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

by Casey, Susan

  The two men were in their early forties and of average height, and they both had that authentic glow that self-tanners can’t replicate and the easy, confident manner of people at home in their own skins. It was as though they’d stepped from the pages of a Patagonia catalog, where perfectly disheveled and impossibly great-looking men who hadn’t shaved in recent memory were pictured doing things like kayaking the Zambezi and hanging from their fingertips off El Capitan. And these guys had the attitudes to match. When I had arrived two days ago aboard a whale-watching boat called Superfish, Peter had picked me up in the shark research boat. The seventeen-foot Boston Whaler plunged up and down below the sixty-five-foot Superfish, each vessel rising and falling in opposing cadence with the eight-foot swells. My job was to make the jump without falling into the water and being crushed like a bug between the two boats, or snapped at by a curious shark. I managed it but was scared almost speechless, and my legs hadn’t quit shaking for an hour. Meanwhile, Peter, cruising through the boat-eating waves, was talking to the Superfish crew, greeting people, watching the birds out of the corner of his eye, and helping me aboard, all at the same time.

  Both he and Scot seemed completely at home here, and in a way the Farallones were like home to them. Over the years, they had established familiar routines. Scot always slept in a bedroom called the Wind Room (also known as Jane Fonda’s Ugly Sister’s Room, because it was small and shunted off to the side). Peter always transported his gear in Rubbermaid tubs that kept out the mice and the bird lice and the damp air. Scot dealt with the Shark Project equipment; Peter handled the island logistics. Scot brought the coffee and the beer; Peter brought the Two-Buck Chuck. Both men liked to drink Jack Daniel’s, knew how to read the ocean, and could fix things. They had this place down to a science, insofar as such a thing was even possible.

  They coordinated their schedules so that during shark season, at least one of them was always present. Peter loved to spend the bulk of the fall here not only because of the sharks but also because it was a major birding season. Scot preferred to come out only when the weather was conducive to his work. When the winds swept in or the fog came down and, as he put it, “someone turned out the lights,” he often tried to hitch a ride on a fishing boat back to Inverness, the laid-back town near Point Reyes where he lived with his girlfriend. During the other nine months of the year, Scot worked as a park ranger at the Point Reyes National Seashore, and as a part-time naturalist for the Oceanic Society. Peter also lived in Inverness, with his wife and two children; when shark season ended at the Farallones, he took it up on the mainland, fund-raising for the project, answering its mail and phone calls, organizing the research, writing reports, and turning the other part of his attention to the bird world.

  We were all somewhat puffy-eyed this morning, on account of the several bottles of wine that had been part of last night’s dinner, and I grabbed a mug and poured myself a coffee too. I sat down next to Peter. “Good morning,” he said. “Are you ready to run?” In other words, was I properly dressed for a shark attack, should one suddenly break out, without any additional coiffing or wardrobe adjustments. Hell, yes. Last night I had carefully placed my jacket, my binoculars, my sunglasses, my camera, and my boots right by the front door, within easy snatching range.

  Adam Brown and his wife, Natalia Collier, known to everyone as Brown and Nat, came into the kitchen and began to make toast, rifling around in the two refrigerators for slices of homemade bread and the last remaining chunk of butter. Brown, twenty-nine, was the third—and newest—researcher on the Shark Project; in fact, he was the only addition that Scot and Peter had ever made. He was a strong-featured guy, tall and lanky, with a blond ponytail. Nat was a biologist too. She was in her late twenties and effortlessly pretty, with thick coppery hair and not the slightest hint of makeup. She had a resoluteness that seemed unusual for someone her age. You could absolutely tell that Nat was going to save a species or two before she was done.

  For most of the year, the Browns traveled a peripatetic circuit on which the Farallones were only one stop. They’d spent several months on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean before arriving here, monitoring bird populations and setting up their own environmental nonprofit. Unlike the majority of twenty-something couples, these two had decided that their ideal life did not involve corporations, minivans, or suburbia. They had no fixed address. During the lulls between jobs, they surfed.

