Shark Trouble (3 page)

4

South Australia, 1974

Part II

The journey for
The American Sportsman
had not begun in that cage in the home range of the great white sharks: the cold, dark waters near Dangerous Reef in the Neptune Islands. Rather, the shooting schedule had been designed, wisely, to introduce me gradually to diving with sharks in the wild, to accustom me to seeing sharks under water, to let me learn, from swimming in company with some of the less imposing species, that while sharks are, indeed, powerful and efficient predators, they know that human beings are not desirable prey. No one—I least of all—wanted me to be so traumatized that I'd refuse to participate in the “money shots,” the moments of peril with great white sharks in South Australia that viewers would tune in to see. The archives of
The American Sportsman
contained instances of celebrities freezing at critical junctures and refusing to go on, sometimes fabricating elaborate excuses that included sudden summonses to meetings with Hollywood moguls, summonses that had mysteriously made their way to points on the globe so remote as to be unreachable by phone, wires, or radio. (There were no faxes back then, no cell phones, no satellite dishes, no pagers.)

We began on the Great Barrier Reef, where there was no danger of encountering a great white shark because great whites—called “white pointers” by Australians, “white-death sharks” by the tabloid press, “whitey” by the few divers who had been in the water with them—didn't exist on the Barrier Reef. The water there was too warm; white sharks preferred the cool seas of South Australia (and California, New York, and Massachusetts). Also, the Barrier Reef was well charted, well known, and visited year-round by thousands of divers. The ports along the east coast were populated by knowledgeable mariners who could choose specific parts of the reef to dive in, depending on what the clients wanted to see.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of our planet's largest living organisms, an interconnected complex of creatures fifteen hundred miles long. It's the longest, the biggest, the richest reef system in the world, home to the most numbers of the most species of the most beautiful … well, you get the idea: it is a living superlative. It has wild areas, savage areas, restricted areas, populated areas, tourist areas, and conservation areas.

It was decided that I should be initiated into diving with sharks by beginning with what Australians call bronze whalers, relatively small sharks (five to seven feet) that tend to gather in schools and are generally regarded as controllable by people experienced in dealing with them, although they can be dangerous when their territory is threatened or when they're fighting over food.

On our first morning on the reef, Stan Waterman had assembled the underwater housing for his 16-millimeter movie camera and—careful professional that he is—decided to take the empty housing into the water, to make sure it retained its watertight integrity—that is, that it wouldn't spring a leak and flood his camera with salt water.

He strapped on a scuba tank, and I, eager to accumulate as much experience as possible under conditions guaranteed safe (so I had been assured), imitated and followed him. We sat on the swim step at the back of the boat—the gaudy reef and sandy bottom were clearly visible through no more than thirty feet of gin-clear water—rinsed our masks, and rolled forward into the sea.

The first couple of seconds of every dive are discombobulating. Surrounded by bubbles escaping from your regulator and your equipment, you're blind and deaf; up feels like down, down like up. Very quickly, though, your eyes adjust, your inner ear orients you in this new space, and you hear the comforting sound of air being inhaled and exhaled through your regulator.

Senses regained, Stan and I nodded to each other and started down.

He saw it first and recognized it immediately; I might have seen it, too, I don't remember, but I certainly didn't know what it was: the pointed snout, the blue gray upper body and stark white underbelly, the perfect triangle of pectoral fins and dorsal fin and—one of the dead giveaways I would soon learn to recognize—the apparently toothless upper jaw, lip rolled under, concealing the rows of sheathed daggers.

It was angling up toward us, slowly, as if idly curious.

Stan touched my arm and looked into my eyes, and there was something so earnest in his gaze—the eyes that normally shone and sparkled were as flat as slate—that I knew instantly what he was saying: Stick with me, do what I do, for we are being approached by a Great … White … Shark.

My first instinct, of course, was to turn and flee, but by now the shark was within ten or fifteen feet of us, and even in my terror I knew that flight would send a one-word message to the animal: food. So I followed Stan.

