Travel Archives - Books by Eric Douglas

Beer, Sand Tigers and ScubaRadio, oh my!

May 5, 2019 By Eric Douglas

Yes, I know that is a such a cliché headline, but I’m not sure I’ve ever used it before. (Maybe there is a good reason for that.)

My good friend Greg Holt, the host of nationally-syndicated talk radio show ScubaRadio called me the other day while I happened to be out in the field working on a completely different project.

We talked about diving, adventure books, beer brewing and nearly everything else in this 10-minute interview.

I was on in Hour 2. Here is Hour 1. He also does a cool interview with Josh Gates from Expedition Unknown at the beginning of Hour 2.

By the way, this is the brewery I was standing in while we spoke: Weathered Ground Brewery in Cool Ridge, West Virginia. Check them out!

Enjoy!

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters audiobook now available

May 22, 2018 By Eric Douglas

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters, the ninth thriller in the Mike Scott series, is now available as an audiobook on Audible, Amazon and ITunes.

The story

Armed gunmen board a liveaboard dive boat near Turks and Caicos in this sea story/action thriller. News photographer Mike Scott is on a dive vacation and gets taken hostage when the theft doesn’t go as planned. When the identity of the head pirate is exposed, he declares that all the passengers will die when they reach their destination. It’s up to Mike, the passengers and crew to overcome the pirates and save their own lives. It doesn’t help matters that there is a mole on board feeding the pirates information and they are heading right into a storm. Now they must rebel against the pirates and take the boat back before time runs out…

Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters is set on a liveaboard trip in the Turks and Caicos. The real trip was hosted by ScubaRadio^TM and the story features several show cast members. Greg Holt, Pup Morse and several others lent their voices to the narration as well, so you’ll be able to hear the real characters voice their parts. CJ Goodearl, “the voice of Mike Scott”, served as the narrator.

If you’ve never tried an audiobook but think you might want to give it a shot, this link will let you start a 30 day Audible free trial and you get Turks and Chaos.

Douglas’ Mike Scott series of thriller stories features diving, beautiful locations and the environment.

“I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau on television. When I created Mike Scott, I wanted to inspire people to love the ocean and go diving, just like Cousteau did for me,” Douglas said.

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25 years since my first trip to Russia

January 3, 2018 By Eric Douglas

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. – Mark Twain

Twenty-five years ago, today, I did something extraordinary. It began with my first international flight. In truth, it was the first time I was ever on a plane. I was part of a group that took off from Baltimore-Washington International and landed in Moscow, Russia. To make the trip, I had to get my first passport.

The Soviet Union split up in December 1991, slightly more than a year before. President Boris Yeltsin led the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose organization that followed. President George W. Bush was in Russia for his final state visit before leaving office, having lost the election to Bill Clinton. We weren’t affiliated with Bush at all, although many people thought we were because of the doors that got opened for us.

I can still point to that trip as one of the single-most important things I’ve ever done in my career. It set things in motion that I wouldn’t even come to realize for many years. I met people who would change my life and those experiences opened doors for many other aspects of my career.

It all began with an invitation from my friend and mentor Dr. Virginia Simmons who invited me along with a group of educators traveling to what was then called Kaliningrad, a suburb of Moscow. Kaliningrad was renamed Korolev, in honor of Sergey Korolev. He was the father of the Russian space program and the city was the home to their Russian Space Flight Control Center – their Houston Control.

I will never forget walking through the dim halls of Sheremetyevo International Airport to be confronted by a Russian border guard for the first time. He didn’t speak any English and I didn’t speak any Russian. I simply handed him my brand-new passport and hoped I wouldn’t be whisked off to some back room for interrogation.

That evening, the group I was traveling with was hosted at a group dinner. There was a buffet of light meats, bread and vegetables. My friends and I all thought, “We are hungry and this is perfect. We don’t want to insult our guests by not eating.” So, of course, we all went back to the buffet a couple times. And then they brought out the next course. And the next one. It ended up being a long dinner with multiple courses and lots of toasting and drinking. We were eight time zones away, jet lagged and miserable. But we also began friendships that have lasted until today.

