by Casey, Susan
Not for lack of surfboards, though. There was a quiver in the supply shed at all times—Scot used them as decoys to lure sharks to the surface for photo IDs. To a shark, apparently, a nice little six-foot swallowtail does a near-perfect imitation of a seal. When retrieved, the decoys were often missing hubcap-sized chunks from their sides, and surfers had taken to sending Scot their castoffs, hoping to repossess them after the sharks had paid a visit. Along with their research value, the strafed boards made for great conversation pieces.
According to Scot and Peter, the Queen Annihilator of Surfboards was a shark named Stumpy. Stumpy was nineteen feet long and weighed five thousand pounds, and when she was in residence, she ruled the Farallones. “She was the only shark that I think understood who we were, what we were trying to do,” Peter recalled. “And she didn’t care for it. When Scot was first putting out the decoys Stumpy would just come up and destroy them, more because she didn’t like them than because she was fooled by their silhouettes.” He turned to Scot. “Hey, it’s an odd-numbered year. Stumpy could be here.”
“If she was, we’d know it,” Scot said.
Stumpy patrolled a swath of sea along the east side of the island near the main boat launching spot at East Landing. For prey, this was not an advisable route onto shore. “No seal gets by her,” Peter said. And while other sharks would take twenty minutes or more to consume their kills, Stumpy could polish off a five-hundred-pound elephant seal in three minutes flat. Though the distinctively cropped tail fin that earned Stumpy her name hadn’t been spotted for several years, Scot and Peter still talked about her with a respect that bordered on awe. “Stumpy was a goddess, there’s no other way to put it,” Peter said, lowering his voice in reverence. One time, Scot rigged a video camera on the underside of a surfboard to determine which angle the sharks were coming from when they attacked. He set the video board adrift off East Landing. Right on cue, like some battle-hardened test pilot, Stumpy gave it everything she had. The resulting footage was stunning, all teeth and whitewater and violent smashing noises that brought to mind a subaquatic train wreck. It was the first time anyone had successfully filmed great white sharks underwater in California.
Stumpy made her movie debut in the BBC documentary I had seen, and won Scot an Emmy for cinematography. During the first furious hit the board snapped in two and shot into the air, and as the camera dispassionately recorded the wreckage, Stumpy resurfaced and gave the bobbling pieces a fierce backhand with her tail, before swimming off grumpily in search of real food.
None of this seemed like the best testimonial for the sport of surfing.
And yet everyone involved with the Shark Project surfed. In fact, Brown had actually been attacked by a shark while riding waves in Palm Beach last November. “Yup, I’m a statistic,” he admitted the night before when I asked for details. “I wouldn’t say I was attacked, though. It’s more like I was bitten.” By seventy-six teeth, to be exact. Waiting for a set, Brown had felt some pressure on his foot and looked down. All around him the water was red. Holy shit! Look at all that blood, he thought, not quite realizing it was his own. He never saw the shark, but after examining his wounds he concluded that it was a sand tiger, a spooky-looking, snaggletoothed shark that eats fish. And in the turbid Florida water, flashing white feet can look an awful lot like fish.
Peter grew up as a surf rat on the beaches of Oahu. Every day after school he’d run to grab his board, a hulking ten-footer that he’d bought for four dollars at a garage sale. (The deal might’ve had something to do with the board’s sky-blue patina of lead-based paint, which would chip off and lodge under Peter’s toenails.) Even as surfing gear improved and evolved over the years and his friends began to do flamboyant tricks on the new shortboards, Peter always preferred the big logs. Longboarding was more soulful, he felt, more in tune with the ocean. Whether other surfers agreed with these esoterics or not, there was at least one advantage to a larger board: It didn’t look quite as much like a seal. (Boogie boards, apparently, were the worst.)
“I know exactly how I’d do it,” Peter said now, gesturing toward the wave. “But to get into the water here…” His voice trailed off.
