Sea Dream Is Alive and Whale for Research Pair

“The sea was as calm, as flat as a sheet of glass,” Cynthia D’Vincent said. “Suddenly, without warning, nine lunge-feeding whales burst out of the water, with their mouths agape. Each one was about the size of a small locomotive.

“I found myself staring straight into the mouth of the nearest one. At that moment I knew how Jonah must have felt.”

A marine biologist and photographer, D’Vincent, 37, works in partnership with her sea captain husband, Russell Nilson. They study the humpback whales at both ends of the whales’ annual migration--from Alaska to Hawaii--sailing with their two children, ages 4 and 23 months.

“We started out doing strictly contract research by ourselves--for the government, universities and private organizations,” she said.

“But, about six years ago, when the Reagan Administration cut back drastically on funds for marine research, we began taking laymen to sea with us. To support our research.”

It has, she said, been wonderful.

“Their enthusiasm is so exhilarating. They’re coming from . . . well, suburbia, usually, out into the ultimate wilderness. Many of them want to sleep on deck, just so they won’t miss anything.”

On this particular morning, a hazy day in late summer, D’Vincent wasn’t sailing in the wilderness. She was sitting on a log in Quail Botanical Gardens in Encinitas, half a mile away from the home of her sister, Susan D’Vincent, whom she was visiting.

She continued the story of the humpbacks, who were lunge-feeding:

“For three days, they came up, again and again--130 times. We began recording them and found they were singing songs. Not identical songs--as they do in the breeding grounds--but quite different ones, and their prey, the herring, appeared to be responding by clustering into a ball.”

When asked whether she considers her life to be the kind most people only dream about, D’Vincent smiled.

“Well . . . “ she said. She linked her fingers around her knees, leaning forward slightly. Behind her a waterfall made a soft, rushing noise. “People do sometimes tell me ‘You are living my dream.’ But it’s a very demanding life.”

The earlier years of her life--growing up in La Jolla, being a cheerleader and homecoming princess at La Jolla High School, studying at UC San Diego, working as a field biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service--were, she said, relatively undemanding. One of her tasks as a field biologist was a census of whales passing Point Loma.

After Point Loma, the fisheries service sent her to the Arctic ice floes to study bowhead and beluga whales. It sent her to the Mexican lagoons where the gray whales calve and to the South Seas to study humpbacks.

Seven years ago, the fisheries service sent her to Alaska’s Glacier Bay, to study the effect of cruise ships on whales.

The ship the government had contracted as a research vessel was the Varua, a 93-foot brigantine, with eight red “pirate ship” sails. A British naval historian once described it as “the most beautiful ocean-going ship of her size ever built.”

D’Vincent was fascinated by both Varua and her captain, a 30-year-old Swedish-Scot named Russell Nilson. (“I’d never met anybody so competent. He seemed completely at one with the sea,” she said.) In the long Alaskan twilights, after their day’s work, Nilson told her the story of how he came to be sailing a square-rigger in the 20th Century.

“Varua was launched in 1942, the dream ship of shipbuilder and author William A. Robinson,” D’Vincent said. “He wrote two books about his voyages on her.”

In 1979, Robinson, by then a very elderly man living beside a lagoon in Tahiti, leased Varua to Nilson for $1 a year, after Nilson made a special trip to meet the man he admired.

“With the understanding that he would use her for research and education, and make the necessary repairs she needed,” D’Vincent said. “They didn’t even have a contract. It was all done with just a handshake.”

Life in the tropics can be hard on both ships and human beings. The necessary repairs on Varua turned out to involve rebuilding it.

The work was done on Samoa for $200,000, D’Vincent said, “all of which Russ borrowed! Two years later, when he sailed her back to Tahiti, Robinson was so impressed with the quality of her rebuild, and so astonished that anyone would do all that on the strength of a handshake, that he gave him the boat outright. Of course, Russ still had to pay back the $200,000.”

While working together in Glacier Bay, Nilson and D’Vincent fell in love.

“But it had the effect of making us extremely shy with each other,” she said. The twilight talks stopped. “For several months we went about doing our work, and barely speaking.”

In fact, she said, if it hadn’t been for the night she cheerfully describes as “the dumbest in my life--really, really stupid,” they might never have gotten together.

“It was a moonlit night, very tranquil and peaceful,” she said. “From Varua’s deck I could see that Russ had built a fire on the shore, about a quarter of a mile away. I wanted to join him, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll swim over.’ Even though the bay was full of icebergs!”

In California, D’Vincent had been a body-surfer and an extremely strong swimmer.

“But this wasn’t California. After a few minutes in the water I developed hypothermia. It felt as if my muscles had turned to stone,” she said. “I could barely move. It was terrifying.”

Made It to Shore

She survived, she said, by struggling onto her back and kicking. Eventually she made it to shore.

“I never did tell Russ I’d been in trouble. I was too embarrassed. But he was awed. ‘You must really be tough enough for a life at sea,’ he said. Shortly afterward, he asked me to marry him.”

They sailed to Monterey, to gather with their families for the wedding.

“That trip was my first indication that this marriage was going to contain a few . . . um, challenges,” she said, laughing. “We sailed through a hurricane at one point.”

