The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (28 page)

“Watch for other sharks,” Peter said, standing on the gunwale, staring down. I leaned over the edge trying to make out shapes or shadows or boils in the lightless water. “There!” he yelled, pointing toward me. A hulking body swept by, and I focused the camera. The shark charged to the surface, jaws slashing at a piece of the carcass, coming in for its close-up. It was the sharpest, closest look I’d had at a great white shark’s face and its alien head and the white underbelly of its throat, which was bulging, and at that moment it was as though time stopped. By now I’d seen more than a dozen white sharks, but I still felt the same raw amazement every time one loomed beneath us. It never diminished, not even slightly. Rather, it grew. This was a standard sentiment. Scot had spoken to the Animal Planet crew about his own sense of awe: “I’ve probably seen more white sharks attacking more things than almost anyone on the planet, so I have a respect for what they can do. And it’s something I’ll never shake.” His response to me was simpler: “I feel sorry for anybody who hasn’t seen one.”

We stayed in Maintop for an hour, filming and struggling to stay off the rocks. The slick dissipated, and as the seal was whittled down to kabob-sized remnants, Peter turned up the Giants game, which had started during the attack. It was a make-or-break playoff game, and if they lost, they would be eliminated in their World Series run. He seemed more keyed up about baseball than any of the other action. “I’ve seen that shark before,” he said, throwing the whaler into gear. “I recognize the spot on his right side. It’s a large male.” This was disappointing news. The shark was massive enough, I’d thought, to have been a Sister. Not by a long shot, Peter told me, laughing. “When you see a big female, you won’t
believe
how badass they are.”

I wanted to know how he managed to see anything when the water was this dark—and no, I didn’t see the spot on its right side. Both he and Scot had the startling ability to track the sharks as they moved around the boat, even to the point of knowing where the animals would surface after they dove. On a clear-water day, they could pinpoint the creatures, even when they were twenty feet underwater. Whereas most of the time, to me, it was like staring into black paint.

“You learn to read the shadows.” He paused. “That, and being at about five hundred of these attacks.”

He drove into Fisherman’s Bay. “No shooting the Gap today,” I noted. The surge channel was engulfed in foam.

“Not unless you want another character-building experience.”

The sky was closing in. “We’re done,” Peter said absentmindedly, adding, “You can drop me at North Landing.” He was focused on listening to the ninth inning, so he didn’t catch the color draining from my face. This offhanded instruction,
drop me at North Landing,
had huge implications. It was not unlike someone casually saying, “Jump when the plane hits thirty-five thousand feet” or “Pass me that eyeball.”

To complete this routine task, I would have to do advanced nautical things. I’d have to maneuver the whaler in North Landing’s pinched entrance, between sets of breakers, steering close enough to the rocks for Peter to jump off, and then nimbly exiting before the next swell barreled in. This would require skillful reverse driving, with no accidental shifts into neutral. Then, as the light fell, I would have to return to
Just Imagine,
align the whaler in fifteen-knot winds, and tie it off. I had never docked alongside the sailboat without at least one person helping, reaching out and grabbing hold of a bumper or a line. And even with assistance, those attempts had not been pretty.

What choice did I have? I tightened my grip on the wheel and went for it. It took five passes before Peter was near enough to shore to leap off, and even then he had to scramble a bit, and water slopped over the top of his boots. There was a brief ricochet off the rocks and an uncomfortable whining noise when I hit reverse a little too hard. It could have been worse. I’m pleased to say, however, that the docking was perfect. Although somehow the whaler’s railing got ripped off.

SCOT AND I SAT IN THE SUN ON
JUST IMAGINE,
UPWIND OF THE HISSING
fixture, drinking a brand of beer called Red Seal. The beer’s slogan was “Vita Brevis,” and even though the seal on the label still possessed its head, there couldn’t possibly have been a more appropriate beer for the Farallones if a microbrewery itself had sprung up at the base of Lighthouse Hill. Scot had arrived yesterday, looking handsome and feral and as though he’d never spent a day indoors in his life, and damned if the weather didn’t change on a dime. Wind slackened, fog blew off, clouds bleached away their tarnish.