Amidst the tours and meetings, one evening we were invited to have dinner in the homes of our Russian hosts. The mother handled public relations and communications for Kaliningrad so she got to deal with the reporter on the trip. She spoke pretty good English. I will never forget accidentally dropping a few pieces of red caviar from my bread, directly into a shot glass of vodka I was about to drink. The father, who didn’t speak any English, smiled at me and dropped a couple pieces of caviar into his own drink. We toasted and drained our glasses of vodka and caviar together.

Nearly every evening after guided tours around Moscow and the Russian space program, we reconvened back in our hotel in a common room with our tour guides and interpreters and just talked. I have fond memories of Nadia, Natasha, Ludmilla and others, along with Anatoly, Vladimir and Alexey who was the deputy mayor of Kaliningrad and our primary host for the trip. The vodka flowed, of course, and we laughed and joked and got to know each other. One thing that struck me from those conversations was the declaration that the Russians felt their government had lied to them for many years. “We were told for 70 years that we had the best of everything. Now we find out we were lied to.”

Another thing they told us was that they felt very disconnected to their government. There is a big difference between the actions of the Russian government and the attitudes of the Russian people. I believe that still holds true.

One focus of the trip was education. The group were mostly educators, invited to Kaliningrad/Korolev to help the city rebuild and restructure its educational system. After the fall of communism, they discovered their text books and educational methods were hopelessly out of date. We visited numerous schools and were impressed in some ways, and disheartened in others.

I remember, about a year and a half after that first trip, having a long, vodka-fueled argument with a Russian friend about communism and its relative merits. I tried to say that what the Russians had experienced wasn’t communism at all, but Alexey wasn’t hearing any of it. Ultimately, we ended the discussion and by the next morning, he had put it aside. We remained friends—although I understood he was angry with me for a while. I realize now just how naïve my assertions were. He had lived through the fear and deprivation. My textbook answers and arguments had nothing to do with life on the ground.

Coming home, even understanding the context of the time, I was stunned to hear people I knew make comments like “They are all just commies, we should kill them all.” I was traveling as a journalist, but ended up being interviewed myself several times. I often quoted a line from the Sting song “Russians” from 1985.

“There is no monopoly on common sense
On either side of the political fence.
We share the same biology, regardless of ideology.
Believe me when I say to you,
I hope the Russians love their children, too”

I usually followed that up with the belief, that Sting implied, that they did. These were people I had laughed with and joked with. They were friends. I couldn’t believe people would wish death on my friends.

That first trip served as the motivation for the creation of the nonprofit Russia and West Virginia Foundation that supported hundreds of student, teacher and cultural exchanges.

In 2008, 15 years after my first trip to Russia, I went back and photographed many of the people and places I saw on that first trip, and subsequent trips I made in the 90s. In 2010, I took those photographs to Moscow and exhibited them in Moscow. The reaction was interesting to watch. It was fun to see the people looking at side-by-side photos of themselves. But it was just as interesting to see spectators who had no connection to the photos, comparing their memories to the ones captured in the photos. They were looking at clothes and hairstyles and laughing. The images showed life 15 or so years before, but in a lot of ways it reflected another world.

All together, I made seven trips to Russia, encompassing more than six months living in the country. Since then, I have made dozens of international trips to more than 25 other countries. It all started with that first trip and that first passport. I’ve had one every since and even had to have extra pages added to my last one.

Five years ago, for the 20^th anniversary of that first trip, I published an e-book called Russia: The New Age with news stories I wrote and essays from the 90s along with blog posts and essays from 2008 and 2010 when I returned to see how things had changed. It also includes most of the photos from the 2010 photo exhibit that was also shown in Bordeaux, France, and in Charleston, West Virginia and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. You can check it out here.

The last 25 years have brought some challenges, but even more amazing opportunities. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next 25.

Marshall divers studying native mussels in Ohio River

October 10, 2017 By Eric Douglas

Originally published in the Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail on September 29, 2017.

Imagine jumping into the Ohio River, the cool end-of-summer water covering your head, and then descending to the bottom, staying there and searching in the dark through the muck, sand, rocks and submerged trees for freshwater mussels for an hour.

