The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (7 page)

You could run your finger across a map of the world, stopping at every location where white sharks are found, and you’d never come close to the kind of perfect research arrangement provided by the Farallones. Scot and Peter had the ultimate spot, and they were proprietary about it with good reason. They were the ones who’d put in the time.

Standing at the lighthouse being blasted by wind and grit, I doubted that I could spend the equivalent of several years of my life up here. Sharkwatch was demanding, and to me, a twelve-hour shift exceeded the bounds of duty—it was an act of devotion. I said as much to Scot. He nodded. “White sharks require patience,” he said, scoping the water. “Pete and I are very patient.” Suddenly, his eyes turned glacial. He clicked on his radio. “The man has arrived,” he announced, in a voice an octave lower than his regular tone. For a second I thought he was talking about a shark, but then I followed his gaze, east toward San Francisco, and I saw a boat emerging over the horizon, heading directly for us. It was still only a speck. I could barely make out a handful of figures dotting its deck through my binoculars, but Scot knew exactly who it was. It was the outside world, pressing in.

“
ATTENTION ADRENALINE JUNKIES! THE WORLD’S BEST SPOT FOR SHARK
diving is just minutes from Fisherman’s Wharf,” trumpeted the October 2002 headline in
Men’s Journal
magazine. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to make money on the Farallon sharks. That person was Lawrence Groth, thirty-six, the founder and president of Great White Adventures, a company specializing in great white shark encounters. As his website pointed out, Groth “pioneered the world’s first cage-diving operation at the Farallones that manages an 86-percent rate without the use of chum!” Every morning during shark season, weather permitting, Great White Adventures arrived with six divers, each of whom was paying $775 to be there.

The economic incentive was clear. To me, what was surprising wasn’t that Groth’s operation was here, but rather that there weren’t ten Groths plowing their way out every morning, one after the other, in successively larger boats. But there are good reasons why cage diving hasn’t caught on at the Farallones. The weather, as mentioned, is often nasty; the water temperature hovers around fifty-two degrees. Underwater visibility is a scant fifteen feet—and that’s on a good day. This is a far cry from the warm, clear waters off Baja or Cape Town. Generally, the divers get tossed around like dice in a cup.

Over the years, numerous other cage-diving outfits had tried—and failed—to make it. In fact, none of them lasted longer than a week or two. Groth, a compact, sturdily built guy with a lavish mustache, was more persistent and had deeper pockets than any of his predecessors. Growing up in Hayward, California, he’d heard tales about the sharky Farallones since childhood. When he finally made it out to see for himself, in 1998, a shark breached so close to his boat that everyone on board got drenched. He was hooked.

Groth started his business in 1999, and he started it big—purchasing a thirty-two-foot dive boat called the
Patriot,
state-of-the-art aluminum cages, and hiring an experienced crew. When asked by a newspaper reporter why he’d invested more than a hundred thousand dollars to set up another cage-diving operation in the spot where so many before him had given up, he answered, “I wanted to see great whites. And I think other people should see them, too. It’s an incredible creature, and it’s right here in our backyard.”

He had been ramping up his operation ever since, upgrading his boat, increasing the number of trips he made, advertising in places like
Shark Diver
magazine, investing in an elaborate website, and promoting Great White Adventures in the press. Demand appeared to be strong, and he wasn’t having trouble finding a clientele who wanted to take their chances in these turbulent conditions. People were coming from as far away as Japan.

Nature didn’t always cooperate with the plan, however. There were days when the cage divers would witness something truly memorable, like multiple sharks feeding or a breach near their boat. But these were the exception, and on a typical day, a client paying the better part of a g-note might see the blurry outline of a shark pass by the cage—if there wasn’t too much plankton clogging up the visibility. And then there were the days when they struck out entirely, when the sharks stayed hidden and all the shivering divers saw from their cage was a murky emerald void.

The
Patriot
usually chose to anchor in Mirounga Bay or off East Landing. Though these areas were undeniably hot spots, from either position at least two-thirds of the water around Southeast Farallon was effectively invisible to them. A whole conga line of sharks could be cavorting on the northwest side of the island, off Sugarloaf or Indian Head or Fisherman’s Bay or West End or Maintop, and they’d never know it. As a result, Groth wanted badly to “work with” Scot and Peter; having close ties to them would mean hearing the lighthouse radio down the attacks, among other things. Clearly, this would be an advantageous relationship for the cage divers.

There was only one problem: Scot and Peter didn’t want anything to do with them. The relationship between the Shark Project and Great White Adventures started off badly and deteriorated from there. The first time Peter encountered the
Patriot,
Groth was chumming, trailing a slick of mashed-up fish parts and blood. Chumming at the Farallones was heavily frowned upon; on a scale of bad behavior it ranked up there with chain-smoking in someone’s emphysema tent. Peter launched the whaler and drove out to put a stop to it. In response, Groth handed him a letter written by a lawyer in Washington, D.C., asserting their legal right to chum in the island waters.

Shortly thereafter, Groth did stop chumming. Although he acknowledged that the practice was unpopular with the biologists, there may have been another reason for his sudden change of heart. “It didn’t work,” he noted in a September 2000 interview with the
San Francisco Chronicle
. By that time, Groth and his partner had made Peter and Scot an offer: In exchange for providing information on the whereabouts of the sharks, the
Patriot
would “protect” them from other, less sensitive cage-diving operations. To Scot and Peter’s way of thinking, it was extortion. They declined.

For the rest of the 2000 shark season, things were frosty on the water. When the
Patriot
began towing seal-shaped decoys around the island, the biologists accused Groth of building them out of heavy lumber that could break the sharks’ teeth. In return, Groth accused Scot and Peter of selling access to the island, and of ramming into feeding sharks with the whaler, sending a videotape that allegedly recorded this to a local television reporter.

