I flipped through a book on harp seals in the late 1970s and saw images of them swimming in emerald green pools of water surrounded by huge sheets of ice. Right then I was hooked, and I knew this was a story I wanted to do.
New England waters are some of my favorite - they are some of the richest waters because they are temperate waters and nutrient-rich, and therefore provide food for so many animals, from giant whales to sharks to everything else.
I think that going to the beach as a child, being in the water and smelling that salt air and hearing the seagulls, it had a real calming effect. But also, it was a mysterious thing - I remember wondering what was under those dark New England seas.
I swam with my first shark in the 1980s. I was 20 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, working with a group of marine scientists. Late in the day, a 5-foot long blue shark swam into our chum slick. For the next hour, I marveled at the animal's stunning indigo color and the elegant way she moved effortlessly through the sea.
Remove the predators, and the whole ecosystem begins to crash like a house of cards. As the sharks disappear, the predator-prey balance dramatically shifts, and the health of our oceans declines.
Under the snowcapped mountains of Fiordland National Park, freshwater streams empty into the saltwater fiords, creating a unique ecosystem. This is a heavily wooded park, so the water in the streams is stained with tannin, a substance found in plants that makes clean water seem dirty, though it isn't.
