The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (20 page)

On Christmas Eve day 1998, he was diving here when, a little ways in the distance, he saw a giant Sister who “made Stumpy look like a baby.” The shark was oddly unscarred, pristine even. For her to have grown so large without collecting any of the wounds that tattooed the other animals was just plain weird, and the first indication that this wasn’t an average shark. As she approached, Ron made a move that in retrospect was not the smartest, swimming at her, fast, from behind. It was one of his typical offensive tactics—he thought he’d make her go away. Instead the shark pulled an immediate donut and charged at him. She was the “fattest, maddest” shark he’d ever seen. Luckily, there were some rocks close by. Which Ron hid under for quite some time.

Remembering the awe with which he and Scot had discussed the shark, whom they’d dubbed Mrs. Clean, I longed to see one of the ultra behemoths. “The ones that manage to get that big, they’re
different
,” Ron had said in a hushed, humble voice, and Scot had nodded soberly. That mystical aura was something that I hoped to witness for myself, maybe even while standing right here, on this deck. Given the sailboat’s location, it didn’t seem unreasonable.

Peter drove the whaler back to
Just Imagine;
Kevin rowed out in Tubby, an eight-foot-long white rowboat that would ferry people from the island to our floating shark research base. He crossed the four hundred yards from North Landing to the sailboat with a few strong strokes. Tubby was the third member of the Shark Project flotilla, and despite her size she was important. Since Tubby was plastic, and not a very robust plastic at that, she could be hauled up on the rocks by a single person and didn’t require the full production of being lifted on and off the island by crane. Given this season’s boat-launching restrictions, that was a key point. When we weren’t chasing sharks in it, the whaler would remain tied alongside
Just Imagine.

Peter and Scot had chosen Tubby carefully, paging through marine catalogs looking for the squarest-shaped rowboat they could possibly find. “Eight feet is definitely in their range,” Scot had admitted, but after years of decoy research he believed that a square object would not be attacked. He wasn’t prepared to say that it wouldn’t be investigated though, and that was enough to make the prospect of rowing around here feel somewhat less than carefree.

The whaler was tied along the port side of
Just Imagine,
while Tubby floated off the starboard. It was an awkward arrangement, and trying to keep this unlikely family of boats from slamming against each other required a series of bumpers that hung like junkyard art over the sailboat’s side. The scariest move of all was the leap from
Just Imagine
into Tubby, which had the stability of a disposable pie plate and no railings to grab in order to cushion the impact. I dreaded the idea of doing this and hoped I wouldn’t have to. After all, Tubby’s job was to shuttle people to the island, and I wasn’t going there.

By now it was past four o’clock. The sun blazed in the late afternoon sky; the water was deep sapphire with a light diamond chop; it was high tide. There was no point in unpacking the groceries since they couldn’t be refrigerated anyway, so the three of us decided to take a lap in the whaler.

At Indian Head, we set out the surfboard. Less than ten seconds had passed when Peter and Kevin saw it at the same time: a boil next to the board, then a dorsal fin slicing around it in a polite arc. The shark made a quick investigatory pass beneath the whaler and then swam off. I didn’t even see its body. “It was small,” Kevin said, dismissing it as a tagging candidate. Older, larger sharks took priority—with Sisters at the top of his list. “Yeah, just a little tiny twelve-foot white shark,” Peter said, laughing. “Well, at least we know they’re here. That’s a relief.”

The sky took on that rich end-of-day glow. Fog began to move in even as the sun was shining, and its tendrils slowly wrapped around the islands, twisting like liquid. Light played between the wisps, which moved and settled according to density, like a layered cocktail, before shifting and reweaving again. Then, through the veiled sunlight, we saw a shimmery white rainbow straight from heaven’s prop room. I’d never seen anything like it; Peter identified the otherworldly vision as a trick of the light called the Specter of the Brocken. It rose like an ethereal mirage over Maintop Bay, in stark contrast to the dark cleft of rocks and the black water below. He steered the whaler beneath its arch, and we drifted through it, while above us birds turned to metal in the silvering light. According to legend, Franciscan monks believed that anyone fortunate enough to see the Specter of the Brocken should go right out and throw themselves off a cliff, because its beauty was so rare and singular that life could only go downhill from there. Looking at Kevin and Peter and the mist sweeping in and the birds glittering above us and a pair of humpback whales gamboling on the horizon and knowing there were white sharks cruising below, I could almost believe it myself.

