Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea Page 6

  All I could guess was that, in some implausible fluke, as the fish had fled the surface it must have passed between my legs, or circled around my feet, or somehow wrapped the leader around my leg. And all I knew was that, somehow, I’d better find a way to free my leg before I was taken to depths from which no traveler returns.

  I reached for my knife, to cut the line, but—encumbered by gear and disoriented by fear—first I couldn’t find the knife, and then I couldn’t release it.

  The tuna stopped diving and turned, and the change in pressure against its mouth, the release of resistance, must have convinced it that it was free, for it swam upward, toward me.

  The line slackened, the leader eased and spread, and I slid my foot and fin out through the widening coil.

  Giddy with relief, I checked my air and depth gauges: 185 feet deep, 500 pounds of air, more than enough for a controlled ascent but nowhere near enough for a decompression stop, if one was necessary, a contingency about which I knew nothing. Diving computers were still years in the future (as were any computers for the common man). Because I hadn’t intended to leave the surface, certainly not to venture deeper than, say, ten feet, I hadn’t consulted the standard of the day: the U.S. Navy’s decompression tables, a reliable guide—though calibrated for a twenty-five-year-old male in peak physical condition—to safe diving at various depths.

  How long have I been at this depth? At any depth? How long have I been in the water? No idea.

  I started up, slowly, and now the black blood no longer billowed around me but trailed behind. The pain in my leg had waned, and my foot seemed to be working, which meant that no major tendon had been cut.

  I passed a hundred feet, then ninety, eighty … things were lighter now, visibility had returned, and I could see the rays of the sun angling down from the shimmering surface. Everything would be okay, after all. There was noth—

  The shark came straight for me, emerging quickly from the blue haze, its fins forming a triangle of lopsided symmetry because of the slight downward curve of the extraordinary pectorals.

  Ten, maybe fifteen feet from me it veered away, banked downward, and passed through the trail of blood leaking from my ankle. Convinced now of the source of the savory scent it had picked up from far away, it rose again, leveled off before me, and began the final, almost ritual, stage of the hunt.

  Because seawater acts as a refractive lens, sizes are difficult to ascertain under water. The generally accepted rule is that animals appear to be roughly a third again as large as they actually are. This shark looked ten or twelve feet long, which meant that, in fact, it was probably seven to nine feet long. But “in fact” didn’t matter to me; all I cared about was that the closer this shark came, the bigger it looked, and near to me or far, it was very big.

  It circled me twice, perhaps twenty feet away, establishing for itself a pattern and perimeter of comfort, and then began gradually to close the distance between us. With each circle, it shrank the perimeter by six inches, then by twelve, then fifteen.

  I raised my broomstick and held it out like a sword, waving its blunt tip back and forth to impress upon the shark that I was a living being armed with the weapons and determination to defend myself.

  Longimanus was not impressed. It circled closer, staying just beyond the reach of the broomstick. I could count the tiny black dots on its snout, the celebrated ampullae of Lorenzini, which carry untold megabytes of information, chemical and electromagnetic, to the shark’s control center.

  The mouth hung open about an inch, enough to give me a glimpse of the teeth in the lower jaw.

  As I turned with the shark, trying to maintain some upward movement, I watched the eye—always the eye—for movement of the nictitating membrane, the signal that the threat display was ending and the attack itself beginning.

  It quickened its pace, circling me faster than I could turn, so I began to kick backward as well as upward, to increase the distance between us.

  I jabbed randomly with the broomstick, never touching flesh, never causing longimanus even to flinch.

  I glanced upward and saw the bottom of the boat, a squat, gray black shape perhaps fifty feet away, forty-five, forty …

  The shark appeared from behind me, a pectoral fin nearly touching my shoulder. The mouth opened, the membrane flickered upward, covering most of the eye, the upper jaw dropped down and forward, and the head turned toward me.

  I remember seeing the tail sweep once, propelling longimanus forward.

