Hunter Mann-Dempster, professional sea cucumber diver, lives on Baranof Island in a house built on cedar pilings, a short ramble to the ocean through a copse of spruce and hemlock. He greets us in long underwear, mug of coffee in hand. Over the years I've come to notice divers in the Great North appear anemic, as if the cold has trimmed fat from their bones. Hunter is no exception. Like a medieval squire readying armor for battle, he lays out hoods, gloves, and dry suits over the lid of his hot tub. It's February. The water is in the 40s.
Hunter dips his head into a neoprene hood, cleans the glass of his face mask. Perhaps we'd have some luck, he wonders, across Eastern Channel at Pirate's Cove? "The otters have been kind of bad, so it might be good to find a place with some current," he says. Farther north, in Peril Strait? To make that work we'd need another 5-gallon jug of gasoline for the boat. If the weather held we'd make it back in time to cook the creatures on the Adak, my World War II tugboat tied up in the channel. But what I'm really thinking about now is a postdive dip in Hunter's hot tub. I know it gets up to, like, 104 degrees, warm enough to melt the ice cubes we will surely become while chasing sea cucumbers.
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