“Well, maybe you could try it in April,” Scot said. Shark attacks in the spring were rare. Even so, he didn’t sound too convinced. He had only recently taken up surfing, and was openly cautious about wave selection. With good reason. While the Farallones provided a convenient drive-thru for seal-hunting sharks, it was certainly not the only place around here where you’d think twice about getting on a surfboard. All of Northern California is sharky, so sharky that the area extending from Tomales Bay in West Marin County to the Farallones to Monterey is known as the “Red Triangle.” More attacks by great whites had taken place in this pocket region than in all the other shark hot spots of the world—combined. Close to home near Inverness, there were a handful of surf spots that Scot wouldn’t even consider.
“North Beach and South Beach,” he said. “I won’t go there.” These beaches were just north of the Point Reyes Lighthouse and featured nearby elephant seal colonies. Both areas had strong undertows and rogue riptides and wonderful ambush potential and, of course, seals, all of which add up to precisely the type of arrangement that great white sharks like. There was also an ominous place near the mouth of Tomales Bay called Shark Pit, where surfers had recently encountered three white sharks in a single day. Concerned, one of them asked Scot, What’s going on? Had there been a sudden influx of seals? Was it the full moon? The red tide? The new yellow wetsuit someone was wearing?
“Nah, they’re usually there,” he told them. “You guys just saw ’em.”
“I don’t surf where there are sharks,” he emphasized to me now.
“You surf in Bolinas!” Peter said, with a snort. Bolinas was a tiny beach town, also in West Marin, that was only eighteen miles by boat from the Farallones. Sightings of healthy-size white sharks in the town’s channel were not uncommon. Recently, a boogie boarder had been attacked there. In other words, Bolinas had plenty of sharks.
“Yeah, but I’m in water that’s only up to my chest,” Scot replied, laughing. “And I always have a buffer zone of about fifteen kids around me.”
All this shark talk was making me impatient. Where were they? As if reading my mind, Scot suddenly stood up. “There’s something going on down there,” he said, pointing toward the wave. Even without binoculars I could see the black dorsal fin, it was that close to shore; any closer and the shark would be joining us for coffee. We watched for a moment as the fin carved a few tight circles like a figure skater diligently practicing and then disappeared into the surf.
“There’s no carcass,” Peter said.
“Yeaahhh, that’s just one of them being weird,” Scot said.
“Well, it could be a sea lion, though.” Sea lion carcasses don’t float like elephant seal carcasses. Thus, attacks on sea lions were much harder to spot. It was decided that we’d launch the whaler and take a look; even if there was nothing going on in Mirounga Bay, we’d be out on the water, that much closer to the action.
WE WALKED THE QUARTER MILE TO EAST LANDING, WHERE SCOT grabbed a surfboard from a storage shed that had the words Shark Shack stenciled on its door above a black-and-white painting of a shark. (Scot was always drawing sharks; the logbooks were covered with his sketches.) The three-foot-wide path from the houses to the landing, paved a century ago, had built-in rails and a rail cart that rode along them. The pavement was crumbling now, but the rails still worked, and the cart was useful when things like propane canisters or solar panels or three months’ worth of groceries had to be trundled back and forth. At the edge of the cliff, the whaler rested beneath the king-sized blue boom that would lift it up, swing it over the side, and lower it into the water.
Brown was radioed down to operate the crane. Peter, Scot, and I piled into the boat, now laden with surfboards and video cameras and life jackets. Using a giant carabiner, Peter clipped the whaler’s harness to the boom. The crane roared to life
, and for a moment the shark boat hung suspended in the air like something out of a James Bond movie, and then we ratcheted down. I was comforted by the fact that Peter had done more landings, in every possible condition, than anyone else. He could read the waves, maneuvering the whaler in the surge channel with one hand while unhooking it from the boom with the other. Anticipating the next set’s arrival was key—if he timed it wrong, the swells would paste the boat against the rocks.
