Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Presently, all I could see of the animal was its belly, white as a bedsheet. The sheer size of the fish filled my vision to its periphery, and when its leathery flesh actually touched the wire of the cage, there was an instant, thrashing jerk—all those muscles whipping and bunching inches from my face—and some part of the shark bashed into the cage, twice. It felt rather like being in a minor pile-up on the freeway: thrown helplessly forward, thrown helplessly backward, bang, against this side of the cage, bang, against that one.

  The shark cut a wide circle through the sea, then disappeared into the blue-green distance.

  Great whites—known to be man-eaters and sometimes called “white death”—can be found in all temperate and tropical oceans on earth. But they are most easily observed, in the wild, off South Africa, where there are an estimated two thousand of the creatures cruising between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. The premier viewing area—probably the best spot on the planet to encounter great white sharks—is near Dyer Island, which is about seven miles off Gans Bay, a small fishing village a few hours’ drive south and west of Cape Town.

  Dyer Island itself is pretty much covered over in gulls and other seabirds, so that occasionally, as if on a signal, half the island seems to rise up into the air and circle about overhead, shrieking in a shrill and self-righteous manner.

  Set just off Dyer Island, there is another, smaller body of land, a long, graceless pile of stones ten to forty feet high at most, and this is called Geyser Rock. It is the home of an estimated seventy thousand southern fur seals, a favorite prey of the great white shark. The seals bask in the sun on Geyser Rock, but must periodically enter the water to hunt and eat. They also become overheated in the sun, which is potentially fatal. The fur seal choice is this: stay out of the water and surely burn to death under the sun, or, what the hell, take a nice, refreshing dip in the ocean, and maybe get eaten by a huge, hungry shark.

  Great white sharks circle Geyser Rock, which they seem to regard as a kind of fur seal McDonald’s.

  In places, less than one thousand yards separate Dyer Island from Geyser Rock. The channel between these two islands is called Shark Alley. Interested parties—tourists, photographers, scientists—can hire a “shark operator,” that is, someone who owns a ski boat and a chicken-wire shark cage, and get right in the water with several great white sharks. It costs about $150 to look white death in the eye.

  Gans Bay is a very small town of neat lawns and wood-frame houses, mostly painted white. It has the feel of small-town America, rural America: a place, one imagines, that values neatness and hard work; personal honesty and public decency. It sits on a coastline that could hardly be more appealing: These are the Scottish moors, with six hundred or more varieties of heather flowering in idiotic profusion because the climate is not drear and chill. It’s Southern California here. Sun. Sea. Surf. A view toward Cape Town featuring purple mountains, range upon range of them, disappearing into the setting sun.

  An American, standing in the midst of such soul-stirring beauty, feels, instinctively, that something is missing. Where are the trophy waterfront homes, the shopping malls and arcades and cheap amusement parks and saltwater-taffy vendors? Who left this place alone to stew in the economic stagnation of hard work and decency?

  The answer is that most of the rest of the world did. In the days of apartheid and sanctions, for instance, South Africa’s share of the world’s tourism dollars was one quarter of one percent. These days, tourists visit local wineries, experience some of the best whale watching on earth, walk the nearly deserted white-sand beaches, and surf the perfect wave. It’s heaven, as envisioned by the Beach Boys.

  The emerging tourism industry, however, is not much regulated, and because South Africa is not a highly litigious country, it has, over the past few years, become one of the few places on earth where the risk-obsessed can go to put their lives on the line, with (sometimes dangerously inexperienced) outfitters offering rock-climbing or whitewater-rafting expeditions. “Sharking” is one of the new risk enterprises.

  There are currently six shark operators working out of Gans Bay. Anyone with a ski boat and a welding torch can build a cage and became a shark operator. A permit or experience is not required and the money is good. The average wage in the area is about 5,000 rand (about $100) a month. Sharking pays better: a boat carrying eight paying guests at 500 to 800 rand a day ($100 to $160) is a month’s wages in pocket. A year’s wages in two weeks!