  I remember bending backward to avoid the gaping mouth.

  I remember the ghostly, yellowish white eyeball, and I remember stabbing at it with the broomstick.

  I don’t remember hitting, instead, the roof of the shark’s mouth, but that’s what must have happened, for the next thing I knew, the shark bit down on the broomstick, shook its head back and forth to tear it loose, and, when that failed, lunged with its powerful tail, intent on fleeing with its prize.

  The broomstick, of course, was attached to my wrist, and I was suddenly dragged through the water like a rag doll, flopping helplessly behind the (by now) frightened shark, which had taken a test bite from a strange, bleeding prey and now found itself dragging a great rubber thing through the water.

  Breathing became difficult; I was running out of air.

  I tried to peel the rawhide thong off my wrist, but the tension on it was too great and I couldn’t budge it.

  I was on my back now, upside down, my right arm over my head as longimanus towed me away from the safety of the boat. I could once again see blood trailing from my leg; at this depth it was dark blue, and it streamed behind me like a wake.

  Everything stopped. At once. My arm was free, and I was floating, neutrally buoyant, about thirty feet beneath the surface. I looked at the broomstick—or at what remained of it: longimanus had bitten through it, and the strands of mashed wood fiber looked splayed, like a flowering weed.

  Far away, at the outer limits of my sight, I saw the black scythe of a tail fin vanish into the blue.

  I sucked one final breath from my tank, opened my mouth, tipped my head back, and propelled by a couple of kicks, ascended to the kingdom of light and air.

  Not until I reached the swim step at the stern of the boat did the weakness of fear overcome me, and the shock.

  I spat out my mouthpiece, took off my mask, and gurgled something like, “Goddamn … son of a bitch!… mother—”

  “No!” said the director. “No, no, no. You can’t use that language on network television. Go back down and surface again and tell us what you saw.”

  Makos and Blue Sharks

  The final two sharks on my personal list of species to be wary of could not be more different from each other. One, the mako, is a loner that reminds me of Jack Palance in Shane: sleek, silent, and vicious. The other, the blue shark, is a pack animal that rarely bothers anyone but has, on occasion, killed human beings floating in the ocean. Because it is a pelagic (open-water) shark like longimanus, the blue shark is vulnerable to large commercial fishing operations, and over the last ten years populations of blues all over the world have been devastated.

  The mako is one of the fastest fish in the sea—far and away the fastest shark—and is the only shark listed by the International Game Fishing Association as a true “sport fish.” The feel of most sharks on a fishing line has been likened to hauling on wet laundry or trying to lift a cow; fighting a mako has been compared to riding a bull or wrestling a pissed-off crocodile.

  Makos leap completely out of the water, turn somersaults, and “run” in any and all directions in their frenzy to escape. Hooked makos have been known to charge boats and jump into open cockpits, where they’ve gone berserk and destroyed the boat that has hooked them. (A mako, remember, can weigh upward of a thousand pounds.) Some fishermen have jumped overboard rather than risk being beaten to death by the flailing fish, and a few have tried to subdue maddened makos by shooting at them with high-powered rifles—a technique not recommended,
because of possible unintended consequences.

  While the body of a mako is one of the most beautiful in the sea, its face is positively ugly. A mako looks mean. Its teeth, upper and lower, are long, pointed, sharp as needles, and snaggly. Unlike a great white’s teeth, which speak to me of quick, efficient death, a mako’s teeth warn of a nasty end, of flesh ripped into ragged chunks. A mako’s eye, too, is distinct from every other shark’s. To me, at least, it looks crazed and threatening, like a coiled snake, ready at any second to explode into unstoppable violence.

  A mako’s speed, however, is its most dazzling weapon. Especially over short distances—like the range of visibility in most water conditions—it is capable of appearing and disappearing as if by magic: a gray ghost in the distance one second, right in front of you the next, gone the next, back again the next.