She was in “a green misery” from seasickness, she said. “Once I looked up and there was Russ, lashed to the helm, huge waves breaking over him, and over Varua’s decks, and he was smiling. ‘Ah, this is the life!’ he yelled.”

Their wedding reception was also held on Varua’s deck, but in Monterey Bay under much calmer circumstances:

“Just as we were pouring the champagne a large pod of whales came swimming past. They seemed to linger around the ship before continuing.”

Nilson, a structural engineering graduate of Cornell, and a founding director in 1975 of Ocean Research Under Sail, wanted to continue combining research with sailing. That, D’Vincent said, was just fine with her.

For the past seven years they have followed the whales, sailing Varua as much as 40,000 miles a year, through the fiords and glaciated valleys of Alaska in summer, and to the whales’ Hawaiian birthing grounds in winter.

In April, 1983, they had a birth of their own when their son, whom they named Storm, was born during one of the worst storms in Monterey’s history.

“I had gone back to shore, but Russ was conducting a research project which couldn’t be interrupted,” D’Vincent recalled.

The weather grew so bad, however, that Nilson was forced to give up. As he was battling back to the harbor, the Coast Guard called him with the message that his wife had gone to the hospital to have a baby.

“He got there just as I was really needing his encouragement, so that’s one storm I have reason to be grateful for,” she said.

Photos Exhibited

That same year, Nikon House, in New York’s Rockefeller Center, exhibited D’Vincent’s photographs, launching what was to become a second career for her.

Many of her photographs have been taken from the small boat she uses when she’s recording the whales.

“Unfortunately, sitting dead in the water in a small boat can be dangerous,” she said. “I never know where the whales are going to come up, and they don’t know I’m there.

“I have a photograph, one I took from a small boat, that shows the bottom of a whale’s jaw on one side of the boat, and the top of his jaw on the other side,” she said. “It’s a bit out of focus. I think it’s because my heart was pounding.”

The people who sail with them are not, she said, expected to sit dead in the water in a small boat.

“We take no risks with them whatsoever, although we do give them plenty of opportunity to work closely with the whales,” she said.

“Aside from the whale research, we encourage them to join us in whatever they feel like doing, identifying birds, hiking ashore and bathing in hot springs, collecting samples and processing the data, fishing for dinner. They become deeply involved in the area, as opposed to being just bystanders.”

Based on Island

In 1985, Nilson and D’Vincent bought 40 acres on Washington’s San Juan Island, using it as a base to operate from. They also formed a new corporation, Intersea Research Inc.

“But a major problem loomed,” she said. “We were running ourselves ragged sailing one ship 40,000 miles a year. We desperately need a ship at each end of the whales’ migration.

“And Varua was designed specifically for the tropics. I don’t think a more perfect vessel for the tropics exists. But we needed a second ship to sail the Alaskan waters.”

Their daughter, Eve, was only 6 weeks old when, in January, 1986, Nilson and D’Vincent heard that another well-known vessel, the yacht Acania, was going to be auctioned.

“She belonged to actress Constance Bennett in the ‘30s,” D’Vincent said. “The Coast Guard appropriated her during World War II, and after the war she was operated as an oceanographic research vessel by Stanford and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.”

They knew the vessel well, D’Vincent said. They had tied up alongside Acania many times and had eaten meals on board. They knew she was a steel ship, made of a gauge of steel so strong it couldn’t even be drilled through. They knew that she had two laboratories. And a photographic darkroom. And a luxurious saloon, with a fireplace, that would be perfect for Intersea’s participants to gather in during the evenings.

“We wanted that boat desperately ,” D’Vincent said. “We scraped together and borrowed everything we could, but I was sure our offer wasn’t going to be large enough.”

They were in Alaska when Acania was auctioned in Ohio.

“We placed our bid from sea. I was so sure that we hadn’t made a high enough bid that when we called Ohio, through the marine operator in Alaska, and a man’s voice said, ‘It looks like you’ve got yourselves a boat,’ I was so overwhelmed my knees buckled.”

In the last year, Intersea Research has grown, she said, from a “mom and pop” organization--the days when she and Nilson manned the Varua themselves--to 11 personnel. Their work will be featured in an upcoming episode of ABC’s “Spirit of Adventure.”

“The focus of our work now is collecting data on the social interactions of the whales,” she said. “We’re striving to understand their complex relationship with their environment.”

Humpbacks, she added, are a charismatic, delightful species, but difficult research subjects.

“They are only on the surface a quarter of the time,” she said. “It’s very easy to jump to conclusions about them. As we’re a factual organization, not an emotional one, it means gathering a tremendous amount of data.”

In the coming winter, she said, scrambling up from the Quail Gardens log and brushing a few leaves from her blue cotton skirt, they’ll be working in Hawaii with the whales’ breeding song, “making comparisons with the songs of the feeding grounds.”

For the most part, she said, they work off the islands of Maui, Molokai and Lanai “in unspoiled areas. It’s a wonderful voyage for anyone who doesn’t want to go to a condominium or be around tourists.”

“In Hawaii, when you’re lying in your bunk, you can hear the song of the whales as you rock to sleep at night. It comes right through the hull. There’s something so primitive, basic and . . . beautiful . . . about it,” she said softly. “It makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.”