Shark Trouble (6 page)

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.

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.

Look at swimmers already in the water or at pieces of wood or seaweed floating on the surface, and note which way they're moving and how fast. That will tell you how strong the drift is and how quickly you'll be carried away from the point where you enter the water. The stronger the drift, the closer you should stay to shore and the more carefully you should plan where you want to exit the water, because here is another inexorable fact of ocean swimming:

You Cannot Swim Against a Strong Current

If you try, you will exhaust yourself and probably precipitate a chain of events that may lead to disaster: fatigue, gasping, breathing water, choking, panic, struggling for air, waving or calling for help, sinking, and, finally, drowning.

If you want to emerge from the water near your blanket, your Yoo-hoo, and your can of Pringles, walk up the beach in the opposite direction of the drift, enter the water, and let yourself float down the beach until you reach your exit point. Then swim gently
across
the drift toward shore. Otherwise, be prepared to float away from your home base and walk back when you're finished swimming.

Under
no
circumstances should you try to swim against the current—the only exception being for swimmers with a lot of experience in the ocean and a dedication to vigorous exercise. For years I swam a mile a day for exercise, and when I was at the shore, I'd calculate the drift with the intent of swimming as hard as I could against it while managing to stay in place. I was always alert, though, for the onset of fatigue, and when I saw myself slipping away from a fixed point on the shore, I'd immediately swim across the drift and get out of the water.

There are a few naturally occurring phenomena that can sometimes (but not always) be seen from the shore, that can be deadly but don't have to be, and that you can anticipate—just by being aware of them—whether or not you see them coming.

Undertow

This is a term that is universally known and widely misunderstood. Many people use
undertow
to mean
any
action of waves, currents, or tides that can jeopardize their safety. In fact, undertow is a very specific phenomenon that occurs mostly on narrow beaches with steep scarps, or drop-offs. It is, simply, the action of water thrown ashore by a wave returning whence it came.

After a wave breaks, gravity will carry the water back to sea. If the drop-off into the sea is steep, the water will fall sharply, carrying you with it. If you don't struggle or resist, the undertow will carry you for a few feet (perhaps more, but not much more) and will then dissipate. Buoyed by the air in your lungs, you will rise to the surface, and you can swim back to shore. You may find yourself in water over your head, but if you're not comfortable being in water deeper than you are tall, you are, in the purest sense of the phrase, out of your depth.

Runout or Sea Puss

A common cause of multiple simultaneous problems is known both as a “runout” and a “sea puss.” Somewhere offshore of a relatively straight beach there will be an invisible sandbar or shoal that has built up over a long period. Untold millions of tons of water will flow over the bar toward shore, until, at last, the level of the water inside the bar exceeds the water level outside the bar, at which moment, inevitably, the water must begin to flow back seaward.

If there is a weak spot in the sandbar, it may collapse and create a funnel-like path through the bar. The enormous volume of water—which always seeks the easiest path to equilibrium—will rush toward the funnel with unimaginable power and irresistible force.

Runouts happen frequently, and they can be seen from the beach. People watching one have described the scene as like seeing the entire ocean running down a drain. A strip of water leading out to sea, perhaps ten yards wide, perhaps fifty, will look different from the rest of the ocean. It will definitely have its own motion; it may contain short, choppy, foamy waves; the water will look murky and sandy from turbulence; all manner of flotsam—pieces of wood, seaweed, trash—will be speeding seaward in the strip. If there is wave action over the sandbar, the runout will appear as a gap in the surf, for this is where the bar has collapsed. Once beyond the sandbar, the strip will vanish as the water disperses and the runout has … well … run out.

For veteran surfers, runouts are a blessing, for they provide effortless transport over the bar and beyond the waves. Surfers know that if at any point they change their minds, they can return to calm water simply by paddling across the runout until they're out of it.

Swimmers caught in runouts have that option, too, but most either don't know it or, in shock and surprise, forget it. They panic and, intuitively, try to resist the force of the runout instead of, counterintuitively, surrendering to it and, when they're ready, swimming across and out of it.

Swimmers have another option, too, but it takes a cool head and a practiced eye to choose it. If a swimmer caught in a runout can see the sandbar offshore (or the waves breaking on it) and can determine that it isn't too far to swim safely back from, she can—no kidding—relax and enjoy the ride. The runout will carry the swimmer past the bar and, perhaps twenty or twenty-five yards farther out, will dissipate, leaving her to return to shore—maybe even pleasantly, by riding one or more of the waves that break over the bar.

That second option may be a bit more of a challenge than the average swimmer wants to assume, but once more, if you're not fit enough to swim, kick, float, or dog-paddle for a couple of hundred yards in the ocean, don't go in.

Undertows and runouts are phenomena that affect only swimmers, for they occur
in
the water, or, in the case of runouts, offshore. You can't be caught in one if you don't go swimming. That's not quite the statement-of-the-obvious that it appears, for there
is
one ocean imp that can reach up onto the beach and grab you (or, especially, your small child) and drag you into deep water. An old Environmental Science Services pamphlet called it a “killer at the seashore.” Its common name is a “rip.”

Rip

The reason a rip is so dangerous is that it actually forms
on
the beach. Children wading in the wave wash where a rip begins—like the four in Queens mentioned earlier—can be knocked off their feet and sucked out to sea in a matter of seconds.