We motored into Mirounga Bay, cutting the engine just west of Saddle Rock, about three hundred yards from shore. Scot tied the surfboard to a fishing line and tossed it off the back, where it drifted, looking rather alone. From where we sat, the land and the water appeared as barren as the moon. In fact, below the surface the area served as a hub for the entire food chain. Along the teetering edge of the continental shelf, life roared from the depths as cold water pushed its way upward, bringing plankton and nutrients that attracted the birds and the krill and the tiny baitfish and the wacky invertebrates such as jellyfish and urchins and octopus and squid, which in turn brought the rockfish and the salmon and the other pelagic creatures that seals and sea lions and mako sharks and blue sharks just loved to snack on; and all these animals made for one big party that the whales couldn’t possibly miss: the grays and the humpbacks and the lordly blues and, of course, where there were whales and seals and a selection of midsize fish, there were great white sharks patrolling the joint, making sure that no one felt too immortal.
We drifted in silence. The only noises were the wind chuffing by and the water lightly slapping against the side of the boat. I kept my eyes on the surfboard.
“Shark approaching,” Peter said this softly. A shark’s presence was always preceded by a boil, the flat surface pattern made by its powerful tail fin right before it broke the surface. Naturally, they saw the boil long before I did. In the next second the shark appeared, knifing toward the boat. Peter and Scot stiffened into high alert, standing with their pole-mounted cameras poised like harpoons. Suddenly the whaler felt ridiculously small and as though it was riding way too low in the water.
The first thing I noticed about the shark was its immense girth. I suppose I had known, intellectually, anyway, that a shark might be as long as the whaler, but I didn’t expect it to be as wide as the boat too. Here, for context, are some measurements: a twenty-foot shark is eight feet wide and six feet deep. That’s wider than a Suburban, as wide as a Mack truck. That’s wider than Yao Ming is tall. The outsized tail of a great white looks more like something that might belong to a whale, but while a shark’s tail rides vertically in the water like a gigantic rudder, a whale’s tail sits horizontally, like the spoiler on a race car.
Another thing about white sharks: They’re black. Not inky black like orcas or labradors but a sort of mottled charcoal black that takes on a luminous sheen below the water’s surface. And not only that, white sharks suntan, which makes them darker. Only their undersides are white. This two-tone color scheme means that from below great white sharks look as ephemeral as ghosts, while from above they possess the solidity of lead. It’s great for camouflage, especially above rocky areas. “Whoever named them must have had one upside down,” Peter pointed out.
This particular shark, which looked to be about fifteen feet long, glided under us, then came to the surface and bumped the back of the boat. Its head was scribbled with black scars that looked punctured and deep, as though someone had been playing tic-tac-toe with an icepick. Each shark had a signature set of divots and spots and scars and scratches, or a chink taken out of a fin, but this one looked like it had lost a knife fight. I felt a very old part of my brain, the part that served us so well back on the veld, snap to attention. The shark cruised around us with the insistent, unthreatening curiosity of a cocker spaniel looking for scraps under the dinner table.
“They have split personalities,” Scot said. “When they’re in attack mode, their dispositions change.” He explained that the shark was merely investigating us, using its mouth to explore something that might be food. After all, they don’t have hands. And being savvy hunters, they aren’t about to launch themselves full tilt at something that might hurt them. Not that even a preliminary look-see by a food-seeking great white is a desirable thing if you’re in the water. But these two distinct modes of behavior are the reason why so many people who encounter a white shark will live, if they manage to survive the initial bite.
