Shark Trouble (9 page)

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 cannons 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 food. 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.

Three more sharks swam in from the gloom; other gray shadows began to appear in the distance.

Soon there were thirteen sharks circling us, expectant but calm … at least for the time being.

We had no food to give them. We couldn't hold up our end of the implicit bargain.

How long would it take the first shark to understand that it had been betrayed, that the rules had been broken? How would it react?

Were they all well fed? Had one or two perhaps not gotten their share during the feeding?

Were all of these thoughts—tripping over one another to crowd into the chaos of my head—nothing more than ludicrous anthropomorphizing?

All I knew for certain was that we had no time to wait for answers. Already a couple of the sharks were exhibiting signs of … not agitation, not excitement … the only word that came to me was
impatience
.

One shark shivered visibly; a ripple traveled the length of its hard, sleek, steel gray body. Another began to swim in spurts, speeding up and slowing down.

I couldn't tell what Clayton was feeling. He knelt motionless, now and then turning his head to watch a particular shark but mostly letting the parade pass before his eyes. Wendy and I had a hand on each of his arms, as one of us always did in any remotely scary circumstance, to ensure that he wouldn't, in panic, suddenly rush for the surface, forgetting his training, and risk becoming a victim of any one of several unhappy accidents.

I looked up at the boat, which was clearly visible directly overhead some thirty feet above us. Then I made contact with Wendy's eyes and told her (as best I could) that I had come to a decision and that she should do exactly as I did. She seemed to—and indeed, she did—understand.

I tapped Clayton to get his attention. He looked up at me, obviously excited, obviously afraid. His eyes, seen through the distortion of mask and water, were the size of extra-large eggs. I made the “okay” sign to him—a circle formed by thumb and forefinger—then touched his mask and mine, saying,
Watch me, do as I do.
He shot me the “okay” sign.

Together, we three rose off our knees and stood on the sand.

The sharks took notice of our movement. Though they didn't change their pace, they closed ranks just a bit, shrinking the diameter of the circle.

Wendy and I faced each other and surrounded Clayton. My right hand held her left. With my left hand, I mimed counting down from three to zero. She closed her eyes for a second, then nodded.

I counted down, and at zero we filled our lungs with compressed air, pressed the purge valves on our regulator mouthpieces, and kicked off the bottom.

A thick, noisy column of bubbles filled the space between us as, shielding Clayton with our bodies, we rose toward the boat, exhaling slowly, fighting the urge to hurry, staying always beneath the last of our bubbles, to prevent any rogue air bubble from being trapped in some tiny space in our lungs, whence it might burst free and become an embolus.

The ploy was elementary and by no means guaranteed to succeed. In general, sharks dislike bubbles. In general, they stay away from loud, erratic bursts of bubbles. Engineers have built bubble “curtains” in attempts to protect beaches, but they've proven to be unreliable.

My hope was that by huddling together and blasting bubbles from our regulators, we would appear to the sharks as an infernal machine worthy of not even a close inspection, let alone an exploratory bite.

Not once did I look down, but Clayton did, and later he told me that the circle of sharks had broken apart as soon as we left and that individual sharks had begun to follow us upward.

We broke through the surface, and in a single motion Wendy and I propelled Clayton up onto the swim step. Next Wendy hauled herself onto the little platform, while I hung off, prepared to kick at any shark that made a run at her legs.

One shark had followed us nearly to the surface. Now it circled tightly just below my feet. I couldn't turn away to climb aboard the boat; I had to keep watching it, in case it should lunge for me.

I hoped that hands would reach down from above and haul me aboard, and Wendy did, in fact, grab the neck of my tank to keep me from drifting away. But she didn't have the strength to lift me and tank and weights and wetsuit clear of the water.

After perhaps a minute, the shark turned away and swam off, and I shucked my tank and pulled myself into the boat.

Wendy and I looked at our son. He had taken off his tank and was shedding his wetsuit. He was trembling, and his lips were blue, from cold or fear or …

We had no words for each other. We had almost lost … we
could
have lost … we were both guilty of … how could we have …?

“Wow!” Clayton shouted. “I've never been so scared in my life.”

“I know,” I began. “I—”

“Can I go again? Can I? Please?”

At eleven years old, he was immortal.

We said no.