The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (27 page)

An ugly noise clanged up through the bottom of the boat. It was a full-on collision sound, the type of thing you’d expect to hear if you hit a solid object, a rock maybe, or the wrecked remains of the boat that was stupid enough to anchor here before you. But it was only the force of the waves churning across the bay. A radio and some batteries went crashing to the floor, whacking the naked lady in the head.

“Sailboats are made to withstand this kind of weather,” Peter said. He didn’t seem entirely persuaded, though. “In the open ocean they go through far worse than this.” What he didn’t say—he didn’t have to—was that when the boat was actually sailing, it was free to track with the wind.

I asked if he and Scot had ever been out on shark attacks in truly dicey weather. It was hard to imagine tooling around in the whaler next to a few feeding sharks in conditions like these.

“Oh yeah, lots,” he said. “Most of the times they’re not really worth it. The slick goes away fast, the boat’s just pitching, and you’re trying to film. There was one really crazy one, though.”

A furious storm had come up a few years ago, he said, out of nowhere. It was late September, prime shark season, and he’d been on the water when he spotted two large fins about a mile north of Sugarloaf, just sitting there quietly, like periscopes. At that point the weather was completely benign, and there were no gulls swarming, no blood slick. Curious, he radioed Scot, who was at the lighthouse, and then he drove toward the fins. Suddenly, the sharks began to thrash, kicking up enormous crests of water. Scot saw it too and sprinted down to launch the Dinner Plate.

As Peter motored toward the attack, he realized that it was farther offshore than he’d estimated, more like two miles. At the site, an elephant seal carcass bobbed, so slashed up that its edges fluttered like ribbons, and it was surrounded by three large sharks. They were circling but, strangely, not eating. It had all seemed very ominous, portentous even, like Macbeth’s witches around the cauldron, and at that moment he’d turned and noticed that the entire western horizon had blackened behind a wall of clouds. Scot arrived as the winds began to build, took one look at the scene, and recommended a hasty retreat. Neither the Dinner Plate nor the whaler was the right place to be during an ocean squall.

Peter, suspecting they were poised to witness something interesting, was reluctant to leave, but when the winds hit twenty-five knots, he too had turned toward shore. By the time he reached the island the storm had ratcheted into a gale, rain and hail thundered down, and using the boom was out of the question. Scot and the Dinner Plate were trapped in Fisherman’s Bay; the huge swells had made it impossible to round Shubrick Point. Peter ferried him to North Landing and then tied off to the buoy, prepared to ride out the storm with the two boats all night, if necessary. But the storm left as abruptly as it had come, and within an hour he was back onshore, wrapped in blankets.

Unfortunately, tonight’s weather wasn’t going anywhere. But it didn’t seem to be getting any worse, so I lashed myself into my bunk, leaving Peter to the creepy captain’s cabin, and both of us to worry about
Just Imagine
beelining toward the rocks during the night. As I tightened the straps around my sleeping bag, I realized that I had to give the Farallones this: Even as the place was trying to kill me, I had never felt more alive.

IN THE MORNING, PETER WAS GONE. A NOTE ON THE LADDER EXPLAINED
that the boat noises had kept him up and he’d rowed back to the island at 4 a.m. I radioed. “I can’t
believe
you took Tubby out in that!”

“It was a bit heavy,” he admitted.

Today was another Small Craft Warning day, filled with the promise of more discomfort. But the whaler was fixed, and despite the offputting conditions, we decided to go out. Casting the surfboard at Indian Head, we drifted down Shark Alley. Peter seemed uncharacteristically quiet. I asked him what was on his mind.

“I’m worried that having the sailboat out here has become a bad idea,” he said, looking somewhat pained. He was thinking about the nights I’d spent on
Just Imagine
being flung around at the mercy of the weather. He was thinking about the groceries that had gone rotten and the toilet that wouldn’t flush and the anonymous blood splattered all over the deck.