  The couple had been here since August and, Nat had told me, would be staying until early December. Only three days remained in the official shark season, however. To date it had been a so-so year. There were fewer seals around, and it seemed likely that the sharks were still hungry. Last week, apparently, the weather had been unusually cooperative, the water had been clear, and things were just going off. Shredded carcasses were popping up left and right, with bunches of sharks cruising around and surfacing to feed and Scot, Peter, and Brown floating in the middle of everything in their research boat. But the run of action seemed to have ended. The conditions had turned foggy, windy, and nasty. Typical Farallon weather, but not so great for seeing sharks. During the two days I’d been on the island, the temperature had barely risen above fifty degrees, the sea had gone from ultramarine blue to gunmetal gray, and we’d been socked in the entire time.

  I had spent my hours on the island exploring, wandering on the flat parts, scaling the ankle-breaking path to the old lighthouse, climbing the sides of scree-strewn hills, and ripping up fistfuls of New Zealand spinach, an invasive plant that had quickly colonized the island after its seeds hitched a ride on the bottom of somebody’s shoes in 1975. (Peter had outlined the mission, all-out war against the exotic species: search and destroy the leafy green scourge whenever possible.) Yesterday, Scot had shown me a spot called the Emperor’s Bathtub, a dramatic, sheltered cove filled with seals and sea lions lounging and capering, snorting and belching, as the water eddied around them in a crystalline Jacuzzi. Walking farther down the dribble of a path, we rounded a corner and dead-ended at the North Landing and Fisherman’s Bay. It was a view that made you grab for your camera, a spooky semicircle of rock spears surrounding an unquiet cove that had no lee whatsoever. One of these farallones, Arch Rock, had a bungalow-sized hole pierced through its center, like the eye of a needle. Another was larger, though less showy; it was called Sugarloaf, and it rose in full-moon grandeur at the northwestern edge of the bay, separated slightly from the rest of the group.

  Even without sharks, it was exhilarating. I could have happily spent a year or two exploring all the fabulously named spots—like Drunk Uncle’s Islet or Funky Arch or Jewel Cave—taking in the seals and rocks and birds and waves and the unpredictable, mercurial sky. But there were less than forty-eight hours left in my visit, and I was feeling more than a little preoccupied by the fact that I had not, as yet, seen a shark. Whiffing for the second time in two years was inconceivable.

  “Tomorrow’s the day,” Peter had assured me last night. “We’re overdue for a big, bloody attack.”

  “THE TRUE BIOLOGIST DEALS WITH LIFE, WITH TEEMING BOISTEROUS life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living,” John Steinbeck wrote in The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Upon his graduation from college in 1979, Peter Pyle set out to prove him right. A twenty-year-old bird savant with big hair, a seventies-issue mustache, and a fresh zoology degree from Swarthmore, he hit the road with the express purpose of seeing as many birds as he could, from the jungly forests of Hawaii (where there were few birds, it turned out, but plenty of opportunities to make some cash tending marijuana plants), to Europe, and on to Asia. Along the way, Peter met another ornithologist who mentioned that the real bird action was taking place in Bolinas, California, under the auspices of a group called PRBO, the Point Reyes Bird Observatory. It was an organization of genius and irreverence, dedicated to conserving ecosystems, wetlands, marine environments—anyplace, basically, where birds lived. “You belong there,” Peter was told.

  A
nd so, on New Year’s Eve in 1979, he pulled into Bolinas in the beat-up navy-blue VW Bug that had occasionally served as his home as well as his car. After volunteering for several months at Palomarin, PRBO’s field station set against the rugged West Marin coastline, he was offered an eight-week internship at Southeast Farallon Island, which PRBO monitored in a partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

  When Peter stepped onto the East Landing for the first time, he took it all in: the masses of birds, the stark landscape, the furious weather, the perfect isolation, the cute female interns. Everything he wanted was right in front of him, all rolled up into one improbable package. This is it, he thought to himself. This is my place. By 1985, he had secured a staff biologist position at the Farallones, which enabled him to spend as much as half the year living on the island.