Beaches are, by nature, unstable. The mixture of sand, pebbles, rocks, shells, vegetation, and water that makes up a beach is soft and malleable, and its contours change with every wave that passes through and over it. All day long erosion creates small depressions, in random sequence, up and down the beach. Water from returning waves will gravitate toward the depressions, scouring them deeper and wider and creating, very quickly, a strong seaward pull—a rip.

If a child is standing at the edge of such a depression, the ground will suddenly disappear and the child will be sucked away from shore. If the natural slope of the beach is long, gentle, and shallow, the child may be able to struggle out of the rip, sideways, into calm water. But if the slope is short and steep, the child will be in turbulent, deep water before he can catch a breath.

Rips resemble runouts in both appearance and solution. Like a runout, a rip is a strip of rough, murky, foamy water moving directly away from the beach. A rip begins right
at
the beach, however, and it tends to be narrower than a runout, anywhere from a few feet to a few yards wide. It doesn't travel as far—dissipating, usually, just beyond the breakers—and it can end as abruptly and unpredictably as it began, while other ones may be forming at other spots along the same beach.

A swimmer caught in a rip has the same options as a swimmer caught in a runout: swim across the rip until you're out of it, or let it carry you out until its force fades away. Whatever you do,
don't fight it;
don't try to swim straight back to the beach. That way lies exhaustion, panic, and, perhaps, drowning.

To me, one of the saddest aspects of drowning is that it is so often unnecessary, the result of compounding a simple error or two.

Years ago, I wrote a piece for
The New York Times Magazine
on how to swim safely in the ocean, and in it I quoted a description of a typical drowning victim, told to me by a veteran Red Cross safety expert named Mike Howes:

“He [the hypothetical victim] decides he's in trouble, so to attract attention he waves his arms over his head, which puts a lot of meat out of water—where it's heavier—and makes him sink. He struggles up again, gasps for breath, then waves his arms again and sinks again. If he left his arms in the water and waved them slowly up and down, he'd stay on the surface. But he doesn't, so he gets water in his mouth; his epiglottis slams shut, and he panics. He coughs, sinks, coughs under water, gasps, and—well, that's it.”

What most swimmers fail to realize is that if they are uninjured and even marginally competent, they can save themselves. In all but the roughest and coldest seas, they can stay afloat indefinitely. They can also, without great effort, propel themselves toward shore. They may end up several miles from where they entered the water, but they'll be alive to gripe about the walk home.

One day in my late teens I was swimming with a friend off the south shore of Nantucket when we found ourselves trapped offshore, beyond the breaking point of endless, tremendous waves. There were no surfboards, body boards, or boogie boards back then—at least not on Nantucket—so all we had for flotation and transportation were our own air-filled lungs and our own strong young arms and legs. We had been riding the waves happily for an hour or so and had paid no attention to where we were in relation to the shore. We weren't aware that we had been swept away from the long, sloping beach where the waves broke in regular, predictable rhythms and carried us all the way in to knee-deep water. Now, we were surprised to find, we were far offshore of a steep, relatively short beach and a precipitous hidden sandbar that, together, produced row after row of tall, rough waves that crested high and broke almost straight downward.

We would try to ride a wave, but instead of being carried gently ashore, we would be slammed violently onto the hard-sand bottom, “boiled” mercilessly in the sandy foam, and then propelled upward to more or less the same place where we had begun—just in time to duck under another monster wave, and another. After making virtually no progress for, I don't know, ten, fifteen minutes, we were both exhausted. We knew that our only salvation lay
off
shore, in the calm water beyond the waves.

Turning seaward, we swam under breaking wave after breaking wave until, finally, we reached open water where ocean swells had not yet become waves.

We were, we guessed, between a quarter and half a mile offshore. Though from this prospect we couldn't see the waves actually breaking onshore, we could see their massive shoulders gather and hunch before they disappeared, to be instantly followed by the next rank of waves and the next.

We knew very well that there was no way we were going to make it to shore in these conditions. We also knew, though, that we had nothing, really, to worry about. Nantucket was only fourteen miles long; we had entered the water at approximately the midpoint of the island; we were heading westward where, at the end of the island, shallow shoals extended far offshore.

We were cold, yes, because the water temperature was only in the upper seventies, but if we stayed active, we could keep from freezing for many hours. Save for an unimaginable stroke of bad luck—being eaten by something, say, or being run down by a nuclear submarine, the odds against both of which were similarly astronomical—we could float safely indefinitely, or at least until we reached a time of slack tide or a point at which we could walk ashore.

We'd be inconvenienced, surely, and grumpy and tired and cold. We'd be forced to hitch a ride, soaking wet and sandy, back to our car. But we would be alive.

It took four hours, but that's what happened. Along the way, we passed several populated beaches—the people were so far away that they resembled the tiny virtual passengers on the cinematic
Titanic
—even one overseen by a lifeguard, but we raised no alarm, for we didn't want to put anyone's life in jeopardy by asking them to rescue us. Besides, we were fine; we didn't need rescue.

Sometime in midafternoon, we came to a part of the island where the shoals extended so far out to sea that wave action ceased—there was no shelving beach for them to break on—and was replaced by a short, confused chop that we could, at first, swim through and then, at last, wade through.

We were everything I described above, plus chastened and grateful. I said a silent “thank-you” to the uncle of my childhood.