I told him that as far as I was concerned, everything was going fine. And mostly, I meant it. Yet I also knew that if the weather continued to deteriorate, the responsible thing to do was get
Just Imagine
out of here. But that would require Tom, who was traveling this week, to come and pick it up, and anyway, Scot was arriving soon. Surely between him and Peter, they’d be able to fix the mooring.

I was well aware that if the sailboat had to go, so did I. I wasn’t ready for this to happen. I hadn’t seen a Sister. I hadn’t spent time with Scot. If I retreated now, all the drama of shark season would continue without me, and I would be sidelined once again on the mainland.

“This is a character-building experience,” I reassured him, trying to sound upbeat. But he wasn’t looking at me. In the nanosecond before I said it, a small boil had risen near the surfboard, and he noticed it just as the shark surfaced. It was a midsize Rat Packer. He made a fast figure-eight around the board, bumped us, rolled onto his side looking skyward with one black and ancient eye, flicked his tail, and disappeared. The shark’s head was raked with long white scrapes. “That was Plimpton,” Peter said.

The encounter broke the tension and seemed to end the discussion of an exit strategy for the borrowed yacht. And although the night that followed was gruesome, again, and the noises hammered at my nerves and I spent the night staring out at Tower Point, waiting to see it suddenly loom large in the porthole, when Peter radioed to see how I was doing, I told him that things in Fisherman’s Bay were much, much better; really quite good.

It wasn’t even a total lie. Over the next two days there were no fresh breakdowns aboard
Just Imagine
, though the weather remained a concern. The island buzzed with chain saws and jack-hammers as coast guard contractors assembled the piles of debris to be carted off by the helicopters next week. From
Just Imagine
’s deck I watched them standing on the rocks at North Landing, fishing. The Farallones had never been a popular assignment for coast guard types. Several seasons ago, in fact, a crew had protested “in-humane working conditions,” citing the kelp flies. And that particular group had flown in a satellite dish for their weeklong assignment. The guys on the island now, Peter told me, had airlifted in their own food. Their menu veered dramatically from the organic and healthful food the biologists ate and toward Dinty Moore beef stew and nacho-flavored Doritos. Whole palettes of packaged goods had been unloaded as the contractors settled into the coast guard house.

I had some new company in Fisherman’s Bay. Less than twenty yards off the bow, resident for several days now, swam a baby gray whale who seemed to materialize every time I stood on deck. Its prehistoric-looking, knuckled back arched above the surface; her elegant barnacled tail waved playfully. Occasionally, we made eye contact. As far as whales go, this one was truly pocket-size, and Peter had wondered aloud if a shark might not take it out.

No one had ever witnessed a shark attack a whale before, but blubber was the ultimate shark delicacy, and there was no more certain place to find great white sharks than at a newly bloated whale carcass floating somewhere in the Red Triangle. Scot had a network of fishing buddies who would give him a heads-up whenever one surfaced. Unless the carcass was beyond rancid, the sharks would be there, shearing off long strips of fat.

Right now, the Farallones were exceptionally well populated with whales. In the shark boat we’d been almost uncomfortably close to humpbacks that would suddenly surface, often in pairs. The humpbacks were sleek and elegant, acrobats with long tapered fins. Feeding out a little farther were the stately blue whales, the largest animals on Earth. The blues were imposing and humbling as they burst from the water or rolled by, their long backs streaming on forever. At one time two hundred thousand of these boxcar-size mammals had ranged the world’s oceans; now there were fewer than ten thousand.

Back in the whaling days, gray whales were known as “devilfish,” and they were notorious for killing fishermen and charging boats. But, it was discovered later, this had more to do with the harpoons stuck in their backs than innate aggressive behavior, and after the practice was stopped, people learned that grays are downright friendly. In Baja’s San Ignacio lagoon, for instance, they congregate en masse, nuzzling tourist boats and allowing themselves to be stroked, reveling when their bellies are scratched. My whale, as I had come to think of her, was clearly interested in the sailboat. Maybe it had to do with the smell. One little known fact: The water that spouts out of a whale’s blowhole in such a picturesque way reeks like the most toxic fart imaginable. And that pretty much described the yacht’s odor, especially downwind of the hissing silver fixture.