Graduate student Mitchell Kriege is finishing a research project in the Marshall University environmental sciences program. He and a team of researchers, led by Associate Professor Tom Jones, have been diving in the river and then completing surveys of the freshwater mussels they find on the river bottom.

On a recent September Saturday morning, the group met at the university and drove the boat to a remote ramp on the Ohio. It’s difficult to call what the team does diving. They are underwater for an hour breathing compressed air, but they don’t wear fins, and they don’t swim. They crawl along on the bottom, fanning away silt and mud, feeling for mussels.

They find mussels with common names, like black sandshell, three-horn wartyback, pimpleback, washboard, three-ridge, deertoe and sheepnose (which is listed as an endangered species on the federal register.) Zebra mussels, an invasive species they don’t study but that are often attached to the mussels they are looking for, have a razor-sharp edge that causes fine cuts on their hands.

According to Kriege, the eastern United States is the hot spot for mussel diversity in the world.

“We are the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest, but for mussels. It is important to study them because they are so heavily imperiled,” he said.

“This project will be the first time we have a statistically defendable estimate of the mussels in the Greenup Pool, or anywhere in the Ohio River to my knowledge,” Jones said. “More species of mussels are federally listed than any other taxonomic group by percentage. Some authors cite almost 70 percent of mussel species have some federal protection due to rarity.”

The research project includes 20 randomly chosen locations on the river. At each location, the team lays out 100-meter-long weighted lines from the bank toward the middle of the river. A diver then enters the water and collects every mussel to be found in a 1-meter-wide swath along that line, placing them in mesh bags.

These swaths are called transects. Every 10 meters, the diver clips off the bag and begins a new one. When finished with the dive, the diver has surveyed a 100 square meters of river bottom.

At each location, they make six transects, each one 100 meters downriver from the previous one. For his master’s degree thesis, Kriege will produce maps showing the locations and dispersal of the various types of mussels in the river.

Jones explained freshwater mussels filter bacteria, fungi, protozoan and algae from the water column.

“In essence, they clean our drinking water for us. They also alter their substrates by movement and provide food to other species, both by being eaten and by producing pseudo-feces that bugs and fishes consume,” he said.

“Each mussel filters anywhere from 5 to 20 gallons of water per day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If one mussel filters 10 gallons of water a day, that’s 3,650 gallons a year. When you get to talking about populations in the millions, you begin to realize how much money mussels are saving the taxpayers,” Kriege said. “Mussels not only clean the water we drink, they act as food for a wide array of organisms — muskrats, fish, etc., and their dead shells act as homes for many macroinvertebrates, fish and aquatic eggs.”

After each dive, the crew brings the 100-meter line to the surface with the mesh bags attached. They carefully measure and identify each mussel and record its statistics, before returning it to the river, where it can continue growing.

Before they are returned to the river, though, the zebra mussels are pulled loose. Zebra mussels attach themselves to just about anything underwater, including other larger mussels, and can kill them in the process. Removing the zebra mussels gives the native mussels a better chance at survival. Kriege explained that they do this for the mussels caught in the survey since they were dislodged from the bottom in the first place.

“This project has opened up my mind to the incredible number of mussels present in the Ohio River. There are literally hundreds of millions of individuals in our pool with 25-plus species. However, it has also opened my eyes to the sad truth of the incredible habitats and wide array of species we lost when the river was dammed and heavily polluted. About half of the sites we surveyed were heavily impacted by humans and nearly devoid of mussels. Historically their numbers would have easily been in the billions in just a short section or river.”

Locations from the novella ‘Oil and Water’

August 15, 2016 By Eric Douglas

All of the Mike Scott novels and novella are set in real locations, places you can find on a map. With one exception, they are also places I have visited and spent time exploring. (A section of Wreck of the Huron takes place in Cuba on the Isle of Pines and I haven’t been there. Yet.)

Each of the following photos represents a scene in the latest Mike Scott novella Oil and Water. It is set on the beautiful western Caribbean island of Curacao. Read the story and then check out the photos to imagine yourself there!