The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (3 page)

And so, on New Year’s Eve in 1979, he pulled into Bolinas in the beat-up navy-blue VW Bug that had occasionally served as his home as well as his car. After volunteering for several months at Palomarin, PRBO’s field station set against the rugged West Marin coastline, he was offered an eight-week internship at Southeast Farallon Island, which PRBO monitored in a partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

When Peter stepped onto the East Landing for the first time, he took it all in: the masses of birds, the stark landscape, the furious weather, the perfect isolation, the cute female interns. Everything he wanted was right in front of him, all rolled up into one improbable package.
This is it,
he thought to himself.
This is my place.
By 1985, he had secured a staff biologist position at the Farallones, which enabled him to spend as much as half the year living on the island.

In the early days there wasn’t much awareness of the resident sharks. However, as sightings of giant dorsal fins and slashed-up seals increased throughout the eighties, so did the biologists’ curiosity. Whenever Peter witnessed an attack from the island, he would jot down his observations, but that was about all he could do. Everyone was riveted when the sharks showed themselves, awed by their size and the large pools of blood just offshore, but there was no research program devoted to great white sharks, no resources to study them, and no one on this island of ornithologists with the time or the inclination to do so, anyway. An intrepid marine scientist named Peter Klimley, who had already distinguished himself with his cutting-edge shark studies, got the ball rolling, arriving in 1985 at the invitation of the Farallones’ head biologist, David Ainley. Ainley, by all accounts a sort of biological visionary, wanted to create a research program devoted to great whites. He and Klimley, assisted by Peter, began to set up systems for collecting data and tried for several seasons to entice the sharks into gobbling sheep carcasses that contained transmitters. The idea of having sharks swallow tracking devices was innovative and promising (and was later continued at the island by a scientist named Ken Goldman), but Ainley had his hands full running the place, supervising every bit of research that was going on, and Klimley had other shark projects in Baja and elsewhere that demanded his attention, and could not devote an entire season to the island. The Farallones was, above all, a field post and required someone to be there at all times, watching.

Which, in 1987, is exactly where Scot came in. He had grown up, appropriately, in Tiburon (Spanish for “shark”), a bayside town in Marin County. While other kids were taping Farrah Fawcett and Rolling Stones posters to their bedroom walls, Scot had been putting up great white shark pictures. He knew about the Farallones. And as someone who had spent his whole life around this stretch of ocean, he’d heard every last legend and big fish story about the sharks. In the seventies and eighties, though, even the insiders didn’t know very much. Local fishermen reported that there were great whites out there, plenty of them, but that was it.

Scot wasn’t the only person interested in researching great white sharks at the Farallones, but without a doubt he was the most determined. He systematically made his way to the islands over the course of several years, cultivating colleagues who could help him get there, and learning to band birds, a complicated and technical process, so that he could qualify for an internship. When he finally arrived, he made himself indispensable by doing everything with extreme competence—from cooking a mean lasagna to fixing the roof. Whatever it took.

But most important, it soon became obvious that he could see things about the sharks that no one else could. He had a sixth sense for knowing where to look at just the right moment, and eyesight one could fairly describe as bionic. Shortly after Scot’s arrival, the fall biologist at the time, a seabird specialist named Phil Henderson, appointed him to a newly created post: principal great white shark researcher. Peter was the only person whom Scot could convince to motor out to a mangled carcass, the only other scientist who was as drawn by the sharks as he was. And Peter, with his ability to tell a LeConte’s sparrow from a Henslow’s sparrow at a hundred yards, shared Scot’s gift of vision. The partnership turned out to be ideal.

And so, together, in 1988, with the joint backing of PRBO and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they created the Farallon Islands White Shark Project, the only long-term study of individual great white sharks—or white sharks, as scientists prefer to call them—in existence. When they said “individual,” they meant it literally. Using underwater video and topside observation, Scot and Peter had identified more than a hundred white sharks, cataloged their whereabouts around the island, even named them. (While naming the animals might come across as a sweet, neighborly thing to do, it had an essential scientific purpose: This was the easiest way to keep track of them in the field.)