SEPTEMBER
22–24, 2003

The Hunchback was a humongous Sister with a Quasimodo hump whom Peter had encountered one wavy afternoon in Mirounga Bay. He’d been alone in the whaler, filming an attack that had drawn a gaggle of Rat Packers. At least three sharks were on the scene, buzzing him and taking their turns at the kill, but then suddenly they were gone. A vast shadow loomed beneath the boat, darkening the water as though the sun had been shunted behind a fat cloud. Peter gazed down, puzzled. Was there a whale below him? Occasionally, humpbacks and blues surfaced underneath fishing vessels, a situation that no one enjoyed, and he was considering whether to throw the boat into gear when the shark’s head glided into view, heading in the direction of the carcass. Her scale made the seal look like a bath toy. She had a distinctively notched dorsal fin that appeared dainty compared to her outsized body, and she was at least three feet longer than the whaler, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-one feet. Peter had felt uncharacteristically rattled by the sight of her, though he forced himself to stay put and continue to film, realizing that there weren’t many opportunities to document a creature so extraordinary. As it turned out, “she was quite docile.”

A great white so big that she blocked out the light: I couldn’t get that notion out of my mind, and I had dreamed about her last night. As the sailboat heeled in Fisherman’s Bay, I was transported to the deck of a rust-colored freighter, plowing through turbulent, icy water somewhere off the coast of Alaska. Whitecaps salted the surface, and every few yards a white shark would thrust its head up. Sharks everywhere, the ocean was thick with them. When the Hunchback glided by, all the sounds were instantly muted: the wind stopped; the seabird cries and the churning water hushed to silence. Peter and Scot were on the freighter as well, but I was the only one wearing a survival drysuit, as though I was expecting to go overboard at some point. This dream water was even spookier than the water at the Farallones. Along with the sharks, it teemed with the unexpected, and typically unseen, denizens of the deep sea. Beside the freighter I could make out the slime eel, a primitive creature with five hearts and no eyes that bores its way inside fish, devouring them from within, and a pack of hatchetfish with icepick teeth. There was an albino sturgeon with ruby eyes, and a bioluminescent viperfish, glowing like fire. Enormous jellies floated among them, trailing poison tentacles. And as we looked down from the freighter’s deck, the Hunchback ghosted by, orbiting like a stray moon.

When I woke up, I had to think hard for a second or two about where I was. Not that I normally slept on an eighteen-inch-wide lime green foam pad.
Just Imagine
had a fairly impressive captain’s bunk up front, featuring a double bed with an actual mattress, but the air under the bow was stale and the skylight above was jammed shut in a snarl of nuts and bolts, and Tom had warned that it tended to slam down on the fingers of anyone trying to wrestle it open. Instead, I’d chosen the bunk nearest the hatch, where ocean breezes could blow in all night. It was just a shelf, really, that I was sleeping on, and it shared the aft compartment with the naked lady carving. The berth had a complicated lattice of blue Cordura straps on the side to hold me in, if it came to that. It probably would. I’d already realized that this setup wasn’t conducive for being gently rocked to sleep—more like briskly shaken. And last night the water had been calm.

Fisherman’s Bay sparkled in the sunlight and its surface was still, with no wind to speak of. Animal noises echoed off the rocks. There were elephant seals and California sea lions and harbor seals and Steller’s sea lions playing in the shallows and clearing their throats, accompanied by a chorus of bird cries. Cormorants and murres shared Sugarloaf with squadrons of brown pelicans, who patrolled the bay on a mission for fish. The pelicans cracked me up. With their ungainly bodies and their long, prehistoric beaks, they seemed sent from
Flintstones
central casting. On land, they looked as though they’d fly with all the grace of a curling stone. But at liftoff, their enormous wingspans lofted them effortlessly, and when they detected a potential meal they folded their wings and transformed themselves into torpedoes, piercing the water and then swooping back up into the sky.

