by Glenn Stout
This primal scene of large wild animals hunting us could’ve been witnessed by any number of locals and tourists sunbathing on the beach or sipping drinks at the cafés along the promenade, for it was three o’clock on a sunny afternoon, September 19, 2011, the tail end of the surf season at Boucan Canot beach and a busy time at this festive resort town on the west coast of Réunion, a French island about 400 miles east of Madagascar. The lifeguards, surfers themselves and friends of the victim, saw it going down right in front of them. Vincent Rzepecki, a powerfully built 31-year-old, was the first guard to hit the water. He couldn’t believe what was happening. He’d grown up with Schiller, had dinner with him the night before last. Now he paddled like mad, hoping for the best.
Of the half-dozen surfers in the water, Yves Delaplin had been closest to the accident. He remembers the fear and the shock, and the inner conflict of fight or flight. From about 20 feet away, he saw the slick of blood and heard Schiller call out from the middle of it, “Shit! Yves!” Time seemed to smear into one long panicky moment of hesitation—the sharks visible as fast-moving blurs, everyone yelling “Get out of the water!”—and then Delaplin, on a bodyboard himself, kicked toward the accident. He was holding Schiller in his arms when Rzepecki arrived on the paddleboard.
“Get out of here!” he ordered Delaplin. “Let me do my job!” And with that he took custody of the victim, shifting the stricken surfer up onto the deck of the paddleboard. Rzepecki saw at once that the situation was hopeless. Schiller’s chest was torn open; water washed into the cavity. Still, he was determined to deliver his friend to shore. Then the next set arrived, a series of 12-foot-tall walls of water. Rzepecki heard the roar of whitewater behind him, and then he and Schiller were ripped from the paddleboard, driven down, and slammed hard on the bottom. Amid a blizzard of turbulence, still clutching his friend to his chest, Rzepecki was somehow aware of the sharks in the whitewater with him, gray shapes at the edge of his vision.
He surfaced with Schiller in his arms, gulped air, and the next wave bore down. Now his thoughts flashed back to a previous fatality at a nearby surf break, Ti Boucan. Three months earlier, 31-year-old Eddy Aubert had been killed during a late-afternoon surf session. Not a widely popular figure like Schiller, Aubert had been more of a soul surfer, a free spirit living with his girlfriend up in the hills. Aubert’s death had seemed an isolated tragedy rather than part of a pattern. Now the pattern emerged. Same pattern of bites to leg and torso. Maybe the same sharks. Sharks with no fear of men. Rzepecki was suddenly very much afraid and close to panicking. He was hurt and he was drowning. His friend was dead. He had to let him go.
By the time he made it back to shore, the nautical crew from the fire department was already on the beach, equipped with scuba tanks, preparing to take on the recovery of the body. According to Rzepecki and other lifeguards, the divers ran into trouble immediately. Despite employing Shark Shields (devices that emit electronic pulses to repel sharks), they were forced to retreat into caves beneath the spit of rocks that delineates the north end of Boucan Rights, while the sharks, in a highly agitated state, frisked in and out of view in the impact zone. Mathieu Schiller’s body was never found.
The world-famous left point break at St. Leu is the surf spot of my dreams, and of my nightmares too. In the predawn gloom, I paddle a big red rental longboard through the chilly glass of the tranquil channel. Sanhn-Loo! I know the place from boyhood lore, Endless Summer fantasies, and surf-magazine pics. French and African. So cool. A long and leisurely paddle out, and then a fast fun ride on a perfectly peeling left-hander. Truly one of the world’s great surfing waves.
Normally, on this crowded planet, I’d never get a wave at a famous break like this. I’m not good enough, not aggressive enough. But things are far from normal now on Réunion. The locals here are staying high and dry, staging a kind of informal strike. According to native wisdom, the risk of a shark attack has become intolerable. Since the death of 21-year-old Alexandre Rassiga in July, the third fatality in just over a year, there have been protest marches, a lot of shouting, and a bit of violence, with surfers demanding that the government kill the offending animals. I’ve arrived in the midst of a turf war between man and shark. It’s Saturday morning, August 25, 2012, less than three weeks after yet another attack, this one not fatal but nearly so—a mauling right here at St. Leu—and there’s nobody out in the water but me and Mickey Rat.
