below 14,000 feet. Stripped down, these craft are simply spherical titanium pressure hulls with portholes for windows, a design that hasn’t evolved much since Alvin became the world’s first deep-diving sub, in 1964.

“Alvin has a wonderful track record,” Hawkes says, “but if I told you that I built one machine 40 years ago but there is still only one鈥攖hat is an abject failure. It’s fat, dumb, and too expensive.” Alvin has a two-year scheduling process and costs $42,000 per day, an expense largely consumed by the 274-foot mother ship needed to transport its 36,000 pounds.

Hawkes laments the federal government’s $21 million allocation to Woods Hole to upgrade Alvin. “Woods Hole is focused on old, heavy iron consuming their budget, but we need multiple inexpensive points of entry,” he says, driving a finger into the invisible chest of lumbering bureaucracy. He draws a parallel to the computer revolution: A handful of giant, expensive, do-everything mainframes owned by a few institutions didn’t change the world; cheap desktops in every home did. He has similarly grand plans for the Super Falcon and its descendants.

At the end of the talk he opened the academy’s floor to questions. One line of inquiry went conspicuously overlooked. If Hawkes’s machines are so transformative, if their light weight allows them to explore the ocean at a fraction of the price of other subs, why does DeepFlight I live under a dust jacket in his workshop? Why are Hawkes and his client Perkins the only people to actually own a Super Falcon? Why, for nearly two decades, has the scientific community ignored Graham Hawkes’s marvelous flying submarines?

“GRAHAM IS the lunatic fringe,” chuckles Dave Gallo, Woods Hole’s director of special projects, in half jest. “He has built great vehicles that push the limit, but we have a vehicle [in Alvin] that makes 200 scientific dives a year. It’s not meant to be a great leap in submarine design; it’s meant to be reliable, like a taxi. If you want to build a machine that does everything, you end up with Alvin.”

Critics contend that Hawkes’s machines are too specialized to provide widespread scientific value. Because they are positively buoyant (a safety factor), they float toward the surface when they aren’t moving forward. They don’t stop or hover, and they don’t collect samples.”I don’t agree with Hawkes’s philosophy at all,” says Phil Nuytten, CEO of the North Vancouver, B.C.鈥揵ased undersea-technology firm Nuytco Research and a longtime friend and rival of Hawkes. “Stopping and hovering is 85 percent of what a submarine does. Graham’s flying subs are wonderful but not for a full-scale research sub.” Nuytten has designed his own flying research sub, which is neutrally buoyant and can stop and hover.

“Over the years, Graham has advanced the technology of these small transportable submarines more than anyone,” says oceanographer Sylvia Earle, Hawkes’s ex-wife and former business partner. But Earle concedes: “As a scientist, I need to stop and look and work. The best experiences I have had have been sitting in one place.”

Hawkes heard this criticism when he launched DeepFlight I, in 1995, and he still turns a shade of crimson when he hears it today. “I have built 60 submersibles that stop and hover!” he cries one afternoon at Hawkes Ocean Technologies, his Point Richmond, California, workshop, referring to the machines he designed before his winged subs. “I don’t have to prove that to anybody!”

What he has proved is that he can build a submarine that’s lighter than most and therefore has the potential to dramatically cut the cost of marine science and exploration. HOT’s office windows reflect million-dollar yachts moored a stone’s throw away in San Francisco Bay, though inside, the scene is more grit than glamour. Hawkes’s global headquarters is a single room of bare concrete walls cluttered with motherboards, and getting from one side to the other requires tap-dancing around four submarines. There’s no lobby or receptionist, and the coffee brews by the dog food for Allie, the company’s mutt mascot.

Rather than subject himself to the red tape that comes with government funds, Hawkes has gotten the money for his winged subs largely on his own, through private sponsorship or from his own pocket. Money he receives from a weapons-systems company he started in 1997 offers a steady income, and it took him ten years to build his first winged sub, DeepFlight I. The project began after he sold his vintage Jaguar to buy the expensive acrylic dome, and it was completed only when he poured in more of his own money.

“We’re great at getting people excited, but we’re not great closers,” says Hawkes’s wife, Karen, who runs the PR and daily operations of the business. (Hawkes has been married three times and has six children.) “Money doesn’t motivate Graham; engineering does.” There’s just one problem with that: It’s hard to convince the world your sub is superior if you can’t find the cash to build it. Over the past two decades, HOT has completed only three deep-diving winged subs.

The son of a postman, Hawkes grew up in a working-class London neighborhood. To his family’s chagrin, he discovered his talents by taking apart household electronics. He studied general engineering and, right out of university, hooked up with a company making underwater weapons units. “That was the first time I put a strategy together,” says Hawkes. “Manned submarines were so badly designed that I thought I could do better.”

Hawkes struck out on his own to develop an offshore-oil-rig diving suit called the Wasp, and in 1979 he used it for safety backup while Sylvia Earle made a world-record plunge to 1,250 feet in Hawaiian waters wearing another suit that Hawkes had worked on. The two started Deep Ocean Engineering near Berkeley in 1981 and wed five years later. With Earle’s environmental ethic and Hawkes’s engineering prowess, they hatched Ocean Everest, a plan to build a fleet of lightweight winged subs that could explore the ocean’s greatest depths.

