Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea Read online

  Nor have I had trouble with any of the various kinds of bull sharks, though I know that many people—divers as well as swimmers—have. If I see a bull shark under water, I never take my eyes off it. In early September 2001, I noticed that some respected journalists and scientists were declaring that bull sharks actually do target human beings as food. I think the conclusion is rash and no more provable than other sweeping generalizations about any species of shark. On the other hand, I am convinced that bull sharks are dangerous to human beings, and they merit a greater measure of fear than most other species.

  I’m just as wary of makos, though they’re so fast that keeping them in sight is nearly impossible. Not only are makos the fastest sharks in the sea, and armed with a mouth full of scraggly knives, but they have a reputation for crankiness.

  I’ve been in the water with a mako only once. It appeared as if by magic, and paused in front of cinematographer Stan Waterman, no more than two feet away. Before Stan could focus his camera, his safety diver—whose sole job is to protect the back of the cameraman—panicked and whacked the mako with his “bang stick,” a steel tube fitted on one end with a twelve-gauge shotgun-shell blank and a detonating mechanism. The explosion of the gases inside the cartridge blew a hole the size of a silver dollar in the mako’s head, killing it instantly, and we watched the beautiful metallic blue body swirl away into the darkness of the deep.

  Stan was furious; he had discerned no danger; he had had the mako in sight at all times, and it hadn’t threatened him once. The gorgeous animal had died for nothing. Stan’s safety diver was abashed and apologetic.

  And then, finally, there is the shark for which no amount of instruction, training, warning, or anticipation can prepare a diver: the great white. Yes, there are a few helpful things to know, such as that you can reduce the creature’s advantage by letting it know that you know that it sees you. Great whites are ambushers by trade, preferring to attack prey from below and behind. Theoretically, if you face down a great white, you may convince it that you’re too much trouble to bother with. Theoretically.

  I know an individual in South Africa who snorkels and scuba dives with great whites in the open (that is, with no cage), and he sometimes carries for protection a weighted piece of wood painted to resemble an enormous great white’s head in “full gape”—mouth yawning open, upper jaw down and out in bite position. He claims that his bluff has several times deceived great whites and discouraged them from attacking him.

  Still, nothing in the world can prepare the average scuba diver—or, for that matter, the average shark diver—for an unplanned encounter with whitey. I know it to be true, for it happened to me several years ago.

  The great Bermudian polymath Teddy Tucker was asked to journey to Walker’s Cay in the Bahamas, to assess a pile of ancient cannons that had been discovered on the sandy bottom. The finder of the cannons wanted Teddy’s opinion as to whether the guns were signs of a shipwreck in the immediate vicinity—in which case, if the wreck appeared to be from a significant era, he might finance an archeological expedition to preserve its remains—or were merely a “dump,” cannons tossed overboard centuries ago from a storm-wracked ship trying to lighten itself enough to pass over the many reefs and shoals among which it had found itself trapped. Teddy would scour the rocks and coral nearby for alluvial stones that might have been used as ballast, and he would search for bits of wood or metal and for coralline overgrowth that could signal iron, bronze, silver, or sections of a ship’s skeleton concealed beneath.

  I accompanied Teddy as dogsbody, bat man, porter, and companion, not because he needed me but because I knew that a trip with Teddy was an adventure guaranteed, always fascinating, often exciting, and occasionally perilous. I had already written two novels based on or inspired by escapades with Teddy, The Deep and The Island, and more were to follow.

  It took him only a few dives over a couple of days to conclude that the cannons were a dump. No ship had sunk with them—no ship big enough to carry this many guns, anyway, and none right here. Perhaps the ship had lightened up enough to clear the reefs and sail on to the safety of the open sea. Perhaps it had made a few hundred yards of headway and then come to grief on another reef. Perhaps the storm had broken the ship apart, sending different sections to float away to different destinations. Perhaps the ship had made it all the way home to England or Spain or France or Holland. The cannons were of English manufacture, but in an age when everyone pillaged and used everyone else’s cannons and currencies (Spanish pieces of eight were legal tender in the United States, for example, until the middle of the nineteenth century), place of origin was proof of nothing further.