The politics became ugly. With the Point Reyes Bird Observatory’s backing, Peter lobbied for rules to limit recreational activities in the area. As things stood, there was nothing on the books to prevent a fleet of pleasure boats from motoring out to the islands on any given day with a six-pack and a surfboard, trying to tease the sharks into an appearance. “Before the shark watching business gets out of control at the Farallones as it has in Australia and South Africa (completely ruining studies at other research sites), we wish to petition the sanctuary for regulatory amendments protecting the sharks and allowing for the continuation of our research,” Peter wrote in a brief to the director of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

Furious, Groth argued that this represented “restraint of trade” and “tortious business interference.” There was talk of lawsuits, accusations of libel. In September 2001 Groth offered “the olive branch one last time,” urging the biologists to accept his partnership deal.

“They’re bad news,” Scot said in a May 2001 newspaper interview. During the 2000 season, he felt, the cage divers had completely disrupted the Shark Project’s work; in one run of seven feeding events, they’d driven away the sharks at three of them. Groth saw things differently. He envisioned the
Patriot
as a satellite observation base that could contribute additional data, claiming to have constructed a remote-operated video platform that could film the sharks feeding from afar. This device, which he’d named the GEO (Groth Eco Observer), had, to his mind, “positive research applications.”

Now more than a decade into their long-term study, the biologists did not find the prospect of collaborating with Groth very appealing. For outfitters, coupling research (real or pseudo) with commercial cage diving had become a popular way to lend gravitas to what could easily devolve into one big yee-hah. And it no doubt relaxed clients to think they were in the presence of someone who knew something about these animals. But what was best for research—or for the sharks—was not necessarily what was best for business.

Scot was especially concerned that drifting decoys all day, every day, would desensitize the sharks. They are, after all, nature’s most exquisitely adapted predators. How long could one reasonably expect them to go on being dupes, snapping away at fiberglass? In his study Scot had always carefully varied the location, the time, and the shape of the objects he floated, and after a shark investigated a decoy, he would remove it for at least three hours. Then he’d sneak another one out there, but this time he would use an entirely different shape. To avoid influencing the sharks’ natural hunting behavior, he limited his decoy use to fewer than twenty hours per season. During the fall of 2000, the
Patriot
floated and towed decoys for almost one hundred hours. By mid-November, Scot could see that their effectiveness had plummeted. The boards continued to be investigated, but they were no longer attacked. It had taken less than two months for the sharks to become wise to the whole deal.

Nonetheless, 2000 was a fantastic shark year, the best on record. On some days there had been as many as four feeding events. Groth’s success rate was high and, far from throwing in the towel, he was more encouraged than ever. Ecotourism had arrived at the Farallones, and it wasn’t going away anytime soon. People yearned to see these animals; they always had. And to that end, Groth’s endeavors actually represented progress: before cage diving was available, seeing a great white shark had usually involved killing one.

THE WORLD’S AQUARIUMS ARE FILLED WITH SHARKS—SOUPFIN SHARKS
, sevengill sharks, hammerheads, tigers, oceanic whitetips, nurse sharks, reef sharks, angel sharks, zebra sharks, sawfish sharks, horn sharks, leopard sharks, a rare albino Port Jackson shark—the list goes on. Great white sharks have been conspicuously absent. This is not for lack of trying.

Before it was widely understood that
Carcharodon carcharias
is one of the few warm-blooded shark species and therefore suited to cooler water, several white sharks were parboiled in tropical fish exhibits. Most refused to eat. And then there were the transportation challenges. It wasn’t easy to cart around a live, two-thousand-pound fish with a mouthful of razors. White sharks must keep water flowing over their gills to stay alive; when forced to remain still, they eventually drown. Often, when a shark arrived at an aquarium it was already half-dead, having been tangled and asphyxiated in a fisherman’s net. And how exactly was a twelve-foot shark supposed to move through the water while it was on the back of a flatbed truck rolling down Highway One en route to Marineland of the Pacific? The whole enterprise was outlandishly complicated.

But in the wake of
Jaws,
in the seventies and eighties, the cash potential of having a real live “monster” on display made marketers salivate. Aquariums kept trying in the hope that one day, one of these animals might make it. At least thirty-seven great white sharks expired in the process; SeaWorld San Diego alone went through five in a dogged series of attempts between 1976 and 1980. Most of the sharks lasted less than twenty-four hours, but in the continuum SeaWorld also managed to set a longevity record by keeping one alive for sixteen days. That record should come with an asterisk, though. In 1968, an eight-foot male white shark exhibited at the Manly Marine World in Sydney, Australia, had shown signs of thriving in captivity—and suffered a very public death because of it.

The Manly Marine World shark defied all the odds. He’d been caught on a hook and line and had fought for hours before he was landed. When the aquarium arrived to get him, he was dragged onto a beach, dumped into an unfiltered tank on the back of a pickup truck, driven over bumpy roads for forty-five minutes, taken out of water, and hauled by stretcher up several flights of stairs, only to be deposited in a shabbily constructed exhibit crammed with turtles, nurse sharks, and assorted fish. By which time most other sharks that had endured such treatment would have already died.

Not only did this one survive, he swam easily around the tank showing no signs of disorientation. On day three he began to feed, with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, rather than eating the dead fish proffered by the aquarium’s divers, he chose to dine on his tank-mates. For a week, the divers watched uneasily as he worked his way through the snappers. Then he began to show interest in the divers themselves. After a particularly close call, it was decided that the shark had to go.