Exploring Alaska’s Jewel
Join Ken Corben and his team as they film the undersea wildlife of Prince William Sound 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. They find that nature has not just regenerated but is thriving as they encounter pink and chum salmon spawning, seals, sea otters and medusa jellyfish. by Kenneth Corben
Our production team took on the challenge of filming the undersea wildlife of Prince William Sound 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I was told that the months of July and August were typically sunny, warm and the water around Prince William Sound was close to 55 degrees. Entering our fourth week of production it was still pouring rain nearly every day and water was in the low 30s in some regions. The floating icebergs should have been my first clue that it was going to be an unusual shoot.
The incredible scenery around Prince William Sound. (Kenneth Corben)
My partner John Friday and I had practiced diving in our dry suits and on the O2ptima rebreathers over winter in La Paz, to simulate the visibility and currents we were expecting to encounter here. Turns out all the practice was a really good idea. The Sound has tides in excess of 12 feet and in fjords deeper than a 1000 feet that is a lot of water movement. Of course it typically moved in the direction opposite of where the shot was.
The decision to use rebreathers was a smart one. Some of the resulting images and animal behaviors could not have been obtained otherwise. The challenge was to get behaviors or images that are new in some way to help tell exciting stories. Prince William Sound does not disappoint. Of all the places I have dove on the planet this certainly makes the top five. It is remarkable to see nature’s recovery two decades after the devastating oil spill. Some of the locations we dove were accessible only at high tide by pulling an inflatable through a river and many aren’t even on any charts.
Right: Pink and chum salmon spawning (Kenneth Corben)
One place in particular was mind blowing, we named it the Secret Lagoon. After a 45-minute trudge upstream we entered water deep enough to use the engine. I will always remember turning the corner into an enormous lagoon that looked like a Spielberg set from Jurassic Park. Fog patches hovered at various levels from the water surface and amongst the peaks that shot up several thousand feet into the cloud covered sky. The smell of sulfur escaping from a thermal vent permeated the very still air. The one thing we couldn’t get over was the sheer number of pine trees. From the water’s edge to the tops of the pinnacles, not one square foot of vertical slope was bare.
With one eye on the tide, we donned our gear and grabbed our RED 4K cameras and hit the water. The temperature was 32 degrees, depth was beyond our sonar range and visibility nearly gin clear. We explored underwater near a stream fed from a thousand foot waterfall, the raging snow melt current added a a “wind chill” factor – burr! Yet what we saw and captured was amazing.
Ken Corben films spawning salmon with the technologically advanced RED 4K camera. (Kenneth Corben)
Our goal was to capture pink and chum salmon spawning. What we did not expect to see were seals feeding on salmon and sea otters feeding on mussels, not to mention the swarms of lion’s mane and medusa jellyfish. As we made our way across the lagoon I saw what seemed like a sand bar in the middle of the lagoon I had not seen on the way in. We made our way closer and encountered something I was not quite prepared for visually.
Thousands of Medusa Jellyfish in a cluster, called a smack, nearly 40 feet thick and a hundred yards long and wide. You simply could not swim through them they were so thick in number. I’ve shot in Palau’s Jellyfish Lake before but it paled in comparison to the size and density of this cluster.
Right: Thousands of Medusa Jellyfish in a cluster nearly 40 feet thick and a hundred yards long and wide. (Kenneth Corben)
Time was running out along with the tide and my fingers were screaming in pain from the ice-cold water but I still had battery left on the camera. The cold water finally won out and we made our way back to the boat. Once back on board our inflatable the boat tender asked if we saw the huge bear that was stalking us from the shoreline when were filming the salmon underwater? Probably could have done without that information. Yet the smile on our frozen faces as we made our way back out to the sound said it all. We had hit underwater movie magic once again…