“The oceans contain the whole future of the human race,” says Hawkes. “To misunderstand this planet as badly as we do is just plain dangerous.”

He’s right. In 2009, NASA had a $17.6 billion budget to explore other worlds, while the federal budget for ocean exploration was about $750 million. Which is part of the reason Hawkes trailblazes ahead on his own. While it took a chance encounter with an ornery crab to convince him that he had been doing everything wrong, an impromptu dance with a school of hammerheads convinced him he was finally doing it right.

When Hawkes turned the Super Falcon over to Tom Perkins, in fall 2007, the two put the machine through sea trials in Mexico. They sailed Perkins’s 289-foot Maltese Falcon from San Francisco to Roca Partida, Mexico, a lump of basalt 450 miles offshore that rises from the Pacific like a guano-frosted tuning fork. Bands of heavy swell and a strong current rocked the massive yacht when it dropped anchor one mile from Partida, and Hawkes was reluctant to put his baby in the water. He had visited Partida once before with his first winged sub, DeepFlight I, but refused to dive it, due to treacherous conditions.

“Every other submarine I had ever been involved with would have been lethal to take in the water,” Hawkes recalls. This time around, Perkins wasn’t buying it. “You built this sub,” Perkins said, pointing at the rock, “to do that.”

Hawkes and Perkins’s son, Tor, jumped in, and a crane lowered them into the Pacific. The Super Falcon porpoised through the water column, despite a two-knot current that would have stifled many subs. The men circled Partida through a series of ecosystems: Colorful clouds of reef fish filled the shallows; schools of jacks patrolled 30 feet down; tuna prowled deeper.Hawkes pushed the nose down and circled, at 200 feet, below and behind a gang of hammerhead sharks. Above them, schools of fish swam around the pinnacle in a slow private symphony. The sharks seemed oblivious to the sub. Hawkes recalls thinking, We must be the first humans in all of history to be stalking sharks.

As Hawkes brought the sub up, one of the bigger sharks spotted them. Suddenly he was playing a game of chicken with a ten-foot hammerhead. Three feet from the nose of the sub, the shark peeled off; Hawkes arced back to the ship. “That was when everything fell into place,” says Hawkes. “Try doing that in a regular submarine.”

HAWKES IS STILL testing the limits of his machine. He’s been holding “flight schools,” three-day, $15,000 pilot courses for enthusiasts and potential buyers. In the process, he’s managed to smash the Super Falcon’s nose on a rock, chew up its propeller in flotsam, and get it wrapped in kelp to the point that a safety diver had to cut him out. I meet him at Breakwater Cove Marina, in Monterey, California, for a briefing. “We’re going to be super-conservative and you’re going to be slightly disappointed,” he says. “Tough luck.”

He’s wearing salt-crusted Ray-Bans and a backward ball cap embroidered with the word PILOT, and he’s joined by marine ecologist Stosh Thompson, president of Marine Environmental Research, in Hawaii. Thompson has long wanted to study the ecosystem between 135 and 400 feet, a “twilight zone” largely beyond the range of scuba divers, and had planned on buying a Super Falcon before the economic collapse. “If we could have one of these,” he says, admiring the Falcon, “we could write the book on twilight ecology and make better decisions when it comes to marine management.”

Hawkes and I climb into our respective cockpits, and the acrylic domes close, sealing in one atmosphere of pressure. A Land Cruiser backs us into the arms of a safety diver, who clips us to a towrope attached to a Zodiac, which drags us to sea. Waves of water splash the dome, followed by those of nausea in my throat, and suddenly I’m locked in the world’s most expensive washing machine.

After the support diver unclips us from the Zodiac, Hawkes points the nose down and spirals toward the bottom. We’re buzzing through the ocean in an air bubble. The ten-foot visibility is disappointing, but the ride isn’t.

“Keep this up for an hour and 40 minutes,” Hawkes laughs, captaining an imaginary dive to the deepest crevice of the planet, “and we’re at the bottom of the Mariana Trench!”

Blooms of phytoplankton turn the water into a chunky green minestrone. When the visibility clears, 50 feet down, Hawkes banks the submarine over a metridium field, a patch of gelatinous white anemones that look like rows of cauliflower. After expertly weaving the Super Falcon by joystick through a kelp stand, he turns command over to me. I promptly stall the submarine, which floats to the surface.

It’s a little frustrating, but under Hawkes’s command we glide back to the boat ramp. A sea lion torpedoes past us, offering a tantalizing hint of what it might be like to followa pod of whales or dolphins. “Can you imagine?” Hawkes says. “That would be a religious experience.”

A loud crunch interrupts the reverie as Hawkes clumsily drops the Super Falcon onto the submerged trailer. “Awww, shhhii…” he mutters. “Not the best landing.”

