Demon Fish (11 page)

Every shark attack survivor has a different story, though many of the details are the same: usually swimming around sunrise or sunset, they feel a sudden strike—frequently from below—and find themselves losing a tremendous amount of blood. Victims often don’t experience much pain at first; that comes later.

In 1978, Mike deGruy was in his mid-twenties and working as a marine biologist in the Marshall Islands atoll of Enewetak when he and a friend decided to spend their Sunday diving. Fifty feet down, deGruy saw a gray reef shark engaged in what he now describes as “agonistic display”: the shark was arching its back and raising its snout. Initially, the biologist backed up slowly and tried to be as still as possible so as not to provoke it, but when the shark did not move toward him, he couldn’t resist snapping a picture.

“When the strobe fired, so did the shark,” deGruy recounts, more than thirty years later. “It just came like a bullet.” While deGruy tried to use his camera to block his attacker, the shark was undeterred, taking his elbow in its mouth and raking the back of his hand when deGruy put it out in self-defense.

While the shark sailed off, deGruy thought at that moment he was destined to die. Blood was pouring out in three distinct streams, he could see the bones in his hand, and he was well aware of how many sharks inhabited the water he was immersed in at that precise moment. “I thought, ‘Christ, I’m in trouble,’ ” he recalls. “The sharks were there all over. They were everywhere. You toss a little blood in the water, and there are fifty sharks in five minutes.” As he spent twenty-five minutes swimming to his boat anchored fifty yards away, deGruy thought of himself as “a living chum line.”

DeGruy managed to make it to the twenty-one-foot Boston whaler, as did his diving buddy, who had also been struck. After hastily tying a tourniquet around his arm, deGruy radioed for assistance, help that took an hour to arrive; because the waves were strong, the military helicopter that came to the two men’s aid had difficulty making out the white boat amid the frothy whitecaps.

In retrospect, deGruy thinks his fatalistic attitude after the attack saved his life. “If I thought there was any chance to make it, I wouldn’t have. I would have panicked; I would have freaked out. I was 100 percent convinced I was going to die.”

As deGruy is recounting his brush with death, he’s sitting in the gleaming white offices of the Pew Environment Group in downtown Washington. Flush with money from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the group is both well financed and creative: its employees are constantly devising campaigns aimed at influencing both national and international ocean policy, along with a handful of other green issues. In July 2009 they came up with one of their boldest salvos, bringing roughly half a dozen shark attack survivors to Capitol Hill—deGruy among them—to lobby for the anti-finning bill.

DeGruy doesn’t look, or act, like your typical lobbyist. Now a professional underwater filmmaker living in Santa Barbara, he’s ebullient even when he’s describing what it was like to feel the life draining from his body. He shows off his scarred arm, repaired after he underwent two skin grafts and eleven separate operations, without reservation. “It looks pretty good now,” he declares with a bit of pride, looking at his lumpy but intact appendage.

And while he admits his attack made him more cautious about entering the sea, deGruy says it didn’t shift his fundamental view of sharks. “My attitude before I was attacked is there isn’t a creature in the ocean as adapted to the ocean and as beautiful as the shark,” he says. “It is unchanged.”

Wearing matching white T-shirts that bear a black fin jutting out of the water and the slogan “Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation,” deGruy and the other survivors made their way to the Senate for a brief handshake with Barbara Boxer and a longer conversation with her aides. By the end of the day, it was unclear how much headway they’d made in Congress, but they scored more press coverage than the Pew staff had ever imagined. Their story made the front page of
The Washington Post
, as well as featured segments on CNN, Fox News, and National Public Radio.

Mike Coots, a native of Hawaii who lost his leg to a tiger shark while surfing in October 1997, isn’t surprised that he and the others managed to make news. “The media loves shark stories,” he says matter-of-factly, relaxing at the end of the day in a Senate cafeteria, the American Grill. While most of those stories undermine the cause of conservation, Coots adds, this particular campaign has challenged the conventional wisdom.

