The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (18 page)

And then the final blow. The letter wrapped up by saying that, as of December 2004, the Shark Project could no longer do “boat-based work” from the island—meaning that attacks could be observed only from land. Bluntly speaking, it was the end.

The timing was harsh. As a result of past triumphs with Tipfin and others, the Farallon sharks had been officially designated part of Barbara Block’s TOPP endeavors, and by association, the Census of Marine Life. Twenty satellite tags were slated to be sent out this fall. That meant rounding up at least twenty individual sharks, a veritable herd, almost as many animals as they’d tagged during the last four years combined. Shutting down for a month at the height of the season would be a hardship at best and, at worst, ruin the chances of success.

Peter didn’t seem angry, but he was perplexed: How could they continue their work while accommodating all the new restrictions? There had to be a way, he’d reckoned, and had spent the past month mulling over alternate scenarios. Conducting the project from the water, for instance, rather than its current island perch; that could work. They’d still need permission to keep Sharkwatch going—without someone at the lighthouse, the attacks would be far harder to spot, downright impossible in certain conditions. Luckily, keeping a sentinel up there didn’t seem to pose a problem. “So I was thinking,” he continued. “We could get a boat and anchor it in Fisherman’s Bay. Something with three, four bunk spaces that a few people could stay on. The boat would be our research platform. If we can’t work from shore, it’s the way to go. And because we wouldn’t technically be
on
the island, there’d be no restrictions as to who could be out there…”

I could see where this was heading, and I liked it an awful lot.

THE NEXT DAY WAS MY LAST ON THE ISLAND. PETER GAVE ME A LIFT TO
Bolinas in the whaler, under sunny skies with a light chop on the water. We’d left early so I could catch a noon plane, and as we approached the harbor all was serene. Surfers bobbed in the channel. The air was filled with softer mainland sounds; the twittering of songbirds replaced the harsh gull cries, and the trees rustled gently. Eucalyptus and other land smells wafted by on the breeze.

Bolinas Lagoon was shallow, accessible only at high tide, and Peter drove slowly, the whaler putting quietly past funky shoreline houses that jutted on stilts above the water. The town was still asleep. He dropped me at the main dock and then anchored the whaler a few yards away, wading back over the sandbar in his stalwart rubber boots. After dropping our gear in the back of his truck, we walked down the road to grab some breakfast at the Coast Café, a sunny place with a shark-bitten buoy on the wall and surfboards hanging from the ceiling. As I scanned the menu, I glanced at Peter out of the corner of my eye. Somewhere in the fifty-yard span from the dock to the truck to the restaurant, his mood had changed drastically. He had turned quieter, darker, closed, as though a gate had slammed down, shutting out the light. So this was what reentry was like for him, I thought, this was the curtain of the real world lowering. I felt it too, and we ate our eggs and toast with a minimum of small talk.

After breakfast we retrieved my rental car, which I’d parked on a nearby side street. It sat there, grimy and neglected, but I was delighted that it was still in one piece; Bolinas was infamous for discouraging visitors by ripping down highway signs that pointed the way into town, and I hadn’t supposed that rental cars would be embraced with any great neighborliness. A brindle-colored mastiff stood in front of it, regarding us with a proprietary air. Peter nudged the dog aside. He moved slightly, then padded back to his original spot.

“So we’re going to find a boat,” I confirmed. “I’ll look for a rental online.” Since yesterday we had been discussing the logistics. Working from the water was the Shark Project’s future, it seemed, and the closure period this season was the perfect opportunity for a trial run. We’d find a captain to man the vessel, and I would stay on board for a week or two. That was Peter’s version of the plan, anyway. Mine was to get out there and then stay as long as I possibly could.

“If you can’t find anything, I could put it out to the Farallon Patrol skippers,” Peter said. “They’ve offered before. Or Scot might know someone who’s willing to lend their boat. An old beater would be great. Something we wouldn’t have to worry about too much.” It seemed the two of us had different images in mind. I was imagining a floating hotel room; Peter was envisioning a lengthy stay in a dumpster. Though it didn’t really matter. To visit during shark season, potentially one of the last ever, I’d bunk down on the Dinner Plate if necessary.