MAINTOP BAY WAS THE MOST PERILOUS SPOT ON THE ISLAND. IT HAD
the most exposure, the biggest surf, an array of treacherous hidden rocks, and fierce currents to suck you toward them. Cast into shadow by Southeast Farallon itself, Maintop was always blacker than the seas around it. For boats it was never the best place to be, as the prevailing northwest winds and the western winter swells walloped it straight on. If you got into trouble in there, you were out of luck. The shoreline was sheer and there was nowhere to ditch in an emergency, something that many people had discovered too late: Maintop had been the site of numerous drownings. Shards of wrecked ships still poked out at low tide. Peter and Scot were always wary as they drove through it, and even warier during attacks. Not surprisingly, the sharks seemed to enjoy the area.

One morning in 1991, Scot had just summited at the lighthouse for his first watch, and he was warming up, doodling, drinking his coffee, when he happened to look up and notice a guy bobbing in the center of Maintop, a bright orange life preserver wedged between his legs. The man was surrounded by a few floating coolers, but there was no boat to be seen. Scot did a double take. He had no idea how the guy could have gotten there, short of dropping out of the sky; no one had noticed any fishing vessels approaching the island.

He radioed to Peter that “there was someone in Maintop Bay,” and Peter, of course, assumed he was referring to a shark. Upon learning that it was, improbably, a person, he rushed out in the whaler—floating in Maintop was not a highly survivable proposition in November—and somehow managed on his own to roll the two-hundred-pound man into the boat. A coast guard helicopter beetled out and airlifted the man, whose name was Bill Kaboose, to the hospital. During the entire rescue, Kaboose remained in shock and never uttered a word. And afterward, they never heard from him either, not so much as a thank-you note. They did find the remains of his boat though, and the fishing equipment that had been on it was handily deployed to cast surfboards out to sharks. In recognition of what a trick it must have been to haul Kaboose from the bay, the marine sanctuary granted Peter the O’Neil Award for Seamanship. It was an unlikely story with a crowd-pleasing ending: “I do like to think that the Shark Project saved one life,” Scot said.

This afternoon Peter and I were floating hopefully off Shubrick, getting heaved around so badly by swells that we’d been about to give up, when Kristie radioed down from the light with news of an attack. “It’s over in Maintop.” Peter glanced at me, started the engine, and said, simply, “Hang on.” And then he hit the throttle so hard that the whaler literally took air, bouncing off the troughs.

First, the mass of gulls came into view as we rounded Sugarloaf, and then, there it was: the body in a crimson slick, the brightest color for miles. Everything else was muted in the fog and asphalt light. Peter pulled the whaler close to the beheaded seal and cut into neutral, grabbing for his pole camera. I fumbled with the topside camera, having difficulty and filming the inside of my jacket for a time—one hand was locked in a death grip around the rail and the other was shaking to the point of uselessness. I didn’t like Maintop Bay. It churned like a malevolent washing machine, and the rocks were close by.

Instantly, the shark appeared alongside us. It was the largest I’d seen, at least sixteen feet with the girth of a trailer home. Every detail of the scene put my nerves on edge: the menacing water, the heft of the shark, the alarm-bell-red blood, an extra-aggressive band of gulls screaming overhead. For the first time I could see how easy it would be to end up in the water during an attack. Peter alternately filmed and lunged toward the console to reverse the whaler from its path toward the rocks. The shark tore a slab of seal and went down, giving us a moment to get it together, but then it surfaced in the next second and seemed almost angry at the boat, whipping the side with its tail, and soaking us. The seal had been ripped in three, and the pieces began to drift apart.