Mickey—Mick Asprey—is a white-haired 64-year-old Australian shaper who owns a shop in town. Ten years ago, he was blinded in one eye in a collision with his surfboard; that and his irascible demeanor remind me of an Aussie Rooster Cogburn. Mostly I’m watching him surf. He’s catching four waves to my every one, and whenever he disappears behind a glassy wall, I’m left alone in the lineup, wondering if at any moment my on-site reporting, and indeed my life, will be brought to an abrupt and bloody conclusion by a streaking gray blur.
For what it’s worth—and I don’t suppose it’s worth much in terms of safety—I have some experience with sharks. When I was field editor for a scuba-diving magazine, I sought out sharks around the world. In the lagoons of Bora-Bora, I dove with lemon sharks the size of small submarines. In Micronesia I hung out in reef passes, kicking hard against the current to watch feeding blue and whitetip sharks. And once in the Galápagos, I ascended through a veritable tornado of hundreds of circling hammerheads. I was never afraid. Always the sharks seemed oblivious to us divers, as if we existed in separate dimensions. Awesome and silent, gray against the blue, they paraded past like disciplined thespians observing the fourth wall. Yet here in the waters off Réunion, it seems that the sharks have broken through that barrier. They see the surfers. They seek them out.
Certainly, on that day three weeks ago here at St. Leu, a shark sought out Fabien Bujon. It was late afternoon, getting close to sundown, a bad time to be in the water, as everyone knew. The first bite took off one of Bujon’s feet, and the shark—a bull shark—came at him for more. As Bujon punched at its head, the shark latched onto his hand, severing it above the wrist. He crammed his other hand into its gill slits and the shark backed off. One tough hombre, Bujon somehow managed to make the 100-yard paddle to shore unassisted.
Now the sun finally crests the 10,000-foot-tall volcano in the near distance, turning the sea a glimmering silver. I squint through the translucent water at my gloriously intact feet, wiggling my toes, and recall the warning I received from a St. Leu local. Wild-haired, eyes red-rimmed from a hard night’s partying, looking like the dockside prophet Elijah in Moby-Dick, the man fixed me with his stare and said, “The sharks, they taste the men, and they learn to eat them.”
If this is hysteria, it’s highly contagious.
Surfing Réunion has never been safe—the International Shark Attack File lists 14 attacks on surfers, of which eight were fatalities, between 1989 and 2010—but the island has never experienced anything like the current spike: 10 attacks in the past two years. In February 2011, a shark tore off a surfer’s lower leg at Roches Noires, a surf break near the harbor of St. Gilles, the island’s busiest resort town. A few months later, a surfer at the same break escaped with just a chomped surfboard. Sharks also pursued a waveski and a canoe, neither incident resulting in injury, though in the case of the canoe, a closed-hull outrigger, the shark came out of the water and bashed in the upper deck—an act of unprecedented aggression, or desperation. These incidents, plus the Aubert and Schiller fatalities, all occurred within or nearby the Marine Reserve, a 12-mile-long protected zone established on the west coast to try to save the threatened coral of the barrier reef.
Was the Reserve itself to blame for the eightfold increase in attacks? Some surfers and fishermen believed that it endangered one group (the surfers) by excluding the other (the fishermen). They felt that la présence humaine was needed to restore the old balance, with man at the top. Or were the attacks just a cascade of coincidences? Or were they due to some changes in the sea at large, or in shark numbers or shark be
havior? To begin to answer those questions, in October 2011 the government of Réunion island launched CHARC, an ambitious water-safety and shark-monitoring program, the main thrust of which would be the tagging of 80 sharks by 2014. In the meantime, the popular beaches of Boucan Canot and Roches Noires were closed to surfing and swimming for the indefinite future.