  In the early days there wasn’t much awareness of the resident sharks. However, as sightings of giant dorsal fins and slashed-up seals increased throughout the eighties, so did the biologists’ curiosity. Whenever Peter witnessed an attack from the island, he would jot down his observations, but that was about all he could do. Everyone was riveted when the sharks showed themselves, awed by their size and the large pools of blood just offshore, but there was no research program devoted to great white sharks, no resources to study them, and no one on this island of ornithologists with the time or the inclination to do so, anyway. An intrepid marine scientist named Peter Klimley, who had already distinguished himself with his cutting-edge shark studies, got the ball rolling, arriving in 1985 at the invitation of the Farallones’ head biologist, David Ainley. Ainley, by all accounts a sort of biological visionary, wanted to create a research program devoted to great whites. He and Klimley, assisted by Peter, began to set up systems for collecting data and tried for several seasons to entice the sharks into gobbling sheep carcasses that contained transmitters. The idea of having sharks swallow tracking devices was innovative and promising (and was later continued at the island by a scientist named Ken Goldman), but Ainley had his hands full running the place, supervising every bit of research that was going on, and Klimley had other shark projects in Baja and elsewhere that demanded his attention, and could not devote an entire season to the island. The Farallones was, above all, a field post and required someone to be there at all times, watching.

  Which, in 1987, is exactly where Scot came in. He had grown up, appropriately, in Tiburon (Spanish for “shark”), a bayside town in Marin County. While other kids were taping Farrah Fawcett and Rolling Stones posters to their bedroom walls, Scot had been putting up great white shark pictures. He knew about the Farallones. And as someone who had spent his whole life around this stretch of ocean, he’d heard every last legend and big fish story about the sharks. In the seventies and eighties, though, even the insiders didn’t know very much. Local fishermen reported that there were great whites out there, plenty of them, but that was it.

  Scot wasn’t the only person interested in researching great white sharks at the Farallones, but without a doubt he was the most determined. He systematically made his way to the islands over the course of several years, cultivating colleagues who could help him get there, and learning to band birds, a complicated and technical process, so that he could qualify for an internship. When he finally arrived, he made himself indispensable by doing everything with extreme competence—from cooking a mean lasagna to fixing the roof. Whatever it took.

  But most important, it soon became obvious that he could see things about the sharks that no one else could. He had a sixth sense for knowing where to look at just the right moment, and eyesight one could fairly describe as bionic. Shortly after Scot’s arrival, the fall biologist at the time, a seabird specialist named Phil Henderson, appointed him to a newly created post: principal great white shark researcher. Peter was the only person whom Scot could convince to motor out to a mangled carcass, the only other scientist who was as drawn by the sharks as he was. And Peter, with his ability to tell a LeConte’s sparrow from a Henslow’s sparrow at a hundred yards, shared Scot’s gift of vision. The partnership turned out to be ideal.

  And so, together, in 1988, with the joint backing of PRBO and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they created the Farallon Islands White Shark Project, the only long-term study of individual great white sharks—or white sharks, as scientists prefer to call them—in existence. When they said “individual,” they meant it literally. Using underwater video and topside observation, Scot and Peter had identified more than a hundred white sharks, cataloged their whereabouts around the island, even named them. (While naming the animals might come across as a sweet, neighborly thing to do, it had an essential scientific purpose: This was the easiest way to keep track of them in the field.)

  One of the first things they learned was that these great whites were the alphas among alphas. Fifteen feet was an average-size Farallon shark, eighteen was large, and twenty was rare but not unheard of. In other great white hubs—South Africa, Australia, Mexico’s Guadalupe Island—the sharks were generally eight-to twelve-foot juveniles, which is certainly no small fish. But at the Farallones, a twelve-foot white shark came across like a runty teenager trying to get into a bar.