  Consequently, competition among sharkers is fierce, and, behind the orderly and idyllic facade of the town of Gans Bay, passions and tempers run high. One sharker claims to have been shot at, probably by a competitor. Each of the operators is critical of the others, such criticisms sometimes degenerating into fistfights at the boat launch. One operator is faulted for using pig’s heads as shark bait, which tourists find aesthetically unpleasing. Some operators have offended tourists by tossing cigarettes and garbage into the sea. Other sharkers are guilty of pulling great whites up to the transom of their boats so that they will thrash about in a dramatic manner, which the more aware sharkers feel is degrading to the animal, and an affront to South Africa, the first country on earth to protect great whites.

  The most cogent critiques have to do with safety: Do you really want a four-thousand-pound great white shark thrashing against a boat that has no guardrails, that may be overcrowded, that is carrying tourists who range from families in matching Bermuda shorts to hot young divers from Europe and America? Shouldn’t the shark cages have tops on them? Or at least extensions that rise above the sea? Shouldn’t someone regulate the number of people an operator can cram onto his boat, boats that, after all, have to be able to handle ten- to sixteen-foot swells on the trip from Gans Bay to Dyer Island?

  The operators and the South African Department of Transportation have been talking about regulations, a code of conduct, rules that would require a dive master and a pilot on each craft; mandate a sturdily constructed shark cage, free of rust; require operators be trained in trauma treatment and, at least, have a radio on board. Radio links to rescue helicopters have also been discussed.

  But no one in Gans Bay believes new regulations will be effectively enforced. What every sharker in town knows is this: someone is going to have to die first. No one wants this to happen. Gans Bay operators are decent folks, first and foremost. And a death, or several, would be very bad for business. Still, no one doubts that the tragedy is coming, and coming soon.

  The folks I chose to go with, the Great White Shark Research Institute, had the largest and safest-looking boat, a thirty-foot Dive Cat, complete with an enclosed wheelhouse, a toilet, and two clean, well-maintained 200-horsepower outboards.

  The skipper, a Swede named Frederick Ostrum, brought the boat down to the dock trailered behind a battered Ford truck. The shark cage sat on the stern of the boat, and it was not the expected and reassuring rectangle of sturdy iron bars. It was, in fact, a cylinder about ten feet high and three feet in diameter, made of galvanized iron woven together in a diamond pattern. The wire was not nearly as thick as that in a Century fence, but it was somewhat stronger than chicken wire, which it closely resembled.

  The cages float free, on a rope, so that they swing away from an attacking shark. The same principle makes bobbing for apples difficult. But not impossible. A spokesman for the South African Department of Fisheries has said that “if a great white wanted to destroy one of these cages, it could.” Which seems reasonable on the face of it.

  The Great White Shark Research Institute is sometimes criticized for being a tourist operation in the guise of a scientific institute. Whatever the fact of the matter is, on the two days I chose to dive with the GWSRI, there was an American scientist aboard, doing actual scientific work. Richard Londereraville, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Akron, had a grant to take blood samples from great whites. His mission was to find out if the ancient fish carried the hormone leptin in their blood. Leptin is created by fat cells, and co
ntrols appetite in creatures as diverse as mice and men. Sharks, however, have little or no fat. Does that mean they don’t have leptin in their blood? Inquiring minds wanted to know.

  Richard was handsome in a boyishly tousled way, and he showed me the implement he’d use to collect the blood. It was a simple, oversized syringe that looked like a big horse needle, with a barb halfway down its length. A piece of monofilament fishing line was connected to the plunger of the syringe, the length of it wrapped around a blue plastic plate-sized reel. The trick, Dr. Londereraville said, was to insert the needle just behind the shark’s gills, where the skin is softest and the blood is fresh from the nearby heart. As the shark pulls away, you play out the line, gently pulling back on the plunger so that the syringe fills with blood. It wasn’t like DNA work: you needed a lot more blood to test for the presence of a hormone.

  Once the syringe was full of blood, Richard would yank the line, which would free the barb from the shark. In ten days of work, he’d collected three good samples.