“This is actually helping the sharks,” he says, looking over at a reporter interviewing one of his fellow survivors. “The sharks are smiling today.”

These survivors are effective, in part, because they make us face an unpleasant truth: sharks will always threaten us, in an unpredictable way. But if deGruy, Coots, and others can make their peace with that, why can’t we?

From the moment
Jaws
became a hit, Peter Benchley made it clear he did not advocate killing sharks. Benchley spent years filming underwater adventure specials for a variety of production companies, highlighting the virtues of ocean exploration. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the best-selling author decided to become an environmental crusader.

In the immediate years after his book and movie came out, Benchley was fairly defensive when it came to the question of sharks: as reporters repeatedly called him for comment on incidents involving either human attacks on sharks or vice versa, the author became skilled at deflecting the idea that he started the war of man versus shark. “He had various ways of explaining to people why he shouldn’t be responsible for everyone who was bitten by a shark, or afraid of sharks,” Wendy Benchley recalls.

Toward the end of his life, Benchley became an environmental crusader, making short educational films for the New England Aquarium and conducting a speaking tour in Asia, and he started telling reporters he couldn’t have written
Jaws
knowing what he now understood about sharks.

“He was looking for ways to get involved and use his reputation and his clout,” says Greg Stone, chief oceans scientist for Conservation International and senior vice president for exploration and conservation at the New England Aquarium. “It’s pretty much the way he spent the last ten years of his life.”

Benchley died with this work unfinished. Even after a decade of advocacy, he had just begun to erase what seems like an indelible mark on the public consciousness. And even decades after the release of his book, plenty of people devote their careers to keeping the
Jaws
myth alive. As long as the myth persists, shark hunters will have many reasons to go about ridding the sea of them. How can you fault someone for wiping out a killer?

3

A DEMON FISH

In terms of the numbers of sharks we’ve killed, nobody comes close to us. We’ve caught just about everything there is left to catch. Sharks are fascinating, but we’re trophy hunters. I get paid to kill fish. Some people don’t like it, but too bad.

—Mark “the Shark” Quartiano, Miami fishing tour boat operator

T
he massive scalloped hammerhead, swaying over the deck of
Striker-1
, brings Rosie O’Donnell to an abrupt halt in the middle of Biscayne Bay.

Driving a motorboat with a gaggle of female friends, the well-known comedian pulls up next to Mark Quartiano’s fifty-foot Hatteras and begins peppering him with questions. Pointing to the now-lifeless body, she asks, “Is that for real?”

Mark “the Shark” Quartiano, who has operated a fishing charter here in Miami since 1976, is pleased with the attention. He works hard, seven days a week, and it’s strangers’ fascination with sharks that keeps his operation humming.

While the captain assures O’Donnell that the nearly nine-foot fish is genuine, one of the Texans who’s spent the morning fishing with Quartiano has a question of his own. Dustin Self is a twenty-six-year-old roughneck who works on an oil rig for a living, but he’s savvy enough to spot the celebrity who’s just pulled up. “Are you Rosie O’Donnell?” he shouts.

She is, and it turns out O’Donnell’s son, Blake, is a shark aficionado who has spied
Striker-1
before. The family has a vacation home on Star Island, the exclusive Miami enclave where the pop singer Gloria Estefan and the NBA star Shaquille O’Neal also own manses, and Blake O’Donnell has pointed out Quartiano’s boat as it’s cruised past their home on multiple occasions. In the past, O’Donnell told her son the vessel couldn’t possibly hunt sharks, but she’s happy to stand corrected. “My son’s going to flip out!” she exclaims, before hurrying back to the island.

Within minutes, O’Donnell has returned on a gleaming dark red Jet Ski with Blake in tow. She is unabashed in her admiration of the hulking mass hanging by a rope, its black eyes on opposite ends of its rectangular head now glassy.

