The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (13 page)

I could see that Scot and Peter were excited at the prospect of tagging so many sharks, but a little worried about how they’d manage to do it. Especially now. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the Farallones; requests for access were flooding in from the media. The latest one proposed that Brad Pitt, rumored to be fascinated by great white sharks, come out to host a wildlife special. (Fish and Wildlife authorities vetoed the idea immediately.)

As our plates were being cleared, the bartender emerged from behind the bar and walked over to our table. He was a dark-haired bear of a guy in an apron, holding a bottle of pinot noir, and he must have caught the BBC documentary that had entranced me. Pointing to Scot, he said, “You’re the guy with Stumpy!”

Scot nodded. He was used to this. “Yeah, I’m that guy.” He gestured toward Peter: “He’s the other guy.”

“How
is
Stumpy?” the bartender asked, pouring us a round on the house.

“Ah, we haven’t seen her in a while,” Scot said. “It’s sad.” I wondered what he hated more: the unexplained absence of his favorite shark, or having to admit she was gone to people like the bartender, for whom Stumpy was merely a myth, a folk hero disguised as a fish.

The bartender, it turned out, had a shark story of his own. He was a surfer, he explained, and he’d recently had an encounter with “the man in the gray suit” near the Bolinas channel. “I was out there by myself in the morning. All the birds disappeared. It got deathly quiet. I started looking around, and all of a sudden this
submarine
came by me.”

Scot smiled knowingly. “So you got out…”

“I was outta there so fast. I hit the sand and I was
still
paddling.”

Peter had a different perspective. “I actually want to see one when I’m surfing. I’d want to know who it was, though.” I envisioned him sitting on his board trying to make out the shark’s scar pattern—Was it ZZ Top? Or Two Scratches?—while around him other surfers fled the scene.

Scot shook his head and laughed. He leaned toward me and stage-whispered: “Peter’s
crazy
.” He paused. At one of the tables in the dining room, a drunken chorus of “Happy Birthday” broke out. “Sure would be nice to see the old stump-tailed girl again,” he added, staring at the bottom of his glass.

That feeling of longing—for a person, a place, or, in this case, a shark—was something I understood. It could smack you, wavelike, delivering actual, physical, pain. It could sneak up on you as a tiny catch somewhere near the middle of your throat. Or it could tug at you with the force of gravity, like a magnetic attraction that was impossible to shake off. Right now, after a few hours of Farallon news and shark updates and big plans for next season, after hearing about all the action while being far removed from it, I wanted to be closer. This was undeniably greedy; I’d already been out there twice, which was two more times than anyone else got to go. Why couldn’t I just be happy with that?

Perhaps it was as simple as this: At the Farallones, encounters with the rare and the unusual—and even the miraculous—were common. You had the sense that every possibility was still open, even the ones that were unreasonable to hope for. Anything could happen. It was an upside-down place where every normal assumption was challenged, a parallel universe where Peter, Scot, and Stumpy became celebrities and Brad Pitt was told to stay home.

Somewhere along the line, my desire to return had become a need. And although I didn’t fully understand it, I was surprised by the force of the urge. I wasn’t ready to ask just yet, but sitting in the Station House bar, a docket of Scot’s shark photographs on my lap, I vowed to myself:
I’m going back.

AUGUST
3–7, 2003

Kingfish
was a handsome boat, and I loved her on sight. She floated in the glassy dawn water of the Sausalito Harbor, all fresh green paint and buffed decks and gleaming brass—thirty-seven feet of immaculate systems, bobbing peaceably in her slip. Tony Badger, the skipper, tall, silver-haired, and natty in a black beret, and his petite brunette wife, Margaret, stood on deck to welcome me as I walked down the dock pushing a wheelbarrowful of groceries. I knew there was a precise nautical term for the type of boat
Kingfish
was, but I couldn’t think of it. Whatever. In about five hours I would be back at the Farallones.