  Unless and until the finder decided to spend the time and lavish sums of money to search naval archives and mount a proper underwater expedition, no one would ever know for certain the fate of the hapless ship.

  One day, while Teddy was examining a stretch of reef, I returned to the cannons, intending to fan away the sand at the base of the heap of encrusted iron, in hopes of finding some small telltale sign of a wreck: an emerald ring, perhaps, or a gold chain. Something modest.

  The water was clear and the visibility seemingly endless, so the cannons were in plain sight from the surface forty or fifty feet away. I remember the pile as being higher than I was tall and at least twenty-five or thirty feet long. A friend of ours was snorkeling on the surface, and he waved to me as I sank to the bottom and began to creep along the sand, fanning with my hand here and there to expose a crack or crevice that might be hiding what had, by now, become in my mind the Gem of Gems.

  After a few pleasant but fruitless minutes of ambling and fanning, I heard a smacking sound from above. I looked up and saw that my snorkeling friend was slapping the surface and pointing down at me—or so it appeared. I looked at him for a moment, long enough to assure myself that he wasn’t in trouble, then I waved to acknowledge him and continued on my way.

  The slapping stopped, and now I heard the sound of swim fins churning through the water. I looked up and saw the snorkeler swimming—no, racing—toward the boat. He’d become bored, I assumed, or cold (though the water was soup warm). I kept going.

  Not till much later did I learn that what he had been doing with all his noisy slapping was trying to save my life.

  From his prospect high above, he had a clear and comprehensive view of the entire area: not just the cannons, but the sand plains that spread out from them on all sides. Seconds after I had begun to creep along the sand, he had seen, emerging from the gloom on the opposite side of the cannons, a great white shark. Not a big one—ten or twelve feet at most, probably a young male—but a great white shark nonetheless.

  Anyone who has ever seen a great white in the water will never mistake it for any other species of shark. Seen from above, the great white has a unique profile. Its hefty, jumbo-jet fuselage is distinguished by what’s called its caudal keel, a curved horizontal fin that protrudes just forward of the tail on both sides of its body. It resembles a diving plane on a submarine or a stabilizer on a ship, and it gives support to the tail, and streamlines the shark. Caudal keels exist in billfish and a few other species of sharks, but in none are they so pronounced. Seen from the side, a great white is thicker and more robust than, say, a silky; its snout is perfectly proportioned, not as sharp as a mako’s, not as blunt as a tiger shark’s. Seen head-on, it is broad-shouldered, neckless, its lower jaw slightly ajar and showing grabbing and tearing teeth, its upper lip looking sort of puckery, as if the upper jaw were toothless rather than home to row upon row of big, serrated triangular cutting teeth that lie relaxed, nearly horizontal, against the upper gums.

  Seen from anywhere, it is a big shark, long and bulky—a seventeen-foot female can weigh more than two tons—and it moves with the ease and confidence of the toughest dude on the block.

  My friend the snorkeler had been with us in South Australia, and he knew what he was seeing.

  He told me later that from his vantage point the pile of c
annons resembled an almond; he could see me swimming along the right side of the almond and the shark swimming up the left side at approximately the same speed. He calculated that the shark and I would meet at the point of the almond, as precisely as two characters in a Warner Bros. cartoon. He had slapped the water to warn me and pointed not at me but at the shark, until suddenly the thought had occurred to him that causing a ruckus on the surface might possibly attract the shark up to him. He figured that I, at least, had the advantage of being completely submerged and on apparently equal turf with the shark, while he, floundering on the surface, was nothing but bait. So he had departed, hastily, for the boat.

  In my judgment, he did exactly the correct thing.