  “So,” I said, “the syringe is fastened to some kind of long pole—”

  “No. That doesn’t work.”

  “How do you get the needle into the shark, then?”

  “You have to do it by hand,” the seriously insane Ph.D. said.

  Low, a former commercial fisherman, piloted the GWSRI Dive Cat. After slaloming through sixteen-foot-high swells for forty-five minutes or so, we arrived at Shark Alley, and anchored about fifty yards from the fur seal colony on Geyser Rock. It was seven-thirty in the morning and no other operators had arrived yet.

  The place smelled like a feed lot, which in fact was what it was if you were a great white shark. Seventy thousand blubbery mammals—males weigh in excess of six hundred pounds—produce an enormous amount of solid and liquid waste, so that the various gusts of wind that buffeted the Dive Cat seemed to have actual weight to them, and they hit like a slap to the face.

  On the far side of the narrow island that is Geyser Rock, over on the other side of the great hillock of densely congregated furry blubber, the full force of the Atlantic Ocean exploded against a rock in a constant, booming meter. The sixteen-foot swells produced great geysers of spray perhaps forty feet high. This spray rose above the fur seal colony, and caught the sun in such a way that it fell back to sea and earth like the shards of tattered rainbows.

  It was a noisy place, Geyser Rock, and the air itself was shattered by the continual barking and roaring of the seal colony. Females sounded like aggravated terrestrial cows, mooing in a kind of constant bawl, while juveniles baaed like goats or sheep, and the large males occasionally roared in the manner of some unfortunate soul suffering the agonies of projectile vomiting. The sound was constant and unrelenting: moo-baa-ralph, moo-baa-ralph.

  The fur seals, scruffy, golden-looking creatures, were draped over the sandy-colored rocks in blubbery profusion, side by side, like an allegory about population dynamics, or Hong Kong, and whenever one seal needed to move any distance at all, it disturbed all the others that it touched or jostled, so that every annoyed seal had to moo or baa or vomit at the traveler.

  Seals reaching the beach lay there for a while, heads in the air, bawling at the sea. These seals were joined by others, all of them vocalizing, as if daring each other and hurling curses to the sky. Finally, one, perhaps braver than the rest, would plunge into the sea, and it was as if the floodgates had opened and a hundred more would hit the surf, while their fellows above lay across the rocks, in attitudes of adipose unconcern, all of them melting in the sun like Salvador Dalí clocks.

  The seals swam in “rafts,” dozens of them, clustered together for the safety that can be found in numbers. The rafts hugged the shoreline, a single flipper raised to the sky, catching the cooling effect of wind against wet flesh and fur. They were dithering about in the surf, only ten yards from the safety of land, only fifty yards from the boat, and it was tempting to wave back to them. Hi, seals.

  Washed up on Geyser Rock were several ship’s timbers, boards forty feet long, the remnants of some historic shipwreck. Waters around the cape are treacherous, combining, as they do, currents from the Atlantic and Indian oceans running at odds to one another and to the prevailing winds. Huge waves, called Cape Town rollers, have been known to literally break bulk cargo ships in half. Waters here are unpredictable and deadly. The area, known to the rest of the world as the Cape of Good Hope, is locally known as the Cape of Storms, and, sometimes, the Cape of Souls.

  Directly off the shipwreck, dozens of seals, basking in the ebbing water of a broken wave, lifted their flippers, as if to say, “We, who are about to die, salute you.”

  On the Dive Cat, Frederick began macerating sardines and fish oil in a fifty-five-gallon drum using a big wooden pestle. Every minute or so, Richard would ladle a great glop of broken fish into the water, and the iridescent mess would float away from the boat, mostly on the surface.

  Low muscled the shark cage into the water. The cage was tied to a cleat on the boat with a yellow rope perhaps an inch in diameter, and the cage floated in the water at the transom of the Dive Cat, so that a prospective shark diver could just step from the boat into the cage.

  Set close to the transom of the boat, and tightly secured to various cleats, was a standard-sized scuba tank fitted with what is called a double hooka rig: a pair of breathing regulators affixed to the tank with two hoses perhaps twenty feet long. Divers in the cage would breathe through the long hose from the tank on the boat.

