Last Voyage for Longhorn
On October 2, six researchers and a crew of five board the research vessel Longhorn before sunrise. Her engines roar to life under the orange glow, and in moments, the shallow boat basin she calls home recedes from view. As the ship picks up speed, it rocks from front to back as it departs the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas.
In a few weeks time, the vessel will have a new home and a new owner. The institute will finalize the sale of the 35-year-old ship to the highest of six private bidders by the end of this month. Despite her peeling paint and the rust that streaks down her hull like red-orange blood, she is still sellable, and six bidders are already vying for the chance to buy her.
Thus on this humid blue October morning, the ship steams away from the pier, tips past the jetties that line the Aransas Pass and takes to the warm open waters of the Gulf of Mexico for her last cruise as the institute’s flagship vessel.
The first station is a long way from here; in the dry lab on the ship’s main deck, a computer program written in Microsoft BASIC reflects the ship’s speed and heading. The DOS-based program pauses for a moment; its screen blanks, then it ticks out a calculation: the Longhorn will make its first station, referred to as C-4, in 39 hours, 48 minutes.
Morning turns to afternoon, then afternoon turns to evening as the ship makes its 8.5 knots ever eastward. The rocking of the ship seems an uncertain metronome, ticking the minutes and seconds at sea. For the moment, science seems an exercise in patience. Earnesto Ruiz, the ship’s cook and deckhand, makes sandwiches for lunch and beef stroganoff for dinner. The ship’s captain, John Cain, splits the 24-hour job of steering the ship with first mate Stan Dignum and engineer Frank Ernst. At times, the researchers make their way to the bow of the ship to watch the setting sun, the rolling waves and the schools of flying fish that jump out of the water like grasshoppers in a blue-green meadow, stirred by the ship’s wake.
As it turns out, the open ocean isn’t so empty. Maybe 70 miles offshore the afternoon is clear, and as we steam westward, anywhere from six to a dozen oil rigs are visible from any point on the ship. Some look like small cities on stilts; others seem no more than one-legged tinkertoys, strange unmanned contraptions that seem to serve no purpose at all.
The ship stops to take readings at station C-4, and after the engines fall quiet, you can listen for them. As a warning system, the rigs — even the unmanned ones — emit a low-pitched beep every 15 seconds. Listening close, they sound like uneven echoes, beeping in gloomy discord: a nearby rig beeps a declaraiton; a farther one sounds its reply; then one of the distant ones manages a muted tone before the conversation begins anew.
Later that night, steaming home under a gibbous moon, the ship has gone, the platforms sit unmanned, and the three rigs still intone their lonesome beeps into the blue night, their sorrowful recitation unheard, their delicate tones mistaken for mere warnings.
The open ocean is full of things like this.
The purpose of this cruise is to study hypoxia, a condition that is killing the ocean floor off the coast of Louisiana. The blue sheen on the gulf belies the complex system that churns below: the wind that kicks up waves blows life-giving oxygen into the waters near the surface, and the sun’s bright beams shine on plants at the bottom, letting them breathe the precious gas into the deep waters below.
The Mississippi River, rich with fertilizer runoff from the farms of the Midwest and sewage dumped from cities, sends vast amounts of nitrogen into the gulf here. The nutrient-filled water gives rise to huge colonies of plankton that block the sun’s rays from reaching the bottom.
Without sunlight, the bottom-dwelling plants cannot make oxygen; without oxygen, the plankton and fish die and sink to the suffocating floor. At its peak, this vast rotting dead zone spans an area the size of New Jersey, yet on the surface, the blue water remains placid, and the sad oil rigs continue to beep their melancholy chords.
The open ocean is full of things like this.
In 1971, when Longhorn was built, there were few ships of its stature in the academic fleet. Today, the Longhorn is an outmoded ship, incapable of carrying many modern tools of oceanographic research. Few researchers at the institute even include Longhorn in their research proposals, opting for Louisiana State University’s newer, faster vessel, Pelican, for their studies of the Gulf.
Most of the ship’s operating funds now come from cruises sponsored by other institutions; Tony Amos, a white-haired, bearded scientist, says one night after dinner, “We’ve been putting the boat up for hire to keep it afloat.” This year, Longhorn has worked only 69 days — 21 of them for private research. “That’s not science,“ he says.
Tony Amos knows Longhorn; he has been affiliated with the Marine Science Institute for 30 years. He ran the first CTD scan ever taken from the ship during a 1979 cruise that studied the Ixtoc-1 oil spill, the largest unintentional oil spill in the world.
On July 3, 1979, the Ixtoc-1 drilling rig was destroyed by an oil eruption, sending nearly 150 million gallons of crude oil into the gulf before the flow was stopped 295 days later. Longhorn made four cruises to study that spill between July 23 and Nov. 6, 1979. Amos was abord all of them.
As the ship slows on Thursday night, he sets up the CTD unit in the dry lab. “Here it is,” he says. “The last CTD station. The last station for Longhorn.”
In the end, it is not Longhorn’s last CTD, nor its last station. On Friday, the ship wakes up early for one last stop, and then another. The ship has made its way westward over the last three days at sea, and by 9 p.m., the lights of Port Aransas come into view. The annual Harvest Moon Regatta has brought dozens of sailboats to the area, and Longhorn weaves her way between them and the massive freighters headed into the channel, past the jetties and back to port.
Longhorn will take to the seas again. A day trip has been planned for the staff of the institute, but that trip will probably go no farther than the lighthouse near Aransas Pass. Once sold, one bidder hopes to turn the vessel into a mothership for commercial diving operations. Others hope to turn the ship into a private research vessel.
Back at the institute, Ruiz ties the ship’s moorings. Everyone disembarks and unloads the ship. Harris and the researchers carry equipment back to the building. Some of the crew head for their cars and trucks parked nearby.
Under the soft blue moonlight, the R/V Longhorn sits motionless in her erstwhile home. The largest ship in the in the shallow boat basin, Longhorn seems a little bit proud. She has seen an oil spill and Katrina’s wrath, visited the waters of the Virgin Islands and studied the crater near the Yucatan. Tied there in the basin, Longhorn looks like more than a outdated boat with rusting name and peeling paint. She looks stately, like a noble veteran of the sea.
A version of this article originally appeared in The Daily Texan.