  I, meanwhile, continued on, oblivious to everything save the phantom jewels undoubtedly nestled in the next pocket of sand between cannons, or certainly the one after that. My eyes riveted on the bottom, I had no reason to look up.

  I reached the end of the pile of cannons, the point of the almond, and then I did look up, to orient myself, and at that very moment the great white reached the same spot.

  We saw each other. Our eyes locked for perhaps a nanosecond, just long enough for my brain to register and recognize what my eyes were seeing and for its brain to register (I guess) shock and surprise.

  I was paralyzed. The shark wasn’t. It braked with its pectoral fins, like a plane with its flaps down for landing, spun completely around in its own length, and vanished in a billowy cloud of brown, which had exploded from its bowel.

  I was alone, kneeling on the bottom, stunned and breathless and, within a few seconds, covered by a cloud of great-white-shark shit.

  11

  You Say You Want to Dive with Sharks?

  Well, you’d better be an experienced scuba diver.

  And you’d better be guided by a veteran dive master who knows the local waters and its inhabitants very well indeed, because the sharks of one area may behave completely differently from sharks of the same exact species that inhabit another locale.

  And you’d better be prepared to expect the unexpected and act accordingly.

  And you’d better be able to suppress your habits and instincts and to react counterintuitively and instantaneously.

  And you’d better be extremely lucky, because except in areas where feeding stations have been established and the resident sharks are accustomed to having humans in the water with them and have come to associate humans with (not as) food, sharks have no interest at all in hanging out with humans and, as a result, go out of their way to avoid them.

  Especially scuba divers, who appear to a shark to be large, strange (they resemble no other animal it knows), alien (they emit blasts of bubbles), noisy (those bubbles are loud), possibly threatening, and definitely unappetizing.

  More and more these days, at dive sites, hotels, and resorts around the world, divers want to see, be in the presence of, and photograph sharks. They’re prepared to travel vast distances and pay big money to dive with sharks of all kinds, from great whites to whale sharks, blue sharks, hammerheads, duskies, and silkies.

  Crusaders for the conservation of sharks, who work in opposition to international commercial interests that kill millions of sharks every year for their fins, have labored to come up with a statistic proving that a live shark is worth much more to a community, any community, than a dead one. The statistic is no more reliable than any other, but it makes the point.

  Every shark killed for its fins brings a fisherman and his community somewhere between five and fifty dollars, whereas every shark that is left alive to become an attraction for diving tourists generates fifty thousand dollars a year in income for the community.

  While that statistic isn’t provable, there is an underlying truth to it, similar to the old adage, Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The truth here is, tourism is the fastest-growing industry in the world; tourism can transform and save ailing, inefficient economies; diving is an important element in tourism; divers want to see sharks.

  Conclusion: preserve your local sharks, and you’ll attract tourist dollars, which ripple out into the rest of the island (or seaside or port or coastline) economy and support restaurants, hotels, car-rental franchises, shops, video-rental stores, and so on, ad infinitum.

  For the most part, intentional diving with sharks is reasonably safe, because it is chaperoned and supervised by experts. Even the many shark-feeding enterprises that are springing up all over the world (especially in the Bahamas) are, as a rule, conducted so that the paying customers are kept out of jeopardy.

  Shark feeding is, however, increasingly controversial. Scientists worry that behavioral patterns are altered in sharks that become accustomed to being fed by humans; natural behavior becomes unnatural when it is interfered with. Sharks lose part of their “sharkness.” They are, in a sense, corrupted by contact with people.

  Surfers, abalone divers, chambers of commerce, and seaside merchants are worried about a different, less theoretical, and more practical potential problem: the supposed danger caused by habituating sharks to being fed by humans. If certain sharks learn to associate humans with food, how will they react to the presence of humans who don’t come bearing food? To counter that concern, operators of shark-feeding programs point out that the sharks conditioned to feeding stations tend to remain in those areas; if you make your living hunting for food and you find a place where food is given to you, why move? The sharks that occasionally maul people in the surf off bathing beaches aren’t reacting to conditioning; they’re chasing food.