On shore, Hawkes is reflective. He has ambitions to turn his company into the “Boeing of the sea,” and to that end he’s already designed a DeepFlight II line of commercial and scientific subs. DFII will have interchangeable pressure hulls to travel to various depths, customizable “work packages” (manipulator arms, cameras, etc.), and the ability to stop and hover. Hawkes estimates that the 10,000-pound subs鈥攎ore than twice the Super Falcon’s weight鈥攚ill cost $4 million to $6 million and be compatible with ships that charter for as little as $3,000 a day. Still, the orders鈥攆or DFII or Super Falcon鈥攁ren’t exactly rolling in, and his annoyance is palpable.

“I’ve spent a lot of time reading books on visionaries,” he explains as we sit on a jetty overlooking Monterey Bay. “The consistent thing about them is that they died poor and miserable, because they were ahead of their time, and they couldn’t get over that nobody got it. I don’t want to follow that path.”

FUNNY HOW A DEAL with Richard Branson can turn things around.

It’s late January when I push through the mirrored doubled doors of Hawkes Ocean Technologies again, and the mood is decidedly more upbeat.

Hawkes cut a deal with Branson in July 2009, and now the team is getting ready to put a new design, the DeepFlight Merlin (which Branson has dubbed the Necker Nymph), in the water to test its buoyancy. The project, under wraps for months, was announced in late January. “Today,” Hawkes declares, “it becomes a submarine.”

Branson has been so impressed with Hawkes’s subs that he’s considering creating an entire business around them. “Graham is a genius when it comes to building underwater vehicles,” Branson tells me by phone from Necker Island, his Caribbean resort. Branson’s new company, Virgin Oceanic, is devoted to marine exploration. “Fifteen miles from Necker, you’ve got the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest point in the Atlantic. It goes down to 28,000 feet, and nobody has any idea what’s going on down there.”

Branson also has his eye on Fossett’s goal of reaching the bottom of the ocean, though the Mariana Trench is a sore subject for Hawkes. With Fossett’s commission of the Challenger, Hawkes thought he had the chance to, if not go there himself, at least build a machine that could. No one has touched bottom since Lieutenant Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard became the first, in 1960, spending 20 minutes at nearly 35,800 feet in a giant metal cigar called a bathyscaphe. Because measuring such depth is an imprecise science, it’s unclear whether they went deeper or even what the deepest point (now considered to be 36,201 feet) actually is. Regardless, no one has gone down that far alone.

Derailed by Fossett’s death, Challenger now sits in an empty space above Hawkes’s workshop. Though it was never tested at sea, Hawkes is convinced that the sub could handle it, given the way the hull responded at a pressure-test facility. He says Challenger is more than 90 percent done鈥攁 claim met with skepticism by some.

“I think there’s a 98 percent [chance] that [it] comes back in one piece and the world goes nuts,” says Hawkes. The Fossett Foundation is selling Challenger for $1 million, and Hawkes estimates that a new dome and final testing would cost the same.

“If Steve hadn’t died and we’d gotten Challenger finished, everything would have been different,” he’d told me in Monterey, hanging his head. It was the only time I ever saw him look cowed. “Everyone would understand what we are talking about with winged subs, and everyone would understand that we have the technology to master our planet. Our little company. Everybody.”

Instead, the last great record on the planet remains unbroken.

Since Branson’s first forays with HOT will focus on shallow water, Hawkes is concentrating his efforts on the Nymph. The three-person open-cockpit submersible is built to travel at scuba depths, is equipped with air tanks, and hits five knots. Clients who rent out the Nymph‘s “taxi,” a 105-foot catamaran that goes for $88,000 per week, have the option of dropping an additional $25,000 to use the sub. Branson eventually plans to commission deeper-diving submarines and establish exploration bases around the world. “Quite a lot of people who have bought tickets to go to space,” says Branson, referring to his Virgin Galactic project, “have said they would like to explore the ocean.”

That’s good news for Hawkes, who recognizes that he is much more of an inventor than a businessman. “I’m not Bill Gates,” he says, standing in his workshop. “I was just trying to solve the technology. Now we need a Henry Ford of the oceans to take it over.”

Two engineers wheel the Nymph out the door to a three-ton crane, where it’s hoisted into the air. With a wide nose, stubby ten-foot wingspan, and a tapered tail, the sub looks like the product of an amorous night between a whale shark and a stunt plane. The 1,650-pound craft spins like a drunken compass needle. The next few minutes of buoyancy testing will determine how likely Hawkes will be to deliver the sub on schedule, in a month.

The sub hits the harbor and water gurgles in. A heavy quiet falls over the submariners as the Nymph exhales her last bubbles of air. The nose tilts forward as if it’s about to sink鈥攖hen rights itself and hovers steadily, one foot or so beneath the surface.

“That’s about perfect!” Hawkes cries, firing off photos like a proud father.

With this submarine complete, Hawkes is moving on to his next project. Rather than design another winged sub, he’s focusing on unmanned vehicles. The same concepts apply鈥�”lighter” and “cheaper” anchor Hawkes’s vernacular鈥攁nd he calls them a “game changer” in the commercial and scientific world.

Hawkes lifts the Nymph out of the water with the crane and swings it back onto the dolly. With another problem solved, he walks back to the workshop to tackle the one challenge that continues to vex him: convincing the rest of the world to follow his lead.

The post Just Don’t Call It a Submarine appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

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