I spent an hour checking out the scene through my binoculars. Sea lions seemed to make up the bulk of the population in the bay. They swanned around North Landing, occasionally hauling themselves up onto the old stone staircase, a relic from the egging days, that led straight into the sea. The sea lions were remarkably agile. They could spider their way up a vertical incline with surprising speed and then flip back down with the poise of platform divers. They traveled in packs, porpoising and performing evasive maneuvers throughout the waters closest to the island, an area referred to around here as “the danger zone.” Elephant seals were more skilled at lolling in the gulches than any kind of acrobatics, and they approached the island alone, which was why they got picked off by the sharks so often. They reminded me of oversized garden slugs, except with cute button eyes. The sleek and spotted harbor seals looked a bit like inflatable pool toys, and there were more of them in Fisherman’s Bay than I’d seen elsewhere on the island. Steller’s sea lions, of which there were only a handful here, were meaty-looking big boys that you wouldn’t want to mess with, though the sharks occasionally did. A Steller’s bull was holding court near the Tit; his size, I thought, would daunt even a Sister.

I went back into the cabin to make coffee, but after failing to light the burner three times I gave up, remembering Tom’s cautionary note regarding excess use of propane within a closed space. My stuff was strewn all over the boat; I decided to try to organize it. I’d given much thought to gear and clothing. In the past, whenever I’d visited the Farallones I’d forgotten at least one critical item, usually something obvious like a sleeping bag or a waterproof jacket or long underwear or polarized sunglasses. This time, I’d spent hours at my computer surfing
REI.com
, trying to anticipate every eventuality of shark season. Would I need repellent of any kind? Nah. A camping stove? I hoped not, as I had always found them scary and apt to maim; an explosion waiting to be let out of its can. Antimicrobial socks? Fingerless gloves? Gore-Tex dental floss?

One of the least useful things I’d brought was an ultradeluxe Therm-a-Rest. As any camper knows, your average Therm-a-Rest is an inflatable nylon pad that acts as a slight buffer between you and the hard, wet ground. In generic form these pads are simple, and they’re cheap, running anywhere from $30 to $40. However, as might be expected, the enterprising folks at Therm-a-Rest had invented some pricier models because…why not? The $199 DreamTime model caught my eye. It was identical to all other Therm-a-Rests except that it was so thick it practically qualified as a mattress, and it promised “decadent comfort.” So what if the DreamTime was so bulky it needed to be checked as oversized baggage? Wouldn’t it be ideal, I’d thought, for those nights when I opted to sleep under the stars on
Just Imagine
’s deck? But that was before I realized that Guiles hadn’t been kidding about the kelp flies.

They were at their peak now, a carpeting plague, crawling up pant legs and down shirt fronts, overwhelming a person’s every moment outside. And these flies were not the cleanest insects—their preferred habitat is the inside of a seal’s anus. The anus flies spent their time in one of three ways: tormenting us, tormenting the poor seals who had to house them in such an inhospitable place, and copulating with abandon in giant fly gang-bangs. This morning I’d counted a vertical stack of thirteen flies. Swarms of anus flies would put a definite damper on sleeping topside. With difficulty, I crammed the DreamTime into a closet.

Likewise, I was having second thoughts about another purchase.

After my strange experience with the chest-constricting presence in the house, it had occurred to me that a Ouija board might get some serious action at the Farallones. At worst, it would give me something to do one night. I set out to buy one. Sadly, the contemporary model is nothing but a plastic shell of the original, and it didn’t seem right to bring a piece-of-crap Ouija board to a place with such a proud history of ghosts. Surely the spirits would relate better to something more authentic? I googled “antique Ouija boards” and was springboarded to various witchcraft sites festooned with graphics of demons and pentagrams and runes dripping with blood. One of them played eerie, tinkly piano music that was frankly upsetting. I went ahead anyway and shelled out $160 for a handcrafted wooden board.

When the board arrived, I was startled to see that it was the size and heft of a sidewalk slab. It bore a sign that warned: “IF AT ANY TIME during usage you suddenly feel cold or threatened, it is a good idea to stop immediately. These are signs of an evil spirit! Over all, this game is NOT completely safe. DON’T be crazy and use it at a graveyard!”

Now that I had dragged the thing all the way out here, I really didn’t want it. I shoved it into my duffel bag.

My radio bleeped with a special tone that meant Peter was calling. Everyone on the island carried Motorola walkie-talkies at all times; practically the first thing that Peter had done when I arrived was to set one up for me. The devices served as both a communications and a safety system. (In an emergency, yelling for help would be futile in the rushing wind.) He and Kevin had finished programming the tags and were on their way out to the yacht. I’d seen the tags last night. They looked like little karaoke microphones, but sleeker. At one end was a metal barb that hooked the tag to the shark, ideally right below the dorsal fin. At the other end hung a black bulb-shaped float. The effect was not unlike a chandelier earring, with the tag subtly swaying alongside the animal as it swam. Kevin had lashed the tags to long harpoons using thick elastic bands.