An experienced fisherman and deckhand, Scot knew his way around boats. After examining the whaler’s splintered edges, torn railing, and walloped side, he’d taken one look at
Just Imagine
’s mooring and shaken his head: No. Peter visibly relaxed. He’d expressed relief to me when Scot had arrived, that now there was “someone else to shoulder the responsibility of all this.” “All this,” I was acutely aware, meant me and the sailboat.

We had to move
Just Imagine
over to East Landing in any case; when the maintenance project kicked into high gear, and the Chinook helicopters roared in to pick up the debris, they would be flying low over Fisherman’s Bay, and the vortex from their rotors would whip the surface into a gin fizz. The sailboat couldn’t be there. The copters would be zooming into a tight pickup zone and then slinging several tons of old timbers overhead; no one was prepared to guarantee that this operation would go off without a hitch. I envisioned a one-hundred-foot log dropping from the sky and spearing
Just Imagine
’s deck.

Scot had spent yesterday afternoon cleaning and checking his gear, meticulously arranging all the equipment he’d need. In a place this chaotic, things could go sideways in an instant, and he’d witnessed enough trouble to know that thoughtful preparation was important. I admired this philosophy. Somehow, though, I hadn’t managed to incorporate it into life on
Just Imagine,
a seat-of-the-pants existence surrounded by broken systems and random upsets.

Today the three of us had hit the water with Seal Baby, a decoy Scot had fashioned out of gray carpet. In the past, Seal Baby had been attacked virtually every time it was dropped into the water. When I admired its lifelike appearance, Scot flashed a smile. “It looks like a seal, baby!”

One great thing about the carpet seal: When it was mauled, as it was so often, Scot didn’t have to see its terror, or its awareness of impending death. The fact that Seal Baby had no face, no eyes that could bulge to the size of cocktail coasters when scared, that was ideal, and part of the decoy’s design. Despite his obvious lack of queasiness, Scot hated to witness suffering and had remained affected for years by the image of a sea lion he’d once seen trying to exit the water with half its body missing. Around here, you didn’t have to look far to find a fate that painful. Ron had once watched, horrified, as a baby elephant seal that was being pursued by a shark tried with every ounce of its strength to scramble aboard the
GW,
the panic seared into its bewhiskered little face. Ten days ago, Kevin and I had rowed Tubby into a pocket cove so we could examine a shark-bitten sea lion that had managed to drag itself onto the rocks. The animal had three furrows raked across its torso, each at least two inches deep. The wounds were extreme, though the sea lion would likely survive them; these creatures managed to heal from the most vicious maimings, like torn and mangled lumps of Silly Putty that, when squeezed together, somehow became whole again. Not without visible agony, however, and we were struck by the emotion on the creature’s face. Its eyes blinked slowly and sadly, and it gave off a deeply resigned air as flies burrowed into its wounds.

This morning under restless but sunny skies we’d cruised Mirounga Bay and Indian Head, and trolled around on the east side too, accompanied by about fifty humpbacks, fifteen blues, and my gray whale. Seal Baby stayed in the boat; deploying it was Scot’s call, and he was preoccupied with another passion. “Look at all the crazy invertebrates!” he said, leaning over the side with a plastic measuring cup, reaching to scoop up one of the countless types of comb jellies that lived in these waters.

Along with the toadstool-shaped yellow and orange
Chrysaora
jellyfish that migrated past the islands, most of which were larger than a human head, there were platoons and battalions of smaller, weirder jellied critters. Their names were tongue-twisting mouthfuls—heteropods, ctenophores, siphonophores, scyphomedusae—and floating around next to the boat they looked like tiny science-fiction characters. Before I came to the Farallones I’d never heard of these animals, which isn’t surprising—they are as evanescent as soap bubbles.