“We can’t believe it!” she tells the Texas family, as she and Blake stroke the creature. “Oh my God. He feels like rubber.”

O’Donnell wants to know who caught the shark—it is Self’s girlfriend, Stephanie Perez, a recent Texas Woman’s University graduate who’s about to pursue her master’s degree in speech therapy. This brings another flurry of praise from O’Donnell. “And you’re the one who caught it,” she marvels. “Girl power!”

Women are showing up more often on
Striker-1
nowadays. Shark fishing used to be an almost exclusively male sport, and Quartiano traditionally hosted bachelor’s parties on his boat along with the usual businessmen’s outing. Now he’s booking bachelorettes as well, giving them equal billing on his Web site.

The captain—who has a deeply tanned, weathered face and the sort of blond-streaked hair that seems almost required for men and women alike in Miami—has no problem with this demographic shift. He is focused on maintaining as robust a clientele as possible, especially in the midst of a major economic downturn. “I’d rather have a woman than a man in the chair, because they listen to everything you say,” he says, referring to the fishing chair off the stern where clients reel in their prize catches.

Quartiano can no longer count on Fortune 500 companies such as Coca-Cola, IBM, and Microsoft holding lavish conventions in Miami where gaggles of executives were anxious to head out for an afternoon of fishing. And on top of that, it’s harder to find sharks. “I spend all day long trying to catch a shark, when twenty years ago, forget it. Ten minutes,” he reminisces as he pilots the boat away from the Miami Marriott, where his ship departs. “It’s a grind. It isn’t easy.”

“But you love it, right?” pipes up Perez’s father.

“It’s a lot of pressure, when you think about it,” Quartiano muses, his eyes scanning the ocean’s surface. “It’s no fun fishing for somebody else. I’ve got to catch you a fish, and I’ve got two hours to catch it. Isn’t that right?”

Perez’s father has no rejoinder; the entire group is quiet. They’ve come out here expecting to see a big shark, and they’ll go away disappointed if they don’t.

Perez is a perfect example of the newer clients Quartiano’s started serving: it was her idea to book a charter this morning, bringing along her parents, boyfriend, brother, and brother’s friend for the ride. The men spend a while catching shark bait, including bonito, kingfish, and barracuda, but when it becomes clear a shark is on the line, she’s the one who settles into the fishing chair for a half-hour tug-of-war.

Initially, Perez has trouble heeding Quartiano’s advice. He tells her to try reeling in the shark only when it’s not tugging at the line to avoid exhaustion, but the twenty-three-year-old has difficulty timing her efforts. (“I used to think girls could follow instructions,” he says good-naturedly at one point, sotto voce.) But with her mother’s encouragement—“Remember, honey, you just graduated from college; you can follow instructions”—Perez gets into the rhythm. As she toils away, her parents start debating whether she could ever mount a shark trophy in their house, located in the Houston suburbs.

“No animals in my house,” her mother, Norma Perez, says, shaking her head side to side.

Quartiano is too superstitious to let the comment pass. “Let’s catch him first, then you can talk about where you can put him.”

Finally, the shark relents. Quartiano and his mate, Jeff Fasshauer, scramble to pull the hammerhead on board. Deeply tangled in the fishing line, with a huge hole in its side, the animal is essentially dead.

After all the debate on board, Perez isn’t actually interested in making a wall mount out of her catch: “Probably pictures are enough for me.” And she remains agnostic about whether shark fishing is good or bad. “I know this sounds harsh, but I guess it depends on how many sharks there are. If they’re endangered, you shouldn’t do it, but if they’re bountiful …” Her voice trails off. “I’m really kind of indifferent on it, because I don’t know enough to say anything.”

Perez will walk away from the boat without her big fish—which is, in fact, classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—but it’s enough to convince O’Donnell she should take her son Blake shark fishing aboard
Striker-1
. As the two of them zoom away on their Jet Ski, Quartiano notes with satisfaction, “I don’t think she’s Greenpeace, right? That’s a future customer.”