The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (6 page)

NOVEMBER
17, 2001

The old tower stands at the highest spot in all the Farallones, a precipitous perch that goes by the misleadingly gentle name of Lighthouse Hill. When the Farallon light blinked on in 1855, it had a first-order Fresnel lens, an optical jewel shipped from France, and a crew of devoted operators. An indentured mule named Jack hauled its fuel—drums of sperm whale oil—up the zigzag path. (Even by mule standards this was no picnic; when Jack retired twenty years later, his fur had turned completely white.) In 1972, the eighteen-foot-high lens was replaced by a pair of automated beacons, and the last lighthouse keeper sailed off on a coast guard cutter.

These days the lighthouse is a wreck, colonized by mice, smeared with guano, and sprouting neon-green lichen. But if you’re up here to scout shark attacks, it’s nature’s luxury box. On a clear morning the observer has ten miles of visibility and can make a 360-degree sweep of the south islands: gazing west into Maintop Bay; looking straight down on Fisherman’s Bay and Sugarloaf to the north; Tower Point, Shubrick Point, East Landing, and Saddle Rock to the east; and Mirounga Bay rolled out like a carpet to the south. Seven miles off in the westerly distance, the North Farallones jut up, and three miles northwest, Middle Farallon pokes out of the ocean like a speed bump. The lighthouse tower itself, a two-story concrete cylinder with a small rectangular entranceway, provides little shelter from the inevitable howling wind, and walking around the deck requires one hand on the railing at all times.

This was the obvious place for Sharkwatch, which Scot created in 1987. During every daylight hour of shark season, someone was stationed up here—Scot, Peter, Brown, Nat, or one of the interns who completed the crew—scanning the water for attacks through a powerful scope. Right from the start, Scot had claimed the first slot: for the past fourteen years, every September, October, and November morning, whenever he was on the island, he had switchbacked his way up 348 vertical feet to man his eight o’clock shift.

When Scot was watching, no nuance on the water would go undetected. Not that a shark attack at the Farallones was typically a subtle event. Elephant seal blood is a brilliant scarlet due to its high oxygen content, and it left a big slick on the blue water that was hard to miss. The most obvious clue, though, appeared in the sky. The site of a kill was instantly engulfed in a Hitchcockian swirl of gulls, all fighting to scavenge a snack. Sometimes the aerial view provided even more detail: the Sisterhood’s lair lay directly below, to the east, and when one of the Big Girls ventured out in the late afternoon light, you could see it all: the blood, the seal, the outline of the shark.

Sharkwatch had a simple set of rules: If Scot spotted a slick or a bird rally on the water, he would radio Peter, chart the position of the ruckus using a surveying instrument called a theodolite, and then sprint down the hill to meet everyone at East Landing. The idea was to launch the whaler as quickly as possible and get out there to video. Later, every last detail of the encounter would be noted in a field report, including an identification of the shark and a diagram of which parts of the seal were missing.

Hurtling down Lighthouse Hill in a big hurry to go see a shark attack, however, was an easy way to die. Not only was it treacherously steep, ranging from a thirty-to a fifty-degree incline, but the ground was unstable. The path was a loose carpet of granite chips, decomposing bird corpses, and skittery stones, and your feet tended to whip out from under you as if you were roller-skating on ball bearings. Recently, Scot had acquired a girl’s banana-seat bike to speed his descent. The bike was sized for someone about three and a half feet tall, and it had a glittery pink seat, purple streamers, and knobby tires.

At the moment I was more concerned with the ascent; despite my two-hour-a-day training schedule in the pool, I’d stopped twice along the way. When I eventually joined Scot, breathless from the last pitch to the top, he had been studying the ocean for an hour. He stood in cinematic relief on the narrow concrete apron that encircled the tower, his arms crossed against the pummeling winds. Classical music wafted from a boom box. There was a dizzying amount of sky up here and the sea pressed in on all sides. At the horizon’s far edge, you could trace the curve of the earth.

I had been up to the lighthouse before, but only in the haze, and the expanse of the view startled me and brought on an unexpected sadness. The raw grandeur was almost too much to take in, a reminder of trifling human scale. It felt terribly lonely.

