I flew from Corpus Christi to Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, late yesterday evening via Houston on Continental Airlines. After getting through customs and getting my baggage, I headed over to Avis to pick up my brand new Chrysler minivan...a first for me in Mexico, but one that will come in handy with our rather large crew. I spent the night in the Hacienda Inn near the airport, the same place my family stayed in 1985. The outside and grounds still look great, but the inside is showing its age.
I met part of our team in the lobby at 6:30 AM for our drive to Campeche where we would pick up the rest of the team. Mark Schrope is an independent writer who is going to do a book on the big BP spill in the northern Gulf of Mexico, and he is interested in seeing how the Ixtoc spill affected the environment and people in Mexico 30 years ago to give some perspective for his current work. He is also doing an article for Nature on our current expedition. Elisabeth Malkin is with the New York Times, Mexico City office, and she has David Rochkind, an independent photographer working with her to document our current expedition looking for remnant Ixtoc I oil/tar and impacts on fishermen and coastal communities.
After a two hour drive to Campeche, Campeche, we met up with two other members of our team at the Hotel Baluarte, where we will be staying tonight. Here we picked up my old friend and colleague Julio Sanchez, who has helped us with HRI's GulfBase as our Spanish Editor for many years, and Otto Ortega Morales, who is Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Campeche, where Julio works too. Julio is a fisheries specialist and sailed on one of the first research vessels from Mexico to study the Ixtoc spill in 1979. Otto studies microbial communities in coastal environments and is particularly interested in biofilms and biotechnology.
After strategizing over a late breakfast, we headed southward down the Campeche coastline towards the fishing village of Champoton. To my surprise, it does not look like a village any more, since it has grown considerably over the past 30 years.
Since the area south of town along this stretch of coast is where I saw the most oil/tar of any location on my 1980 exploratory trip along the entire southern Gulf shoreline, we picked a spot soon after leaving the town. It was near the Marine/Navy Station at mile marker 136 where the limestone shoreline extended in either direction for miles. We found several very weathered patches of tar on the rocks in the upper supratidal zone under the sea grape and button wood trees. Otto took samples for microbial analysis, and I collected some for chemical analysis or fingerprinting by Gerardo Gold at CINVESTAV in Merida. We do not know if the tar is Ixtoc tar, so the only way to determine that is by fingerprinting. I do not know if it is possible for Gerardo to analyze a sample like this, but he can tell us on Wednesday when I drop them off. It is so weathered it just looks like dried asphalt.
Since Hurricane Roxanne really hammered this coast in the late 1990s and the road was moved inland a little ways, it was hard to find any of my other stations. We drove all the way to Sabancuy in southern Campeche, but we were unable to find any other suitable access points or appropriate rocky shores.
About mid afternoon we stopped at a small restaurant overlooking the Gulf just south of Champoton, where we met up with Carlos E. Brown, a retired 78 year old free-diving fisherman from the Ixtoc I days. Talking with him was a real pleasure and very much like listening to an oral history of the area. He related that he used to get 60-70 pounds of grouper and snapper spear fishing before the Ixtoc spill. Although heavy oil did not come in to this area, he related that his mask would get covered with a film of oil, and that dead tarpon and grouper washed in along the shoreline. He stopped fishing then, getting fish for his restaurant from western Mexico or rivers to sustained him in the down time. He said it took 3-4 years before the fishery started to recover, and 8-10 years before it recovered completely.
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