  I can’t speak with authority to the first concern, though it sounds logical and serious.

  With the second, however, I am intimately familiar. I was party to a pseudoscientific “experiment” long ago, and the recollection, seen with the benefit of hindsight over many years of acquired knowledge and experience, causes me some chagrin.

  Shark feeding as a resort attraction was in its infancy. Scuba diving itself was still a relatively young and exotic sport. I was asked to do a TV show on Long Island in the Bahamas, where a dive master had conditioned local sharks to assemble at a certain sand hole in a reef at a certain time of day, and to expect and accept food skewered on a spear stuck in the sand and, sometimes, to eat directly from his hands.

  The routine called for paying customers to gather in a circle in the sand hole, surrounding the dive master, who would lure the sharks to the food. The sharks would arrive, swooping over and between the divers, and would then fight over the food. After ten or fifteen minutes, the food would be gone and the sharks would disperse, eyeballing the divers and passing near enough to give them a thrill and a chance to take a good close-up with their underwater cameras.

  Not for us. Not exciting enough. We were pros. We had to go where other divers dared not. We had to test the limits. So somebody cooked up the idea of measuring the bite dynamics of the sharks, determining how many pounds of pressure per square inch a shark—in this case a variety of bull shark, as I recall—could exert with its jaws.

  We built a gnathodynamometer—a seventeen-letter word for a bite meter—which was nothing more than a sandwich of two dead fish tied to a slab of pressure-sensitive plastic. The idea was that the “talent”—I and a photogenic young Ph.D. candidate named Clarisse—would hand-feed the sandwich to as many sharks as possible, after which we’d determine from the depth of the tooth marks the pressure the sharks’ jaws had exerted.

  The first gnathodynamometer was an instant casualty. No one had paused to consider what would happen if two, three, or more sharks went for it at once. Clarisse and I held it out to a single shark, which swam between us, opened its mouth, seized the sandwich, and was instantly dive-bombed by three other sharks. Knocked aside, we watched helplessly as the sharks swarmed in a ball of fury, tore the fish to shreds, and swam away with the plastic.

  We tried again, this time while a dive master distracted most of the sharks with their usual fo
od. One shark detached from the group, cruised over the bottom toward us, and lunged upward for the gnathodynamometer. But its tail disturbed so much sand, which billowed in a cloud around us, that it couldn’t see where it was going, and instead of biting the sandwich it grabbed a yellow steel-cased strobe light, which it gnawed and worried until, convinced that the light wasn’t appetizing, it gave up and swam away.

  It took several days of trial and error for us to get the shots we sought, but succeed at last we did, and without loss of digit or limb. When the shooting was over, our eleven-year-old son, Clayton, who had watched the action through a face mask at the surface, asked us to take him down to see a shark—if any were still around.

  Without thinking, Wendy and I said, “Sure.” Clayton had been diving for three years; he was careful and knowledgeable, and he obeyed instructions. We knew that most of the sharks had gone, and we were confident that, between us, we could shepherd him safely to and from the bottom.

  We checked all his gear, refreshed him on all the precautions, and went overboard off the stern. I went first and sank straight to the bottom; Clayton came next; Wendy followed.

  We three knelt on the sand and looked around at the empty blue, hoping to see a single shark swimming placidly in the distance.

  We never saw the first shark arrive. It bore down upon us from above, passed quickly before us, and began to circle ten, perhaps fifteen, feet away.

  Two more sharks arrived and joined the circle. Wendy and I closed in on Clayton and looked into each other’s eyes. Simultaneously, we recognized the gross error we had just committed: by jumping into the water and descending into the same sand hole where the feeding ritual took place every day, we had, essentially, given cues to trained animals. And they had responded.