We parted, and I drove off, feeling both elated (I was going back!) and discombobulated (not for six weeks). Between now and the start of the season there was much to do. I would need a cat-sitter. I’d have to make a request for a leave of absence from work. I required better binoculars. Most important, though, I had to find a boat. I fumbled in the glove compartment, pulled out my watch, and noticed that I had badly misjudged the time, leaving me eighty minutes to make the two-hour drive to the San Francisco airport. Clearly there would be no stopping for a shower. The weekend traffic didn’t help. The entire Bay Area, it seemed, was headed for the beach. I crawled along the shoreline highway in my dusty Taurus, behind an endless stream of kayak-and surfboard-laden Range Rovers and BMWs.

By the time I returned the car and caught the shuttle to the terminal, I was sweating, and hopelessly late. The ticket agent shoved a boarding pass across the counter and told me to run. Headed for the gate, I mistakenly ducked under some ropes, forgetting that the days when you could do such a thing were good and over. Buzzers exploded, sirens went off, policemen, airline personnel, overempowered security guards all came at me. No one was particularly friendly about it, either. A sour-faced luggage screener grabbed my backpack, which was smeared with drippy gull guano, while a stout woman with a billy club hitched to her waist patted me down. I realized that I looked suspicious: unkempt, dirty, almost feral. During a week on the Farallones, it seemed, I’d forgotten the rules back on Earth, misplaced my copy of the social contract. I barely made the plane.

SEPTEMBER
21, 2003

A day upon which you are traveling to meet your yacht is a good day by anyone’s reckoning, and that’s exactly what I was doing at the moment, sitting on a bench in the cabin of a fishing boat called the
Flying Fish,
slamming over the bunker swells of the San Francisco Bar en route to the Farallones. The morning was magnificently wild: gusty and bright with salt spray whipping raucously over the stern and sparkling in the sun. As the Golden Gate Bridge shrank in the distance, I felt myself unwinding. Last week I’d spent marathon hours working around the clock, writing last-minute magazine headlines, eating greasy take-out food for every meal, and drinking gin with my colleagues. During this unhealthy stretch of days, I’d counted the minutes until my escape. And now, on board, it was just me, the
Flying Fish
’s captain, Brian Guiles, his first mate, Dave, and a thousand dollars’ worth of groceries.

I’d chartered the
Flying Fish
to take me to the islands, where I would meet up with Peter and a marine biologist named Kevin Weng, a shark-tagging expert from Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey. Scot was due to arrive in two weeks. Today, at Southeast Farallon, Peter, Kevin, and I would rendezvous with a sixty-foot steel-hulled yacht named
Just Imagine,
a Farallon Patrol boat whose captain was dropping it off on the return leg of a two-week trip to Seattle. Sometime early this afternoon we would anchor
Just Imagine
in Fisherman’s Bay, its crew would hop aboard the
Flying Fish
and return to Sausalito, and I would settle into my new, floating home. And then, I imagined, we would toast the yacht with champagne and watch sharks frolicking off the bow at sunset. Or something like that.

I didn’t know much about the boat, other than that, as mentioned, it was sixty feet long. In the end, it had been found close to home. After weeks of online searching had resulted in exactly zero suitable boats (and revealed that owners of large, live-aboard vessels are not especially eager to rent them), Peter had mentioned the situation to several Farallon Patrol skippers. Four of them instantly offered their boats; the first person to respond had been a man named Tom Camp, captain of the alluringly named
Just Imagine.
As it turned out, though, Tom Camp wasn’t available to man his yacht, so I’d happily agreed to be responsible for it, making sure its batteries stayed charged and its hatches stayed battened and it stayed right side up and whatever else. I knew virtually nothing about large boats, but I couldn’t imagine that babysitting one would be very difficult. The thing was going to be lying at anchor the entire time it was at the Farallones, somewhere in the neighborhood of five weeks, depending on conditions. When the sucker-punching northwest storms rolled in around November,
Just Imagine
would be whisked back to San Francisco. In the meantime, it would just float, a two-minute boat ride away from the island. Peter and Scot would be sharing the house with Brown and Nat, who were back for the bulk of the fall once again, along with two interns. During the day, the sailboat would serve as the Shark Project base of operations, with the whaler tied alongside for convenient access to attacks.

I was looking forward to the setup. As shark season had drawn nearer, I’d become increasingly excited about being back here, seeing the sharks, catching up with Peter, Scot, and Ron, finally getting a good look at one of the Sisters. What better way to ensure this than to spend all my time on the water?

Arranging a leave of absence from my job had been smooth; the timing was good, and in my business it was standard practice to tear off in pursuit of a story. I couldn’t wait to go native again, to abandon the tamer version of my life. The effect was more than psychological. Each time I had visited the Farallones I’d left New York puffy and office-worn and come back glowing and sleek with extra angles and an uncontrollable dusty mane of hair and dirt jammed under my fingernails. And even when I didn’t get to shower for a week out there, I always felt sexier than I’d ever felt walking around Manhattan all cleaned up and wearing Gucci heels or La Perla underpants.