Holding his camera housing before him, Stan swam slowly down, directly at the shark. I could see that this was not, in fact, a big white shark, though part of my brain registered it as the size of a rhinoceros. It was about ten feet long, a young male, probably still adapting to the variables in his life, such as water temperature, hunting grounds, feeding methods, and now analyzing prey.

I found myself wondering what we looked like to the shark. Large, loud, bubbling creatures, possibly reminiscent of seals or sea lions in our black wetsuits but substantially different: unafraid (after all, we weren't running but were actually approaching), possibly even aggressive. Still, nothing to be feared; the only things this animal would fear would be larger versions of itself and killer whales.

Silently, we descended; even more silently, it ascended.

Are you crazy? Why are you playing “chicken” with a great white shark?

When we were no more than five feet apart, the shark blinked. Without seeming to flick its tail or alter the pitch of its fins or move a muscle, it changed its arc from up to down and passed beneath us. We stopped and turned, and watched the shark disappear into the gray canyons of the deeper reef.

Once safe back aboard the boat, I protested. “I thought … you said … you promised …”

“I know,” Stan said with a grin. “Amazing, isn't it? Can you believe the luck? And I didn't even have my camera!”

“But what about—”

“The first law of sharks,” he said, “is this: forget all the laws about sharks.”

For the next nine days we waited and watched and baited and dove—day and night, hour after hour—and we saw no sharks of any species or description. We set out chum slicks of fish guts and oil; the crew speared fish and we hung the corpses off the stern of the boat; we prepared savory baits and tied them to brain corals and then hid quietly in crannies in the reef until, one by one, we ran out of air and surfaced and put new tanks into our backpacks and descended again to resume our posts.

We swam free, without cages, for back then (a generation ago) most divers considered cages necessary only when dealing with great white sharks or when filming large numbers of big sharks with reputations for aggressiveness.

The water was warmer than eighty degrees, and our wetsuits kept us comfortable for a long time, but eventually the hardiest of us chilled and began to shiver and, again one by one, we surrendered to the cold and surfaced for good.

With one day to go in this first half of our schedule, we had no film, not a single frame, of any shark in the water, with or without people. Now began the litany of woe from the experts. No one could
imagine
where the sharks could possibly have gone. Bronze whalers were
always
around this area. Why, man and boy, the local crew, had been here, all told, for more than fifty years, and
never
had they seen anything like this. If only we'd been here two weeks ago, the sharks were jumping everywhere. And so on—every excuse ever uttered by every fishing guide and boat captain who has ever struck a dry hole in the ocean.

Our tenth and last day began exactly like the others: clear, hot, flat calm, no breeze, and very little current. The corpse of a big stingray was secured to a brain coral as bait. I dove down and took my position in the sand, kneeling (as instructed) exactly thirty-one inches from the stingray—the optimum distance for Stan's lens to capture, in the same frame, me and any shark that might show up.

After about an hour I had emptied my tank of compressed air, so I surfaced, stretched, warmed myself in the sun for a few minutes, changed tanks, and descended again to resume my station.

Almost weightless, rocked gently by what current there was, snug and cozy in my rubber suit, immersed in the warm, soothing amniotic ocean, I think I fell asleep. I must have, for I have no memory of time passing or of seeing or hearing anything, until I felt Stan tap my shoulder and I opened my eyes and saw, less than an arm's length away, a shark the size of a school bus about to assault our stingray bait.

It was a tiger shark—no mistaking the stripes on its flanks, the peculiar catfishlike protrusions from its nasal passages, the broad, flat head, and the curved, serrated teeth identical in top and bottom jaws—one of the few species of shark that had well earned and long held the title man-eater. Its mouth was open, and the upper jaw had dropped down and rolled its teeth into what is known as bite position.

The so-called nictitating membrane, a defense mechanism in many sharks designed to cover the eyeball and protect it from the claws or teeth of struggling prey, had slid up and over all but a tiny slit of the yellowish eye—a sign that the shark had decided to bite—had, in fact, begun to bite. It looked, I thought, like a maniac.