This time it was official. I’d proposed to write a series of longer articles about the islands and had spoken at length with Joelle Buffa, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s manager of the refuge. Buffa is whip smart and a devoted guardian of the place, as well as a working biologist specializing in birds. When the generator exploded and the power went out and the plumbing needed to be replaced entirely and the coast guard suddenly decided that, after forty years, they were not going to deliver water anymore—Buffa was the one who got the call and had to figure out a way to fix the problem. Entertaining visitors was not high on her priority list. And considering the mugging that the wildlife took for so long at human hands, it was both defensible and easy for her to turn every applicant down cold. But she didn’t give me a flat-out no when I first approached her, so I had flown in for a meeting at her office near Palo Alto. She was small, sharply pretty, and all business in a crisp U.S. Fish and Wildlife uniform, and she had an amazing set of eyes: jade-colored with hazel starbursts in the irises. As Buffa looked me over with the x-ray stare of a customs interrogator, I pled my case. I wheedled and cajoled. I practically begged. And in the end, she granted me one of the only weeklong permits that had ever been awarded; it came, not surprisingly, with many conditions attached. Condition number one: I was to choose a week that did not fall during shark season.

I had expected this. As a result of the power struggles and regulatory wrangling of these past two years, the Shark Project had attracted a surfeit of press attention, not all of it positive. In print and on TV, Groth had accused Peter and Scot of treating the island waters as a “private playground,” and of attempting to bar public access. Never mind that this wasn’t true—anyone could visit the Farallones simply by booking a day trip on
Superfish
. They just wouldn’t get to tramp all over the island, and there was certainly no guarantee that they’d encounter a shark during their one-hour loop. But it
sounded
outrageous: Who were these arrogant scientists to stiff-arm the American taxpayer, to think they could hog the great white sharks all to themselves? As the feud flared, more requests from the media poured in. Buffa’s only possible response was a blanket rejection: sorry. The few day permits allotted during shark season had been scotched; there were no exceptions.

Peter’s hands were tied. Unofficial visits were out of the question. Great white research at the Farallones was on probation. My choice was this: I could write about the mating habits of cassin’s auklets, or I could stay in New York.

I opted for the birds.

With characteristic optimism Peter had explained that I’d see another side to Southeast Farallon: with all of the breeding seabirds in residence, a couple hundred thousand in the space of a few city blocks, it was an entirely different place. He would be out for a few days during my trip; there was prep work to be done for the fall and he, too, was missing the sharks. The night before, we had met up for drinks in Bolinas. “We’ll go out,” he said. “Drive around. There’ve been some huge, bloody attacks in August.” He took a long pull on his beer and shot me a sly look. “We’ll see someone.”

THE BADGERS WERE MEMBERS OF THE FARALLON PATROL, A THIRTY-
strong flotilla that had been delivering people, supplies, and groceries to and from the island since 1972. This support fleet included powerboats and sailboats of various styles and vintages, all of them spacious enough to accommodate overnight trips. Every two weeks one of the boats would make a run—their role was as critical as the
Madrono
’s had been in the lighthouse era. Even so, there was no pay involved. Farallon skippers joined the patrol out of a desire for adventure, and for the prestige of association. (Since only badass sailors could really handle the trip, this was an elite crew.) The captains all felt a kinship with the islands.

When one of them, Ed Kelly, lost his wife to cancer in 2001, he’d spread her ashes in the surrounding waters while making a supply run. Shortly after he’d done this, Peter spotted a shark attack off Shubrick and convinced Kelly to jump into the whaler with him to take a closer look. The shark was a gargantuan Sister with a quarter-moon-shaped scar on her head, and she passed directly under the boat, dwarfing it, like a visitation, like a creature you could only half believe, giving new meaning to the word
grace
. Peter knew he would recognize this shark if he saw her again. He named her Jane, after Ed Kelly’s wife.