Last week I’d had a staticky cell-phone conversation with Tom, a jovial fifty-five-year-old lawyer from Berkeley, who was remarkably enthusiastic about lending his boat to the Shark Project. He’d touted
Just Imagine
in the booming voice of a game show host. “I don’t mean to sound like a hotelier Susan,
but you should see my stateroom!
” From the sounds of it we’d hit paydirt, and despite Peter’s desire to procure a beater, the opposite had happened. “I’ll take care of
Just Imagine
as if she was my own,” I promised.

“Well, I’d just like to get her back in the same shape I left her in,” he said.

“Tom, you’ll get her back in better shape.”

“Haaaaannnnggg on!!!” Guiles yelled from the cabin. In the next instant the
Flying Fish
cratered hard into a giant trough, and I was hurled from the bench onto the floor. I could hear the two men laughing up front. Guiles, who had grayish hair and a lean build and looked to be somewhere in his early fifties, was a hard-core fisherman. He didn’t think a lot of the Farallones. To him, as to most skippers, the islands weren’t much more than a fine opportunity to wreck your boat, a place you passed on your way out to the albacore that schooled along the edge of the shelf.

As I’d arrived at the dock this morning, he’d greeted me with a smirk: “So, had your last shower?” When I replied that I actually enjoyed not having to brush my hair, he’d laughed knowingly. “Yeah, well, that’ll be all right for the first couple of days,” then added, “Oh and by the way, they’ve got
a few flies
out there.” When he’d noticed that I was carting about five hundred bags of groceries and another several dozen cases of water, beer, wine, and Diet Coke, however, his eyes bugged. “How long are you going to
be
out there, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Depends on the weather. Maybe five weeks?”

Guiles let out a snort. “That’s what you think. Here’s my card. If I’m not booked, I’ll come out and get you. You’ll be calling me.”

Buying groceries for five weeks on a boat had proven surprisingly vexing. Yesterday I’d roamed the aisles of the Mill Valley Whole Foods for several hours, considering the inventory. Tossing things into the cart with abandon wouldn’t do; this particular grocery shopping had to be approached strategically. Over the years there had been memorable food tantrums at the Farallones; people had hoarded food, hidden it, fantasized about it, fixated on it, fought over it. Peter had mentioned that an intern once became physically threatening upon being told that the mayonnaise had run out.

I realized that I didn’t even know if I could cook on
Just Imagine.
Surely, I figured, there would be a stove of some kind, but I’d forgotten to ask Tom. He had mentioned a large refrigerated compartment that worked like a dream and kept things very cold. Knowing that, I’d stocked up on frozen burritos and other perishables.

As the
Flying Fish
broncoed through the surf, the vast grocery supplies swayed and clinked on the stern deck. I lurched my way up to the wheelhouse, where Guiles and Dave were drinking coffee and talking shop. Earlier, I’d learned that the
Flying Fish
was the boat that released Sandy, the captive shark, back in the eighties. I asked Guiles about the trip.

“That,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a big circus.” His boat had been jammed with media people and aquarium people and many cases of beer, and Sandy had been so out of it, there was some concern that she was dead. Guiles himself had certainly thought so. “I picked her up right by the head, and we stuffed a bilge pump in her mouth so the water would flow over her gills. Then all of a sudden she tried to bite me. She was plenty alive.” When they slid Sandy into the water, she’d dropped like a stone, arrowing straight down in a stupor, and smacking into an underwater cameraman who’d jumped in to document the release, before pulling herself together and shooting away. TV cameras whirred topside. “And then at eleven thirty that night, after the news, my insurance company called.” The representative made it exceptionally clear that, in the future, should Captain Guiles decide to host live great white sharks aboard the
Flying Fish,
he could consider himself just slightly less insurable than the space shuttle.

We were approaching the outer waters of the Farallones, an area where white sharks were often encountered swimming lazily along the surface, and where Guiles had once even hit one. He described the time a sixteen-footer had porpoised alongside
Flying Fish
at railing height, at least six feet above the surface, trying to rip salmon off fishing lines and soaking the passengers: “Shark was so close I could’ve slapped him right in the face.” Another time, fishing near Stinson Beach, a popular swimming spot in Marin, he’d seen two white sharks silhouetted in the surf right near the shore, less than ten yards from a group of boogie boarders. Even so, in his opinion, it was the makos who were the true badasses of the shark world. “Extremely aggressive. Nasty as hell. Makes a white shark look silly.” He picked up the radio and tuned it to channel 80, the island’s working frequency. “Peter, Farallon Island, Peter, Farallon Island,
Flying Fish,
over,” he said.