As the CHARC scientists pursued their tagging program—catch each shark with rod and reel, immobilize it alongside the boat, surgically implant an acoustic beacon—France’s biggest dive-training and certification organization took a more submersive approach: they hired the world-famous Belgian breath-hold diver, Frédéric Buyle, a kind of eco–Van Helsing of the monster-shark world, to swim down and have a look around. A passionate shark advocate, Buyle had won fame swimming with great whites—sans cage—and looking at them eye to eye. Here in Réunion, Buyle was amazed by what he saw, or failed to see. There were no sharks at all, at least none of the smaller reef sharks found everywhere else in the tropical world. Eventually, using baits, Buyle coaxed his wary quarry from the shadows. Moving in slo-mo and hugging close to the bottom, gray against gray, were specimens of Carcharhinus leucas. Requins bouledogues. Bull sharks.
“Ils sont timides, très, très timides, mais present,” Buyle writes in his report of the expedition. They were there all right, but very, very wary. And very bad news.
When Buyle inspected the attack sites at Boucan Canot and Roches Noires, he concluded that both sites are ideal bull-shark habitat: sand beaches fronting ravines holding fetid streams. Roches Noires has the additional attraction of nearby St. Gilles harbor, with its murk of pollution and steady supply of fish carcasses. Buyle asserted he would never enter the water at either place without a dive mask for defense against ambush.
Nevertheless, he believed that closing the beaches had been a mistake. Who would assume the authority to reopen them? Who could decide when they would be “safe” when they never would be? Réunion island didn’t have a shark problem so much as it had a people problem, peculiarly French. There was the French faith in the law, on one hand, that for every crime a criminal could be found and punished. On the other hand, just a careless plunge away, was a powerful and unpredictable species—evolving and adapting to conditions made more hostile by humans. The sea had become “a place of mass consumption,” in Buyle’s words—and at the same time primo bull-shark habitat. He called the situation “grotesque.”
The bull shark is a species with a detestable reputation. Feared worldwide under various names—Zambezi shark, Nicaragua shark—it is perhaps the most intelligent, most adaptable, and least predictable of the large, dangerous sharks. Neither fast nor graceful like the tiger, nor majestic like the white, the bull is a bulky, round-bellied, seemingly sluggish beast, though capable of quick bursts of speed in attack. Mature females, larger than the males, attain a maximum length of about 11 feet and can weigh more than 500 pounds. Small eyes hint at the relative unimportance of sight in their hunt for prey, which they are known to pursue in coordinated attacks, often in turbid, low-visibility conditions. Through an adaptation called osmoregulation, their versatile kidneys allow them to move freely between salt water and fresh water, to enter river mouths and prowl miles upstream. On Réunion, with its steep volcanic slopes scoured by deep ravines, it had long been folk wisdom to stay out of the water after heavy rains, when fresh water laden with silt and debris sent long brown plumes into the sea. Above all, bull sharks are attracted to that turbidity, to murky waters for the cloak of invisibility. That’s why bulls are rarely glimpsed until the moment of impact.
The most common explanation for why sharks attack surfers is the “mistaken identity” theory: sharks on the hunt for seals, sea lions, and turtles look up and see the silhouettes of surfers on their boards, mistake them for their natural prey, and decide to investigate with a bump or a bite. The theory helps explain both why some surfers are targeted and why so many survive their encounters with much larger, superbly evolved killing machines. As Mick Asprey points out, “We’re not on the menu, mate!”
But many Réunion surfers had come to believe something different: the bulls were learning that surfers were easy prey. So they wait, these killer sharks. Hidden. Elsewhere. You never see them when the sea is calm. Then the waves come—a symphony to their senses, the big pounding swell. The swell churns up the bottom, the sand in solution creating that murkiness through which they navigate with the ease of the blind, like great bats. Then—voilà!—the food arrives, arranged just beyond the breakers, a dangling banquet of human limbs.
On July 23, 2012, at Trois-Bassins—traditionally the safest surf break on Réunion—a third surfer was lost. Alexandre Rassiga, a handsome 21-year-old actor-bartender, took a bite below the knee—a nonfatal injury—and then suffered a second bite to the upper thigh that severed an artery. At this point, something seemed to snap in the minds of Réunion island surfers. Aubert. Schiller. And now Rassiga. The surfers were losing their friends, losing their pastime. Boucan Canot and Trois Roches remained shut down. Now the mayor of Trois-Bassins closed that venerable surf spot. Robert Boulanger, president of the Ligue Réunionaise de Surf, described the mental state of his constituents as “psychose.”
