t the Fisheries Division on the FAO-sponsored Village Fisheries Development Project. During the earlier part of his stay, he had been working on a number of projects starting with a sea turtle conservation project down in Aleipata and then moving out to Savai'i to design and build an outboard engine repair workshop and then finally into the swamps of Vaitola with a bunch of shovels and a couple of his coworkers to dig six fishponds by hand for a baitfish culture project. It was time for something new. Part of this new development project involved working with a wonderful group of local Samoan carpenters, led by master wood carver Sven Ortquist (pictured at left keeping a close eye on me) building boats. Working with the FAO marine architect who designed the boats, these guys would turn out both an 18 and 28 foot version of an outboard-propelled fishing boat that would be purchased by fisherman from villages all around Samoa.
Another part of his job involved taking one of the boats and going from village to village with a few of the best fishermen from the Fisheries Division and spending a few days in each village demonstrating the boats and the different fishing techniques that they offered. Rather than just trolling for tuna or fishing in the relatively shallow, protected waters within the reef, these boats could be taken offshore and with large reels of heavy monofilament line mounted on each side, it was now possible to fish the very productive and relatively untapped deep ocean depths, generally one hundred fathoms or more. Of course, this meant fishing throughout the night, bobbing around in a relatively small boat with perhaps three other fishermen and by the end of the night, adding to the mix several hundred pounds of fish in every size and shape and smell.
The project was so successfull and the fish catches so plentiful that he soon started taking twice weekly trips around the island of Upolu, hanging on for dear life to the back of a giant flatbed truck that held four large boxes containing ice on the outbound trip and hundreds of pounds of fish that were caught in the remote villages on the return. As a result of these various projects and with the arrival of a new group of fisheries volunteers, more fish reached the markets than ever before and during the first 18 months that this new group of volunteers was in the country, the importation of canned fish into Western Samoa dropped significantly.
During his Peace Corps years, Gene experienced first-hand, many of the fisheries traditions unique to the south seas, including the rather remarkable way the people of the South Pacific fish for that most feared creature of the sea, the shark.
In addition to adventures underwater in Samoa, there were also some pretty interesting experiences underground during the exploration of an ancient lava tube that was once used as a place of refuge by the Samoan people over seven hundred years ago.
During the many years that Gene has spent going out
to sea, he has come face to face with more than his fair share of marine life. After Peace Corps, he worked as a fisheries biologist in Seattle, Alaska and San Diego.
It was through a combination of taking to
heart the old sayings of "my boat is so small and the ocean so wide" and
"you can't tell the forest for the trees", that Gene first became interested
in the prospect of using satellite observations to help get a better
understanding of how the oceans worked. This led to his becoming a Graduate Research Fellow at the Marine Sciences Research Center, State University of New York at Stony Brook, where for his dissertation, he used satellite and oceanographic data to study the variability in, and the relationship between, the physical and biological processes in the ocean.
The author and co-author of numerous publications, Gene has also contributed to a large number of programs including The Jason Project, Public Broadcasting, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Society, the Cousteau Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and U.S. Congress Office of Technology Ass