Peter had coordinated my trip with the Badgers, which was also serving as a supply run of food, mail, and propane. The logistics of shuttling people and supplies to and from the Farallones were devilishly complicated and always involved a chess game with the weather gods. Figuring out who went where, and when, and with whom, and who would buy the groceries and who would be dealing with the garbage coming off the island and who was going to courier the new generator part to the Emeryville Marina at 5 a.m. and hundreds of other details was like trying to untangle something heavily knotted and three-dimensional. Peter seemed to manage it with ease. And the job was crucial: You didn’t want someone who’d been stuck on an island for thirteen weeks left standing in the marina parking lot with five duffel bags of gear, an urgent need for a shower, and no means of transportation. You didn’t want to forget to send groceries to a group of people who’d been down to rice and lettuce for the last several days.

I shook hands with Tony and Margaret and was introduced to Tony’s sailing partner, John Boyes, who appeared on the dock. John was fit and energetic, clean-cut and square-jawed and shipshape. He, too, wore a black beret cocked on the side of the head. It must be a sailor thing, I figured. Also making the trip were the Badgers’ son-in-law, Pelle, and a PRBO intern named Parvenah, who was riding along so that she could see the islands for the first time. One of the perks of being a patrol captain was permission to come ashore if time and weather permitted, but
Kingfish
frequently sailed in the roughest conditions, and in all their trips to the Farallones, the Badgers had never made a landing. This morning, however, the weather was placid, and disembarking seemed like a possibility.

Tony and John hustled around, checking gauges and doing complicated things with ropes. As we pulled out of the marina, Tony delivered a tough-love lecture about what never to do while on
Kingfish
: where never to stand, how never to walk along the railing, which buttons never to lean against. He spoke in a drill sergeant’s voice, with John occasionally adding his own stern directive. Clearly, this was not their first rodeo. In fact, Tony told me, he had raised his two daughters on a boat this size, and they had sailed the world like a seagoing Swiss Family Robinson.

Both men stressed that it was critical to watch out for ship traffic as we pulled under the Golden Gate. “If we’re going to hit a boat this is where it will happen,” Tony said grimly, as if this was something that occurred on most days. I could see what he was getting at. A marine layer of fog clung to the water, and even this early there were fishing boats of all sizes buzzing around in every direction, most of them without radar. Thousands of container ships the size of three football fields hauled in and out of this port every year, and they moved at deceptively fast speeds, materializing out of the mist without warning, bearing down on smaller boats like blind locomotives.

“The San Francisco Bar is the most dangerous stretch of water on the West Coast,” John announced. He explained that the channel was only fifty feet deep in places, the tides inhaled and exhaled at a brisk six knots, and a series of crazy currents cut through it all, running as fast and wild as rivers. When you threw in some swells, the effect was like dipping a spoon into a shallow bowl and whipping it around for a bit. The waves bashed and tumbled over one another, bouncing off the bottom to create a trampoline effect on the surface, and in general making things unpleasant and quite dangerous.

“They lose about three boats a year in here,” Tony added. I looked out at the water as we passed under the bridge. Gone was the harbor calm of twenty minutes earlier. In its place was a black and roiled ocean, pocked with sudden whitecaps and foam-swept crests.

It wasn’t just the twenty-seven miles to the Farallones that had kept people away. It was
these
twenty-seven miles. Tony was right to be vigilant. Others had taken the crossing less seriously, and paid for it. Countless accidents had occurred en route, even more upon arrival. Flipped boats, crushed boats, abandoned boats, swamped boats, boats bashed to slivers by rock—there had been more lost boats at the Farallon Islands than anyone could count. Tricky seas conspired with sudden, poleaxing weather changes to create instant emergencies, and even the most experienced skippers could find themselves caught out. During a two-man race around the islands in the eighties, a catamaran radioed Mayday; during its last transmission someone was heard to scream, “A wave just came through the cabin!” The crew was never found.