One of the first things they learned was that these great whites were the alphas among alphas. Fifteen feet was an average-size Farallon shark, eighteen was large, and twenty was rare but not unheard of. In other great white hubs—South Africa, Australia, Mexico’s Guadalupe Island—the sharks were generally eight-to twelve-foot juveniles, which is certainly no small fish. But at the Farallones, a twelve-foot white shark came across like a runty teenager trying to get into a bar.

With their project, Scot and Peter had a coup: to study a
neighborhood
of great white sharks doing their great white shark thing, year in and year out. As a result, the duo had been the first to document the great white’s natural feeding habits, its instinctive behavior around other sharks, and its innate hunting strategies. While these observations might seem mundane, in the biology world it was like winning the trifecta. The unique setup at the Farallones—the lighthouse viewing post, the convenient living quarters, the abundance of sharks and seals and throngs of gulls to point the way to the attacks—enabled them to rewrite entire chapters of the book on great white sharks. Which is fortunate because, as it turns out, most of the conventional wisdom was wrong. Scientists thought great whites hunted at night; they hunt by day. They thought these sharks had poor vision and stalked by smell; they’re visual predators. People thought these animals were insensate killing machines, but in truth they go after their prey with caution and a plan.

These days, Peter and Scot had zero hesitation about getting next to a feeding great white shark. In the beginning, though, things were scarier. They wanted to observe the sharks at close range, but their boat was only eleven feet long. They called it the “Dink Boat” or the “Dinner Plate.”

Powering up the Dinner Plate and approaching a shark in the aftermath of an attack required a leap of faith—they had no idea what the animals would do. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could look up in a reference manual: Procedures for Operating a Tiny Boat Next to a Feeding Great White Shark. Everyone was still under the dark influence of
Jaws.
Both men suspected that the sharks wanted to eat them. Why
wouldn’t
they rock the boat and try to tip them out?

Certainly, white sharks had a reputation for biting, ramming, attacking, and even sinking small boats. Captains worldwide told stories of them butting sport-fishing crafts, as if making a territorial statement, and from time to time their teeth were found embedded in the hulls. At Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, a twelve-foot great white smashed a hole through the bottom of a dory. In South Africa, a fishing boat came to an abrupt stop despite the fact that the engine was still running. When the fishermen peered over the edge at their outboard motor, they discovered that a great white shark had locked its jaws around the propeller. Breaching great whites had been known to accidentally land on top of small vessels, killing people, crushing pelvises, and, in at least one case, chewing on the upholstery.

As they settled in that first year, the two men crept closer and closer to the attacks and whenever anything scared them, their response was always the same: gun the motor and rocket out of there. Which was exactly what they did on their third time out to an attack, a clear-water day off the western tip of the island, a spot called Indian Head, when a shark approximately twice as big as the boat came up to nose around. And she wasn’t alone. It was the first time they’d encountered two sharks simultaneously. When they could track one shark circling beneath them they felt reasonably secure, but the idea of the second one sneaking up from behind while they were watching the first was too unnerving at that point. They hit the gas. After hovering fifty yards away for a few minutes, watching the fins pirouetting around the carcass, curiosity won out and they inched their way back to the feeding sharks. And the sharks eyeballed them, but kept right on tearing at the seal. “We realized that we could go out there, look at the attacks, and not die,” Scot recalled. “That was a big deal.”

PETER’S WEATHER PREDICTION HELD. AS THE LIGHT CAME UP AND I
stepped outside I saw that the fog had dissolved, the ocean was unveiled, and the jagged contours of another farallon, Saddle Rock, were crisply in focus for the first time since my arrival. Saddle Rock reared out of the water only two hundred yards southeast of the main island, and from certain angles it looked exactly like a dorsal fin. Cormorants bunched along its edges, forming an elegant black picket fence. It marked the divide between Mirounga Bay (where the Rat Pack hunted) and Shubrick Point (where the Sisterhood reigned). Many an elephant seal head had been lost in its shadow.