  A friend of mine was snorkeling in shallow water in the Bahamas a few years ago, poking the sand bottom with a long metal rod in search of buried cannons or shipwreck wood, when he glanced up and noticed a shark cruising at the far limit of his vision. Here’s what he recalls:

  “I didn’t give it a thought, didn’t pay any mind to what kind it was. Before my eyes had refocused on the bottom, it hit me. Out of nowhere. I never saw it coming. All I knew was, I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train. My mask was knocked off, both flippers came off, I dropped the spear, and suddenly the water was full of blood. Mine. The mako had hit me just once, a glancing blow, tore up my thigh pretty badly. I could see him off a ways, hanging there, like he was deciding whether or not I was worth eating. Then—poof!—he was gone. I guess he figured I was too bony.”

  Bony, perhaps; lucky, definitely.

  Any Shark Can Ruin Your Day

  Don’t take as gospel my (or anybody’s) list of bad actors in the company of sharks. All such lists are subjective. Mine includes only sharks that either I or my colleagues have had trouble with. Some folks, for instance, have reason to be scared of hammerheads; others have had unhappy run-ins with gray reef sharks.

  What you should take as gospel—and what subjective lists ignore—is the most important fundamental precept of dealing with sharks, that is, any shark can be dangerous. Still, most injuries inflicted by reputedly inoffensive sharks are caused by human error or ignorance.

  Nurse sharks, for example, are among the most docile of all species. The common peril people face from them is being bumped by them as they flee. I know of at least one diver, however, who, when he entered a cave and saw a nurse shark sleeping in the sand, pulled the shark’s tail to get it to move. The shark moved, all right; startled awake, it spun around in a frantic blur, bit the man in the throat (missing an artery by a couple of millimeters), tore a gold chain from his neck, and, as it fled the cave, knocked the man spinning against the rock wall.

  Over a single August weekend in 2001, in the single Florida county of Volusia, six people were bitten by sharks that they saw before they entered the water. The sharks (most were blacktips) had gathered to feed on schools of baitfish; the people had gathered to participate in a surfing contest. Too impatient to wait for the sharks to finish feeding and leave the area, the surfers chose instead to wade among and step over the feeding sharks.

  That only six were bitten seems to me a miracle.

  Other attacks last year happened to people who ignored, or were ignorant of, one or more of the basic rules that help keep the chances of an attack to a minimum: they swam at dawn or at dusk; they swam alone; they swam far from shore or where fish were feeding or birds were working.

  Elsewhere in the world, a man was almost killed when he tried to hitch a ride on the back of a whale shark, as harmless a giant as ever roamed the sea. When he grabbed the enormous dorsal fin, his hand slipped, then he slipped, and hung in the water, watching, as the great speckled body moved beneath him like a ship. Mesmerized, he forgot that this ship was driven not by a propeller but by a tail as tall as he was and as hard as iron, and the sweeping tail clubbed him from behind, rendering him breathless and senseless. He survived only because an alert buddy located his regulator mouthpiece, rammed it into his mouth and purged it—forcing air into him—and inflated his vest, which lifted him to the surface.

  There is one circumstance under which all sharks of all sizes and (nearly) all dietary predilections will eat a human being without hesitation. That is if the person is dead.

  Sharks are scavengers. Scouring and clearing the ocean of animals that are weak, weary, or dead is one of a shark’s most valuable functions.

  8

  Swimming Safely in the Sea

  At approximately nine o’clock on the morning of July 23, 2001, four young cousins—three girls and a boy, aged eleven to sixteen—waded into knee-deep water at a beach in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York.

  Although lifeguards assigned to the beach were not scheduled to begin their shift for another hour, the youngsters were accompanied by an adult, an uncle, who was reportedly aware of the dangerous currents off this particular stretch of beach. He warned the children not to go into the water while he busied himself preparing fishing rods and fetching food for their picnic.

  The children probably thought they were obeying; wading wasn’t really going into the water.

  Within minutes, three of them were dead.