Scot turned and gave me a half wave as I summited, glancing over for a nanosecond before returning to his ocean surveillance. I asked if he’d seen anything that looked potentially sharky. “Nothing yet,” he said. “But it’s almost high tide.” Most shark attacks took place during high tide; this was another piece of the great white puzzle that the Farallones had supplied to the world. Because—think about it—unless the sharks were watched all the time, and from a fixed position, how would anyone ever figure this out? You needed the continuity. It was one thing to spot a great white, note its location, track its behavior for half an hour. Maybe, if a researcher were especially lucky, he would be able to determine its sex, which requires getting a good look at the shark’s underside—the males have two long claspers. (As one might guess, this is not an easy thing to do.) But things got far more interesting if you actually
knew
the shark. For instance, if you happened to know that a particular shark was Spotty, a large Rat Packer with a lopsided grin, and you kept track of his appearances over the seasons, you could draw the following conclusion: Spotty had been coming to the Farallones for eleven consecutive years, almost always in the company of Cuttail. And then you might take it one step farther: Did they travel together all the time? Or were they simply sharing some turf? Scot and Peter were hoping to put satellite tags on both sharks next season to find out. Such a discovery would be huge. If these two had been hanging out together for a decade, how could anyone go on thinking of white sharks as rogue assassins, the ocean’s killing machines? Rather, they’d be animals with intelligence enough to choose their friends, and to keep them close by.

Prying secrets from the great white shark wasn’t a job for dilettantes; it required a rigorous system that extended all the way down to a dress code. The Farallones were hard on a person’s wardrobe. Clothes got covered in mud and blood and bird shit, whipped with salt water, fog, and rain. Everyone on the island wore heavy work pants and the kind of footwear one might select for hacking through the Congolese jungle; to this Scot added a jacket, a hoodie that he kept cinched around his head whenever he was outside, and polarized sunglasses that covered half of his face. Underneath the sunglasses, Scot’s eyes were ice blue, with the intensity of lasers.

I looked down over the backside of the peak. A misstep in any direction would result in substantial air time before landing on the spiky granite below. The island seemed to be made of six-dimensional rock, striated by a million tiny crevices and fissures casting disco ball shadows in every direction. It was rock as imagined by a cubist on peyote, a mad jumble of stone veined by seawater and runneled with elemental abuse. The whole place was pocked with caves and holes and long twisted passages that led to other long twisted passages. During big storms the island actually vibrated and hummed, making what frightened visitors often described as a “moaning noise.”

DURING THE FIRST FEW YEARS HE WAS UP HERE, SCOT’S SHARKWATCH
shift often lasted for twelve hours straight. He bought a heap of photo equipment for the project, paying for it himself, and the lighthouse bristled with telephoto lenses. Launching the Dinner Plate was dicey when the water was rough, and the water was almost always rough, so until 1992, when they got a bigger boat (fourteen feet!), the lighthouse was the best place for viewing the attacks. Spending whole days at the light—standing on concrete, at the mercy of the weather—was hard on his legs, and sometimes on his psyche, but the vigil had its rewards.

During the long waits between shark attacks there was always something amazing to see—a pod of dolphins cruising by, or a squadron of whales breaching and spouting. Sometimes a fantastically rare bird would put in an appearance, wildly off course in its migration. The Farallones were famous for these sightings, and they happened regularly, especially during the fall. Birds that ought to be at the North Pole or winging over the Serengeti would instead blunder their way down to the lighthouse or land on one of the three small trees on the island. Red-flanked bluetails and Eurasian wigeons and Xantus’ murrelets—they all showed up here eventually. Once, Scot watched as an African pink-backed pelican touched down in the middle of a flock of standard-issue brown pelicans, looking like an exotic stuffed toy that had fallen from the sky.

The solitude, the long, dramatic views, the challenge of the task—it all suited him. Scot was not a big talker. He appreciated routines. And though he got along well with people, he also liked to be alone. In Scot’s ideal life, all of the hustle and commerce, frantic movement and paperwork stayed so far off his personal horizon that he would never even have to see it, much less become caught in its tentacles.

As a kid, he was crazy about fish. Scot would watch people angling off the Tiburon seawall for hours, hoping for a glimpse of whatever they caught. There was something about seeing a fish flashing through the water that seemed magical, like finding a piece of hidden treasure. One day he was out on a fishing boat when someone landed a small leopard shark. The creature was burnished bronze and silver with a catlike face, perfectly symmetrical spots, and a sinuous elegance. Scot was instantly struck by its beauty. The leopard shark didn’t flop around in a panic; it moved straight across the deck like an alligator, with an air of self-possession. That image never left his mind.