Scot and Peter and I drank our coffee on the front steps, looking out at the water glimmering in the early light. There was a feathery wind and a handful of scudding clouds. The morning was hardly tranquil, though. The gulls screeched at top volume, as always. Surf boomed onto the rocks and the air was hazy with spray. Seabirds flew formation passes over the water, and every time they seemed to favor a particular spot I felt a little flash of hope—was there a carcass out there? Peter seemed to have other things on his mind; he was eyeing a perfect eight-foot barrel wave that rolled along an area known as “Shark Alley.” The wave, unsurprisingly, had never been ridden.

Not for lack of surfboards, though. There was a quiver in the supply shed at all times—Scot used them as decoys to lure sharks to the surface for photo IDs. To a shark, apparently, a nice little six-foot swallowtail does a near-perfect imitation of a seal. When retrieved, the decoys were often missing hubcap-sized chunks from their sides, and surfers had taken to sending Scot their castoffs, hoping to repossess them after the sharks had paid a visit. Along with their research value, the strafed boards made for great conversation pieces.

According to Scot and Peter, the Queen Annihilator of Surfboards was a shark named Stumpy. Stumpy was nineteen feet long and weighed five thousand pounds, and when she was in residence, she ruled the Farallones. “She was the only shark that I think understood who we were, what we were trying to do,” Peter recalled. “And she didn’t care for it. When Scot was first putting out the decoys Stumpy would just come up and destroy them, more because she didn’t like them than because she was fooled by their silhouettes.” He turned to Scot. “Hey, it’s an odd-numbered year. Stumpy could be here.”

“If she was, we’d know it,” Scot said.

Stumpy patrolled a swath of sea along the east side of the island near the main boat launching spot at East Landing. For prey, this was not an advisable route onto shore. “No seal gets by her,” Peter said. And while other sharks would take twenty minutes or more to consume their kills, Stumpy could polish off a five-hundred-pound elephant seal in three minutes flat. Though the distinctively cropped tail fin that earned Stumpy her name hadn’t been spotted for several years, Scot and Peter still talked about her with a respect that bordered on awe. “Stumpy was a goddess, there’s no other way to put it,” Peter said, lowering his voice in reverence. One time, Scot rigged a video camera on the underside of a surfboard to determine which angle the sharks were coming from when they attacked. He set the video board adrift off East Landing. Right on cue, like some battle-hardened test pilot, Stumpy gave it everything she had. The resulting footage was stunning, all teeth and whitewater and violent smashing noises that brought to mind a subaquatic train wreck. It was the first time anyone had successfully filmed great white sharks underwater in California.

Stumpy made her movie debut in the BBC documentary I had seen, and won Scot an Emmy for cinematography. During the first furious hit the board snapped in two and shot into the air, and as the camera dispassionately recorded the wreckage, Stumpy resurfaced and gave the bobbling pieces a fierce backhand with her tail, before swimming off grumpily in search of real food.

None of this seemed like the best testimonial for the sport of surfing.

And yet everyone involved with the Shark Project surfed. In fact, Brown had actually been attacked by a shark while riding waves in Palm Beach last November. “Yup, I’m a statistic,” he admitted the night before when I asked for details. “I wouldn’t say I was
attacked,
though. It’s more like I was bitten.” By seventy-six teeth, to be exact. Waiting for a set, Brown had felt some pressure on his foot and looked down. All around him the water was red.
Holy shit! Look at all that blood,
he thought, not quite realizing it was his own. He never saw the shark, but after examining his wounds he concluded that it was a sand tiger, a spooky-looking, snaggletoothed shark that eats fish. And in the turbid Florida water, flashing white feet can look an awful lot like fish.

Peter grew up as a surf rat on the beaches of Oahu. Every day after school he’d run to grab his board, a hulking ten-footer that he’d bought for four dollars at a garage sale. (The deal might’ve had something to do with the board’s sky-blue patina of lead-based paint, which would chip off and lodge under Peter’s toenails.) Even as surfing gear improved and evolved over the years and his friends began to do flamboyant tricks on the new shortboards, Peter always preferred the big logs. Longboarding was more soulful, he felt, more in tune with the ocean. Whether other surfers agreed with these esoterics or not, there was at least one advantage to a larger board: It didn’t look quite as much like a seal. (Boogie boards, apparently, were the worst.)