  While the uncle’s attention was elsewhere, all four had been yanked off their feet by the waves, and grabbed and dragged under water by a current so violent that it had already earned the area its local nickname—“the death trap.” Only one of the children, the eleven-year-old boy, managed somehow to escape the grip of the current and get back to shore.

  The next day’s newspapers were replete with warnings against swimming on unguarded beaches, and official warnings about the price the public pays for ignoring regulations.

  The pertinent issue, however—the real reason those three girls and more than four thousand other people in the United States drowned in 2001—has nothing to do with rules, regulations, or lifeguards.

  It has to do with the public’s unfamiliarity with the ocean and ignorance about swimming safely in it.

  According to the American Red Cross, more than 54 percent of Americans—perhaps as many as 140 million people—say that their primary leisure activity is swimming. That’s more than all our golfers, tennis players, sailors, scuba divers, and Frisbee artists combined. Off the record, though, those same Red Cross officials acknowledge that only about 12 percent of the professed swimmers are actually competent swimmers.

  And God only knows what tiny fraction of that 12 percent are competent ocean swimmers, a specialty that takes as much knowledge, training, and experience as rock climbing or kayaking. A Red Cross–certified beginning swimmer is about as close to a skilled ocean swimmer as a licensed driver is to an Indianapolis 500 contestant.

  The United States has 12,383 miles of shoreline, of which much less than 1 percent is patrolled by lifeguards on any given day. So if, on a hot summer day, you’re struck by a sudden urge to swim in the sea, the odds are that there won’t be a lifeguard nearby to keep an eye on you.

  I began to swim in the ocean at the age of five, shepherded diligently by an uncle who had been disqualified from serving in the armed forces during World War II because of a bad back. Swimming in the sea was his passion and his therapy, and because there were no lifeguards on most of the beaches on Nantucket, he wanted me to know how to take care of myself.

  He taught me how to study the water before I went in, how to enter the water without getting bashed by a wave, how to select the wave appropriate for me to ride, how to ride it and recover from the inevitable mistakes I was bound to make. He taught me that swimming in the ocean meant working with the ocean, never against it.

  My uncle’s first, indelible lesson, writ large, was: Never fight the ocean. Go with it and it will work with you. Let it take you where it will, and it will let you go.

  It’s the most important single dictum in ocean swimming. If everyone who swam in the ocean obeyed i
t, the number of drownings would shrink dramatically.

  People who get into trouble in the ocean are prone to panic. If the past is any guide, somewhere between twenty and forty people a day will drown during the summer in the United States, most of them within fifteen feet of safety, and all because of panic.

  If you are a young, healthy, sober person, there is no reason for you to drown while swimming in the ocean if, before you go into the water, you learn the basic facts about the environment into which you’re about to go, learn how to coexist with it and cope with its caprices. Some people harbor the belief that they can out-muscle the ocean. No one can. And yet there are some who will die trying.

  Here are some basic lessons I’ve learned and some simple precautions to take that will help keep you and your children from getting into trouble while swimming off a beach. They require nothing more than a rudimentary knowledge of how oceans work, the patience to study the water you’re about to enter, and a healthy dollop of common sense.

  Ocean Water Is Always Moving

  It’s a fact you must take on faith: no matter how calm the surface may appear, the water beneath is never still. It is moving in three dimensions: back and forth along the shore, in and out from the beach, and up and down to a degree dependent on the slope of the shelf of the beach.

  Water is driven constantly by wind, tides, and currents, and by local phenomena like channels, jetties, and points of land. The presence (or absence) of reefs, shoals, and sandbars will alter water’s motion; prevailing winds will drive surf onto certain beaches and leave others to be lapped by little but the tides.

  If you intend to swim in the ocean on a given day, it makes sense to stand for a moment and study what the water is doing that day. The wind will be pushing waves onto the beach, and since winds rarely blow directly at a beach, the waves will strike the shore at an angle, causing a current called a “set” or a “drift” that moves the water in a particular direction.