Startled as much as afraid, I must have flinched backward, for I felt Stan's hand pushing me forward.

Thirty-one inches,
I thought.
That thing is thirty-one inches from my face. My shirts have thirty-
six-
inch sleeves!
(Yes, I know—so what? But in moments of shock my brain often blows a circuit.)

The tiger shark grabbed the stingray and began to shake it. The huge body (thirteen feet, minimum, was the estimate later) writhed, stirring up a cloud of sand and generating pressure waves that rocked me backward. Conscious of the needs of Stan's lens, I looked for something to hold on to to steady myself, but the only solid structure within reach was the brain coral to which the ray was tied, and I thought that to put my hands
into
the shark's mouth might be … inadvisable.

The shark's teeth sawed off one wing of the stingray, then, swallowing, it swam away, swinging in a slow circle to approach the bait again.

As the cloud of sand cleared and settled, movement somewhere above made me look up. Halfway to the surface, perhaps fifteen feet away, swimming with agitated movements that projected (to me, anyway) anger and frustration, was a second tiger shark, this one the size of a midsize sedan.

I knew the cause of its apparent distress: in the hierarchy of tiger sharks—and several other species—the biggest feeds first, and this smaller animal, which the consensus would later declare to be about eleven feet long, had no choice but to watch as the tasty hors d'oeuvres were consumed by the larger fellow.

Again the big tiger bit down on the stingray, seeming this time to take in its mouth the entire brain coral, and its teeth tore the carcass to pieces. Shreds of gray black skin flew out through the shark's gill slits and sank to the sand, where tiny fish, brave enough to sortie out into the tumult, snatched them up and retreated to eat them in the shelter of the reef.

I was transfixed, paralyzed not from fear but from fascination and concentration. And then—

Oh, Jesus.

I couldn't breathe. Trying to inhale was like sucking on an empty Coke bottle. Quickly I looked at my air gauge: zero.

I was out of air.

For once I didn't panic, and counterintuitive though it felt, I didn't shoot for the surface. I knew the risk of an air embolism: ascend too fast, holding your breath, and the air in your lungs will expand and blow a hole in a lung, letting slip an air bubble that can travel to heart or brain and kill or maim you. If I was to attempt a free ascent, I wanted to do it properly: drop my weights, open my mouth, and exhale constantly as I swam for the surface.

But I also knew that there was, in fact, at least one more breath of air in the tank, though I'd have to ascend to get it: air that has compressed as a diver descends expands when he ascends, and unless you have truly sucked a vacuum into your tank, chances are there's a bit of crucial, life-sustaining air left.

Of course, to be on the surface above one feeding tiger shark and one tiger shark pissed off because it couldn't feed was not an ideal situation. Still, it struck me as preferable to drowning. Besides, I didn't intend to stay on the surface for long. I looked up and saw the boat above me. If I angled my ascent properly, I should be able to surface near—if not exactly at—the dive step at the stern.

I turned to Stan and made the “out-of-air” signal—a finger drawn across the throat—then rose off the sand bottom, slowly, as inconspicuously as possible, straightening my legs for the first time in more than an hour and starting to kick.

Both legs cramped, simultaneously and in exactly the same way: my hamstrings sprang taut, snapping each leg up under my body, rendering useless legs, feet, and fins. The sudden pain made me gasp … except there was no air to gasp.

Now you are in trouble … what to do, what to do, what to do?

I pulled the release on my weight belt; twenty-five pounds of lead dropped off my waist, so immediately I began to rise.

A breath of air became available, and I gulped it down, careful to leave my mouth open to let my exhalation escape.

The last thing I saw before my head popped through the surface was the second tiger shark, swimming in circles beneath me. Alerted by the commotion of my ascent, it had ambled over to see what was going on, and it swam, body tilted slightly, so that I could see its eye watching me.

No worries, mate,
I thought.
Just put an arm out and let 'em pull you aboard the boat.