  The other paying passenger on the boat was Louise Murray, an English photographer with white spiky hair and milk-white skin. She smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and had once been a negotiator for British Petroleum, working deals that ran to millions of dollars. She fell into the job sometime after she joined the company and took a test that showed that she was “a risk taker.” British Petroleum apparently felt it needed fearless negotiators.

  Now Louise was traveling the world, publishing her photos in various scuba magazines, doing some writing now and again, and galloping through the last of her “oil money.”

  The chicken-wire cage was suspended by floats—cylindrical blue and white plastic objects like giant, two-foot-long sausages. The floats were placed deep into the cage so that about three feet of wire projected above the surface of the sea.

  Louise and I repaired to the wheelhouse to don our wet suits, as Richard chummed for sharks, and Low worked a pocket-knife through the half-frozen head of a dead fur seal. He said that shark operators used to buy seals that had been killed in fishermen’s nets, but new laws, designed to make killing seals economically unsatisfying, had stopped the practice. Now, Low and Frederick just picked up dead seals every once in awhile. I spotted a couple of them—defunct seals—rotting on the far shores of Geyser Rock. In fact, there was a seal-shaped thing with a big hunk missing in the middle directly below our boat, which was anchored in about fifteen feet of clear water. It might have been an oddly shaped rock.

  “Is that a seal?” I asked Frederick.

  “Yes,” he said, then added, unnecessarily, I thought, “it’s dead.”

  Richard ladled chum, while Low whirled the roped seal’s head about in a great underhanded circle and tossed the bait about fifteen yards from the boat. To the west, a small squall, like a bruise against the sky, stood on dark and slanting pillars of rain. A freshening breeze slapped the boat with the heavy, deep brown odor of fur seal.

  “The smell,” Frederick said, “isn’t too bad today.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.” The temperature stood at 60 degrees. On really hot summer days, 100-degree scorchers, Frederick said, fur seal excrement literally baked on the stones of Geyser Rock, and tourists who’d come to risk their lives diving with white sharks spent most of an eight-hour day vomiting into the sea, chumming the waters with last night’s dinner and unconsciously imitating the sounds of the fur seal bulls only fifty yards away.

  “There’s a shark out there,” Low said, in the way another
man might say, “Oh, look, a robin.”

  I stared out to sea, in the vicinity of the floating seal’s head, and saw what looked to be a shadow on the surface of the sea.

  Louise and I were struggling with our weight belts. I needed seventeen pounds to be neutrally buoyant in order to stand comfortably upright on the bottom of the cage.

  Frederick and Low said they had seen the shark come up below the frozen seal’s head and then glide slowly past it. “We call that a dummy run,” Frederick said.

  “Shouldn’t I be getting in the cage?” said Louise, the certified risk taker. She was standing on the transom of the boat, about three feet off the surface of the sea, and out beyond her, I could now see the dorsal fin of the shark cutting through the water, leaving twin ripples drifting off to each side. Definitely a great white.

  Frederick tugged on the rope that pulled the shark cage to the transom of the boat. Louise sat with her feet dangling over the water, then lifted them into the cage. She held the regulator in her hand, adjusted her mask, cradled her camera in her right arm, like an infant, and turned to me.

  “Bring my second camera,” she said. “Be careful with it.”

  So it appeared I was going to get into the water. I sat on the transom with my feet in the cage, bit down on the regulator, adjusted my mask, and, as I did so, the shark rose out of the water and hit the seal’s head with a kind of indolent indifference. It was not at all like a trout hitting a fly on the surface of a stream. Instead, everything happened very slowly, very deliberately, and there was no sense of urgency in the shark, only a kind of regal indifference. The sun caught my mask at an angle, so what I saw was a blurred and brilliant glare, with a great triangular head shimmering in the center as it rose languidly from the sea, mouth agape. Rows of glittering triangular teeth ridged the palate, and the great white’s eyes were a pure and ghostly white.