Three days after Rassiga died, some 300 surfers and fishermen marched on the capital, St. Denis. Carrying surfboards painted with slogans, they chanted “Open the Reserve now!” The protesting surfers believed that the Marine Reserve, in which commercial fishing is banned, had become like a “larder” for sharks. They were no different from criminals, these bouledogues!, as one furious surfer put it, except that they had the Reserve as a hideout and a refuge, a sanctuary like a medieval cathedral.
Ten days after the protest march, on August 5, Fabien Bujon was mauled at St. Leu, the island’s signature break. If Rassiga’s death lit the fuse, the St. Leu attack created the explosion. An angry mob of about 100 surfers and fishermen tried to break into the offices of the Marine Reserve, where they were forcibly repulsed by police.
The mayor of St. Leu, Thierry Robert, promised a shark cull. The cull would be good for business, this pro-development mayor of a tourism boomtown might have reasoned (not unlike the panicked mayor in Jaws). Instead the plan made international headlines, and the backlash from animal rights groups was immediate and effective. In France, Brigitte Bardot (as head of her eponymous animal welfare group) wrote a letter to the prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, attacking the decision to kill the sharks. “The sea belongs first to marine life,” the group announced. “We can’t condemn sharks to death just to please surfers. It’s ridiculous.”
A minister in France bigfooted the St. Leu mayor with a compromise. Two professionals would be hired to fish the Marine Reserve for 20 sharks, bulls and tigers, which would be tested for ciguatera, a potentially deadly food-borne toxin, to see if their meat could be marketed. It was a grotesque solution, as Frédéric Buyle might’ve said, since the fishermen were targeting the same sharks CHARC was attempting to tag. And angry Réunion surfers were far from satisfied. But for anyone watching with dismay the endgame of the earth’s last large charismatic animals—the dangerous ones, the difficult and inconvenient beasts of the shrinking wilds—Réunion island’s reluctance to cull marked a long-overdue check on human arrogance.
Meanwhile, as the Réunion shark controversy boiled, signs and portents of nature’s revenge—call it “bite-back”—continued to emerge around the world. Last August, scientists in the diminishing Everglades captured a record-setting 17½-foot Burmese python—an invasive species swallowing whole populations of native mammals. In southern India, the desperate poor were moving into the national parks, foraging for food, and grazing their cattle on land set aside for elephants. The elephants, tenuously confined in what one writer called “animal concentration camps,” responded with rampages through towns and villages. About the same time, a lioness and her three cubs were captured in a Nairobi suburb. She was staking out her territory in backyards and vacant lots. A biologist for the Nairobi
National Park said that he believed the survival of the species as a whole depended on “successful fencing.”
There’s a troubled history of fencing off the reefs of Réunion, where wave action makes shark netting difficult, and where the situation is further complicated by the near-invisibility of the predators. Sardon Courtois, the prophet who balefully warned me—“They taste the men, and they learn to eat them”—had gone on to say that there was no magic solution. Then he gave me his blessing to go forth and surf.
The next morning at my hotel, I can hear the rhythmic booms as waves unload on the barrier reef. The swell has begun to build. I wonder if that drumbeat is really summoning the bouledogues to feed. The surf is probably triple-overhead at Pointe du Diable (way too big for me), double-overhead at St. Leu (but the local surfers have posted a sign asking visitors not to surf). I decide to try my luck at L’Hermitage, a reef-pass break in the Reserve that’s still open for surfing.
As I’m wading into the lagoon, about to begin the 300-yard paddle to the barrier reef, two lifeguards on a Jet Ski come blasting across the flats to confront me. “You surf alone?” one asks. “Why do you make this bad decision?” I want to answer that in a place where to surf or not to surf has become a political decision, my politics tell me to surf. But that sounds pompous, even to me. So I just shrug. One lifeguard shakes his head, glowering, dismounts from the Jet Ski, and wades ashore. The driver returns my shrug and says, “I have to apologize for my friend. He was there, you know, when Mathieu Schiller was killed.”