Over the years the coast guard had called often on the marine radio, asking the biologists to be on the alert for missing vessels. On more than one occasion, rescues had been made. One blustery November morning at around 6 a.m., Peter had just come downstairs when he heard a knock at the front door. Since everyone else on the island was upstairs, asleep, this was interesting. On the front stoop two Vietnamese men stood in street clothes, gesticulating wildly. “Boat! Boat! Boat!” was all they could manage in English, but they were clearly upset and they led Peter to Fisherman’s Bay, where a snarling southeaster was pounding their twenty-four-foot skiff to matchsticks on Aulon Rock, also known as the Tit because of its nipple-shaped peak. At the top of the Tit, two other men crouched in a small lee; one of them, an elderly fellow, was clad in an orange bathrobe.

Another time, a twenty-foot runabout showed up with no one aboard; originally it had been manned by a family of five from Sacramento, out for a day of fishing. Not one of them was ever found, though for days the biologists were instructed to walk the island perimeter, searching for bodies.

Incidents like these were most frequent during the fall, when conditions looked promising on the mainland and recreational boaters thought nothing of lighting out to the Farallones to catch a few salmon. On a clear day in San Francisco, the islands could even be seen from shore—how hard could it be to motor out there and back? People had no idea what they were in for, and they tended to lack things like compasses and flares and extra water and radios. When the weather snapped its fingers, they found themselves in dire situations.

And you could write an entire book about the commercial vessels that had met these rocks, oceangoing clippers and schooners and freighters. During the pre-LORAN, pre-GPS, pre-EPIRB days there were a dozen major shipwrecks at the Farallones, starting in 1858 when the
Lucas,
a full-rigged ship carrying two hundred people, slammed into Saddle Rock at 2 a.m., and twenty-three passengers died in the icy water of Mirounga Bay, less than fifty yards from shore. From that point on, that scene played itself out every few years with a variety of victims:
Noonday, Morning Light, Annie Sise, Champlain, Franconia, Bremen, American Boy, Louis, The Bardstown Victory.
Ship after ship crashed into the islands, and the main culprit was always the same: weather.

Even now, the ships lay down there like so many cautionary tales. Ron Elliott had told me that he often found large hunks of them embedded in the ocean floor; one time he swam up to an anchor that was nine feet tall. He’d come across old sextants and binnacles, brass chains and bronze bowpieces, masts and hulls, all of them splintered and crumpled and cloaked in sediment. The waters around Southeast Farallon were one of the most notorious boneyards in North America.

Today the water was flat all the way out, and
Kingfish
made it to the Farallones in less than four hours. As the islands came into view I felt a surge of happiness. There were the familiar spires and towers, thrusting out of the black water. Something was different, though. The last time I’d been on Southeast Farallon, the island was brown. Now, it was sort of…white. And then, as we got closer, I heard it—an otherworldly echoing din of wailing, screeching, mad cackling. Tiny bird heads popped up from behind rocks; sleek, aerodynamic bodies lined every surface; stray feathers fluttered in the air. It was as though the island itself was heckling us. And then there was the smell: an ammonia-fueled cloud that settled, tentlike, over the boat. The Badgers, who had been visibly excited about going ashore, suddenly looked uncertain.

Biologist Pete Waryzbok came out to meet us. He had been on the island for more than four months at this point, and he sported a russet-colored beard that would’ve made Grizzly Adams jealous. He was driving the Dinner Plate. This was the first time I’d actually seen it in the water—it was shockingly small. The only thing that set it apart from something a kid might point to in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog was its thick coating of gull guano. But this was the only boat the bird biologists had—the shark boat belonged to Peter, and it was at the island only during shark season.

This time, instead of being winched up in the boat, we were hoisted on a contraption known as the “Billy Pugh” (pronounced Billy Poo). No one had any idea if someone named Billy Pugh had created this device, or whether there was a salty anecdote behind the name, or whether the gadget’s inventor just had too many martinis one night and thought,
What the hell.
The Pugh was shaped like an enormous badminton birdie with a heavy metal disk at the bottom. (I knew it was heavy because it fell on my leg the first time I tried to climb onto it.) The disk was encircled by rope netting that was gathered at the top and attached to the crane. Two by two, we clambered from the Dinner Plate onto the Pugh, looped our arms through the netting, and clung as we were winched up and swung ashore.