The jellies living nearest the surface had transparent bodies, but their edges twinkled and flashed, as though traced by fiber-optic cables, blinking and undulating like neon signs. They were delicate; if you weren’t looking for them, you’d easily miss them hovering, but once you realized they were there, you could never stop seeing them. They came in a boggling array of shapes and sizes and colors—from the
praya
siphonophore, a filament made of hundreds of individuals (think of a chain of people holding hands) that could exceed 120 feet in length, to the gumball-size sea goose-berry. Some resembled elephants with glowing eyes, and some looked like rabbits whose floppy ears swept prey into their mouths. Some were wing-shaped; some looked like they were made of zippers; others brought to mind elaborate, psychedelic spaceships. Many of them stung, including the siphonophore known as the Portuguese man o’ war, and all of them were carnivorous predators who survived by eating plankton, fish larvae, and each other.

In their element they were hearty little cannibals, but their gelatinous bodies collapsed when caught in a net. Scientists could only hope to bring them up in a pail or a glass container, carefully raising them to the surface suspended in water. Even that method didn’t work much of the time, though; the jellies still deflated or shuddered into pieces, and besides, some species were completely transparent and eluded all capture. None of them preserved well; in many instances, the animal could be studied only in photographs, or by someone floating next to it in the water. And that, too, was difficult—many of them lived at great depths.

Scot dipped the cup into the water and came up with a strand of minuscule red dots suspended in what looked like a clear piece of spaghetti. It was a siphonophore, one that had a light but wicked sting. “I want to feel it,” Peter said, rolling up his sleeve to expose the soft skin inside his forearm.

“If you really want to feel it Pete, put it on your eye,” Scot said. He placed a glob of it on Peter’s arm and then touched the filament to his own wrist. “Susan? Do you want to feel it?”

I put out my wrist. It stung, but not that much. Anyway, it hurt less than rope burn, which I’d already received this morning.

Peter held his arm up to Scot’s and mine. “It’s a bonding thing.” Scot looked away uncomfortably. I was beginning to sense that he didn’t think much of the yacht arrangement. Complex logistics—the kind of juggling act that Peter thrived on and the convoluted set of circumstances that brought me here—bugged him. He did not invite distraction: not from me, not from the motley fraternity of coast guard contractors who’d descended upon the island, not from the world’s relentless fascination with the group of sharks he studied. I’d noticed that, while Peter often gave public talks about the sharks and referred to them with personal pronouns—“Whiteslash is one of our biggest females”—as though it was just one big happy family out here, Scot was guarded, keeping his shark experiences tight to his vest, reserving them for scientific papers and for special occasions. When he was at the Farallones, his attention was directed 100 percent toward the natural world. Though he was always friendly, I recognized that a journalist’s presence was an extra concern that he could’ve done without.

The siphonophore glistened in the measuring cup as Scot held it up to the sun. Back on the island he had built several Plexiglas aquariums, which he’d arranged against a black background so that the jellies stood out. When the shark action was slow, he studied the ctenophores and the siphonophores and the salps (“a completely unappreciated life-form”), videotaping them and tinkering endlessly with the lighting. The resulting films were magnificent, as intricate and luminous as the creatures themselves.

“How about giving Seal Baby a bath?” Peter asked. We were not exactly beating off the sharks. Scot seemed reluctant to set out the carpet seal, though he didn’t give a reason. “It definitely doesn’t feel active,” he said, sniffing the air, laser eyes scanning the water, taking it all in. “But I’ve seen years when it’s started out slow, and then it
rocks.
”

“
SEAS TEN FEET AT TEN SECONDS,” THE WEATHER VOICE HAD ANNOUNCED
yesterday morning. “Winds fifteen to twenty-five knots.” The promised weather from Point Arena showed up around dinnertime, and all night the boats continued to try to destroy each other, the whaler fighting back with the jagged edge of its railing. As usual, I got slapped around too. We’d planned to move
Just Imagine
in the next couple of days; it couldn’t be soon enough. I was hanging on by my fingertips, I felt, in Fisherman’s Bay. In a moment of paranoia last night, I had pulled out my notebook and written in block letters: “THIS COVE WANTS ME GONE.”