  With their project, Scot and Peter had a coup: to study a neighborhood of great white sharks doing their great white shark thing, year in and year out. As a result, the duo had been the first to document the great white’s natural feeding habits, its instinctive behavior around other sharks, and its innate hunting strategies. While these observations might seem mundane, in the biology world it was like winning the trifecta. The unique setup at the Farallones—the lighthouse viewing post, the convenient living quarters, the abundance of sharks and seals and throngs of gulls to point the way to the attacks—enabled them to rewrite entire chapters of the book on great white sharks. Which is fortunate because, as it turns out, most of the conventional wisdom was wrong. Scientists thought great whites hunted at night; they hunt by day. They thought these sharks had poor vision and stalked by smell; they’re visual predators. People thought these animals were insensate killing machines, but in truth they go after their prey with caution and a plan.

  These days, Peter and Scot had zero hesitation about getting next to a feeding great white shark. In the beginning, though, things were scarier. They wanted to observe the sharks at close range, but their boat was only eleven feet long. They called it the “Dink Boat” or the “Dinner Plate.”

  Powering up the Dinner Plate and approaching a shark in the aftermath of an attack required a leap of faith—they had no idea what the animals would do. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could look up in a reference manual: Procedures for Operating a Tiny Boat Next to a Feeding Great White Shark. Everyone was still under the dark influence of Jaws. Both men suspected that the sharks wanted to eat them. Why wouldn’t they rock the boat and try to tip them out?

  Certainly, white sharks had a reputation for biting, ramming, attacking, and even sinking small boats. Captains worldwide told stories of them butting sport-fishing crafts, as if making a territorial statement, and from time to time their teeth were found embedded in the hulls. At Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, a twelve-foot great white smashed a hole through the bottom of a dory. In South Africa, a fishing boat came to an abrupt stop despite the fact that the engine was still running. When the fishermen peered over the edge at their outboard motor, they discovered that a great white shark had locked its jaws around the propeller. Breaching great whites had been known to accidentally land on top of small vessels, killing people, crushing pelvises, and, in at least one case, chewing on the upholstery.

  As they settled in that first year, the two men crept closer and closer to the attacks and whenever anything scared them, their response was always the same: gun the motor and rocket out of there. Which was exactly what they did on their third time out to an attack, a clear-water day off the western tip of the island, a spot called Indian Head, when a shark approximately twice as big as the boat came up to nose around. And s
he wasn’t alone. It was the first time they’d encountered two sharks simultaneously. When they could track one shark circling beneath them they felt reasonably secure, but the idea of the second one sneaking up from behind while they were watching the first was too unnerving at that point. They hit the gas. After hovering fifty yards away for a few minutes, watching the fins pirouetting around the carcass, curiosity won out and they inched their way back to the feeding sharks. And the sharks eyeballed them, but kept right on tearing at the seal. “We realized that we could go out there, look at the attacks, and not die,” Scot recalled. “That was a big deal.”

  PETER’S WEATHER PREDICTION HELD. AS THE LIGHT CAME UP AND I stepped outside I saw that the fog had dissolved, the ocean was unveiled, and the jagged contours of another farallon, Saddle Rock, were crisply in focus for the first time since my arrival. Saddle Rock reared out of the water only two hundred yards southeast of the main island, and from certain angles it looked exactly like a dorsal fin. Cormorants bunched along its edges, forming an elegant black picket fence. It marked the divide between Mirounga Bay (where the Rat Pack hunted) and Shubrick Point (where the Sisterhood reigned). Many an elephant seal head had been lost in its shadow.

  Scot and Peter and I drank our coffee on the front steps, looking out at the water glimmering in the early light. There was a feathery wind and a handful of scudding clouds. The morning was hardly tranquil, though. The gulls screeched at top volume, as always. Surf boomed onto the rocks and the air was hazy with spray. Seabirds flew formation passes over the water, and every time they seemed to favor a particular spot I felt a little flash of hope—was there a carcass out there? Peter seemed to have other things on his mind; he was eyeing a perfect eight-foot barrel wave that rolled along an area known as “Shark Alley.” The wave, unsurprisingly, had never been ridden.