He knew then that what he really wanted to do was to study sharks. But more important, he wanted to study them in their element. That, he thought, was the only way you could ever understand them. Forget about sitting at a desk writing grant applications or leaning over the computer plotting numbers on a graph. Trying to figure out the life of an animal by staring at a screen struck him as futile. For a time he worked as a deckhand on local fishing boats, a job that was great for viewing marine life but not so great for getting his foot in the door as a biologist. Scot realized quickly that advanced shark access required at least one college degree, but he had struggled with school in the past and worried that he was dyslexic. Eventually, he found a school called World College West that wasn’t afraid to try things differently. Scot supplemented its new age approach with marine biology courses at the nearby College of Marin, where he hooked up with a gifted teacher named Gordon Chan and realized, for the first time, that he actually loved to learn.

His education extended to a bird census in Alaska, the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, and six months in Kathmandu, where he lived with a Nepali family and learned to speak the language. Back in Marin, his homework included intercepting the flatbed trucks of fishermen as they cruised the streets of Point Reyes, proudly hauling the bodies of great white sharks that had died in their halibut nets. When the sharks were butchered, he asked for—and received—the surplus parts, and then he and Gordon Chan would dissect them, trying to figure out how it all fit together.

In the field, Scot’s curiosity, dexterity, and unorthodox science background sparked innovations like the decoys, the pole cameras, and the video surfboard. He was determined to come up with newer, more effective ways to spy on this community of sharks. Other great white shark researchers had come and gone at the Farallones, doing interesting work, just not staying very long. And not everyone is suited to life on an isolated set of rocks in the Pacific. In order to make it on this island, a researcher had to be hearty, adaptable, and emotionally together, with a deep sense of respect. Scot was all that. And more than anyone else, he seemed able to think like a shark.

Even the Cousteaus couldn’t hack it. In October 1986, Jean Michel Cousteau and his crew steamed into the Farallones aboard a 103-foot-long boat called the
Alcyone
and promptly began to shower the place with blood and guts to chum for sharks. They anchored off East Landing for several days. Peter had received instructions from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to accommodate them in any possible way, and he stood by on Southeast Farallon for their call. They never radioed the island. On their third day, he watched from shore as two big, bloody killfests took place less than one hundred yards from the
Alcyone
’s bow. He decided to launch the Dinner Plate, to go out and tell them that they were missing the action. Pulling alongside the ship, he hollered a greeting, but no one responded. He couldn’t see a soul from the water, so he drove around to the stern and peered onto the deck. It was a bright autumn day, and the entire Cousteau crew was sunbathing, clad in bikini briefs. They looked up from their sun reflectors with irritation. One man waved him away, saying, “Yes, yes. We will call you later.”

Afterward, in a book titled
Cousteau’s Great White Shark,
Jean Michel bitterly recounted his time at the islands: “We were equipped with cameras and an antishark cage…but we did not see even a single dorsal fin. When gallons of fish and animal blood failed to lure great whites during the Farallon expedition, the Cousteau team began to question the abundance of sharks in the area.”

Cousteau’s empire aside, no matter how many dorsal fins ring these islands, the world of professional shark research remained brutally competitive. There weren’t enough jobs. There wasn’t enough funding or enough credit. And clearly there weren’t enough study subjects to go around. Scot had visited the great white shark hubs at South Africa’s Seal Island and Guadalupe Island off Baja, and both areas had their disadvantages when compared with the Farallones. The waters surrounding Seal Island were heavily trafficked by white sharks, but the animals were dispersed over a much larger area, making them harder to study. Also, behemoth Sisters were unheard of. Likewise, at Mexico’s Guadalupe Island, many of the sharks ran small. More problematic for research, though, was the fact that Guadalupe was a wild free-for-all involving freeways of chum and no limit to the number of operators that can dunk a cage in the water. These sharks, in Scot’s view, were so tourist-addled that they swam toward the boats in anticipation of food the moment they heard the anchors being lowered. And in Australia, a location previously synonymous with great whites, the populations were fading quickly, despite the animal’s protected status.