By midafternoon’s high tide we were out on the water, with Brown on Sharkwatch. Earlier, while we were standing on
Just Imagine
’s deck, transferring gear into the whaler, Ron had swung by. He planned to make his first dive of the season later this week and had come by today to check the conditions. He idled beside us in
GW
and raised a dubious eyebrow at our mooring. “What kind of anchor’s he got out there?” Ron asked. I was the only one who had seen it up close; I had no idea what kind of anchor it was, but I described its cross-hatched shape. “Sounds like a Danforth,” he said, with distaste. “All wrong for out here.” He told us that the island was an anchor cemetery. “I see them all the time on the bottom. They get bent up like pretzels.”

We returned to Indian Head, where we’d had such instant success yesterday. The water was wildly alive, red with krill and teeming with fish and birds. Krill are tiny crustaceans, and they’re pink, like a Lilliputian shrimp cocktail. “These are big ones,” Kevin said, looking over the side. “They’re lunkers.” And where there’s krill, there are whales. To the west, humpbacks rose and spouted.

Peter reached into the boat’s glove compartment and pulled out a transistor radio, which he strapped to the railing. The San Francisco Giants were playing the Houston Astros in the National League playoffs, an event that ranked right above surfing in the leisure hierarchy of his mind. And he wasn’t the only baseball fanatic on the island; all of the bird biologists were rabid fans. Yesterday he and Brown, an avid Red Sox fan, had spent a long time on the radio debating the merits of Barry Bonds versus Pedro Martinez with the same eye for detail they brought to the identification of a vagrant oriole or pipit. Perhaps it simply came down to a love of watching small objects whizzing through the sky.

Peter fiddled with the dial until the sounds of a sports announcer and a roaring crowd boomed out. He picked up a fishing pole and began to untangle the line that was attached to the surfboard. “Listening to baseball and watching for sharks. What could be finer?”

While waiting for news of attacks, we drifted in the sun with the decoy set out. The board received some halfhearted attention, a few drive-bys, but no one was getting serious enough to bite it or even bump it. The most extreme move was a mild tail flick. Just the fact that they
were
out there, unseen perhaps, yet always a possibility, thrilled me. But the sharks’ new take-it-or-leave-it attitude troubled Peter. It supported Scot’s theory that the cage divers’ constant use of the decoys was desensitizing them, and that for future research purposes, decoys might not work at all. The sharks’ lack of interest was all the more unusual since it was early in the season, and few of them had managed to kill a seal yet. High tide came and went without an attack.

As the hours ticked by, more than a dozen fishing boats began to mass off East Landing, resembling a small, itinerant town. This was the Monterey squid fleet. We’d seen them yesterday too. They worked through the nights, shining powerful lights that lured squid to the boats, which they then scooped up in purse seine nets. Unfortunately, the lights also attracted the nocturnal seabirds, which flew toward them, only to be picked off by the gulls.

Commercial squid fishing was legal within the marine sanctuary, oddly enough, but traumatizing the seabird population at the wildlife refuge was not. The two jurisdictions overlapped here. Peter had already received an email from the Fish and Wildlife Service asking him to keep an eye on the squid fleet.

Peter piloted the whaler through the gang of boats. Most of them were about sixty feet long,
Just Imagine
’s length, but stockier. Some had already caught squid and were in the process of brailing in their nets. In these waters the species was
Loligo opalescens
, or California market squid, an invertebrate shaped like a toy rocket, about eight inches long and milky in color, with dime-sized eyes that could see twice as well as a human’s. Contrary to most people’s expectations, Kevin told me, squid were wily and clever, some of the more intelligent creatures in the ocean. And among the most athletic—they traveled through the water by jet propulsion, leaving fish in their wake. For mating, these animals favored orgies. It was thought that they communicated with each other using their own language of color, pattern, and luminescence; instantly, they could turn themselves spotted or striped or dark as ink or a shimmery pearl color to lure other creatures toward them, or to fake out predators. Scientists had determined that squid made rapid and complex decisions, reacting to situations as they arose. For instance, when they realized they were trapped, they would panic and swim against the net.