Peter answered immediately. “Roger,
Flying Fish,
Farallones. Good morning.”

“You guys order a pizza to go?” Guiles said, cackling. “Well you’re gonna have to wait awhile. It’s really rolling. We should be there in about an hour.”

He clicked off the radio and turned to me. “You know what the most dangerous thing is out here?” he said. “Not the sharks. The weather.” He described being caught out on the far side of the islands when thirty-foot swells rose up and barely making it back in one piece, though the weather had been lovely when he’d left the harbor that morning. And by all accounts, this wasn’t an unusual experience.

As if on cue, the Farallones rose on the horizon, looking terrible and beautiful. By the time we reached the East Landing buoy, Peter was already waiting in the whaler; there was a shark attack under way over by Saddle Rock. I looked and could see the clutch of gulls. There was no time for my usual anxiety about clambering between boats; I jumped from the
Flying Fish
into the whaler. As we blasted over, I settled into the spot I liked next to the steering console, where it was possible to grip the rails on both sides. Peter grinned at me from under his baseball cap.

We floated in the slick, watching a tattered hunk of elephant seal bob up and down with no apparent takers. It seemed the sharks had come and gone already, although Peter claimed that often, just when you thought an attack was over, the second string moved in to polish off any remains. One time he’d been watching a lone scrap of seal just like this one for twenty minutes, when he’d noticed a tag attached to what was left of its flipper and reached over the side to make the ID. At that exact moment, a shark emerged from below and snatched the seal right out of his hand, its jaws less than a foot away, its eye rolled back and ghostly white.

There were several large boils around the seal but no probing dorsal fins, and then
Just Imagine
arrived from the north and glided toward us, looking somewhat majestic. This was a serious boat. Its long hull was navy blue with a white deck, its sails were furled and smartly secured by marine-blue tarps. On deck, waving, stood a tall, beefy guy with thick glasses and a mat of gray hair, unshaven and blissed out–looking in a worn purple T-shirt, chinos, and a crinkled sun hat. We decided to abandon the carcass and lead
Just Imagine
to its anchorage. Peter yelled directions to Tom and said that we’d meet him over in Fisherman’s Bay. In the background I could see the
Flying Fish
idling, waiting to pick up the yacht’s crew. Dave was leaning over the stern, spooling out the fishing lines.

In Fisherman’s Bay, we pulled up beside the sailboat and said our hellos. Along with Tom there were now two more men on deck, Bob and Brian, who also had gray, desert island hair. Tom said they needed an hour to clean up the cabin and pack their things. They all looked scruffy and contented, and I felt my heart sink a bit at the news that the three of them had been living on the boat for two weeks and had not yet started to clean.

As Peter and I pulled away from
Just Imagine,
intending to cruise around the island while we waited,
Superfish
arrived at the mouth of the bay with Mick at the wheel and a full house of whale watchers gathered at the stern. All the passengers were squeezed along the port-side railing, watching us, and the boat listed dramatically. Kevin, the marine biologist, was on board, and we drove over to pick him up. He was a Stanford Ph.D. candidate who specialized in sharks, especially great whites, and he worked for Dr. Block.

The crowd parted to let Kevin climb over the edge. He passed two hard-sided equipment cases down to Peter, and then jumped lightly from
Superfish
into the whaler with the kind of surefooted ease that suggested he had maybe been born on a boat. He was a striking person, in his early thirties and athletically built, with jet-black hair and dark eyes and a smile that could light up a small midwestern city. As he reached up to grab his duffel bag from Mick, I noticed that all the muscles in his forearm were sharply defined.

We quickly made introductions, and Kevin told Peter that he’d brought six tags and another six were on their way. Kevin had just returned from Alaska, where he’d been tagging salmon sharks, a bulldoggish cousin of the great white that thrived in cold water, razoring its way through schools of salmon. Before that he’d been in Costa Rica, attempting to tag leatherback turtles as they crawled onto the beaches to dig their nests. And he’d spent July in Southern California working with a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium that was attempting to capture a baby great white shark for possible exhibit. The aquarium had earmarked $1.2 million to accomplish this—the shark was intended to be the institution’s “mascot.”