Now there were three sharks circling us. Their presence was tentative and—as unlikely as it sounds—almost gentle. They kept their distance from each other but they were all working from the same playbook, looping from every possible angle, swimming about six feet below the surface so their fins stayed submerged, trying to figure out whether the whaler represented food. At this shallow depth they were clearly visible, and their dark bodies gave off a kind of glow, as though spotlighted from within. If a shark decided to surface, its tail would pop up first, then its dorsal fin, and then its head. The three animals were in no particular hurry, checking us out like low riders trolling the strip on a Saturday night. They dove beneath the whaler, bumped it, slapped it with their tails. Looking down over the side, trying to follow their movements, I came face-to-face with a shark arrowing straight up from below; this was how they rushed their prey. I could see its eyes and its crooked, fiendish smile. “Oh my God,” I said, lunging back from the edge.
Next to me, Peter plunged his camera in the water. “White sharks have this great grin on their faces when they’re coming right at you,” he said. “It’s cute.”
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Scot said, with the kind of pride that others reserve for their children.
Then, off the bow, I saw a tail that dwarfed the others. It looked more like the tail of a Gulfstream jet than of a fish, and it moved with the languorous swishy motion of a runway model. It was so enormous that even with its back end next to the boat, I couldn’t make out the front half of the animal. This shark had a different aura. It could only be a Sister. Her great tail gleamed, and it bore absolutely no scars. She swam with unbelievable power and unlikely grace, a Sherman tank making dressage moves. As she vanished into the depths, another shark emerged from the darkness, making several quick runs, back and forth, under the whaler. Scot leaned over the edge to get a better look.
“Hey, that’s Cuttail!” he shouted.
Cuttail, he told me, was a Rat Packer, back at the Farallones for his thirteenth consecutive year, which was a record. He was a cantankerous shark but enormously popular because he was one of the “Adopt a Great White Shark” candidates that were part of the project’s fund-raising. Little girls who had “adopted” him wrote ardent letters to Cuttail with regularity. (Eight-year-old Paige Hulme from England was a typical correspondent: “Dear Cuttail: I am writing to you to say everything really! I love you so much. I want to see you. You know that key ring you gave me, well it’s on my pencil case. My friends think you’re scary [only being childish like they are]. I love you so much. I will always love you longer than anyone shall live. P.S: Could you please write back?”)
The sharks kept coming and coming. At least five of them visited the boat, maybe more. As the afternoon passed I lost track of time, crouched in the whaler’s scooped-out bow, bouncing from one railing to the other while the massive fish cruised under us like submarines; I could have kept it up, I think, forever. I was stockpiling questions. Did they recognize the boat? Each other? When they lifted their heads above the water, could they see us? I wanted to know which individuals we’d seen, but often that was hard to tell from above. We’d find out exactly who had stopped by later, when Scot and Peter analyzed their video. Sometimes they would notice more sharks beneath the ones they’d seen from the surface, apparitions that the camera picked up as blurry shadows lurking in the watery twilight. Scot couldn’t figure out why we were so popular this afternoon; there was no blood in the water, nothing to explain the sharks’ continuous laps. They were acting hungry.
Most of the tim
e when a human encounters a great white shark, it’s hunting something; at other times these animals hide with expert slyness. But even when a great white is in quiet reconnaissance mode, stalking on the periphery, its presence is overwhelming. You can feel them, a phenomenon acknowledged by researchers, surfers, divers—anyone who’s spent enough time on the water to have had a brush with one. The only thing more powerful than a great white’s arrival is that prelude instant right before the fin appears because, somehow, you know it’s coming. I’d heard surfers refer to this sixth sense as “that sharky feeling” and “the creeps.” Peter referred to it as “being in the groove,” and it was clear that both he and Scot cultivated the instinct.
With so many sharks converging on the whaler right now, their presence was as palpable as heat. It struck me as surreal to be floating among them, drinking a Diet Coke, only a thirty-mile hop from the Macy’s in Union Square.
But there was something even stranger going on two hundred yards away. Smack in the middle of Stumpy’s lair, just about the last place you’d ever consider dipping your toe, a boat was anchored, and a man was climbing out of the water. His name was Ron Elliott, Peter said. Ron was the last commercial diver at the Farallones, the only man left who was willing to take his chances here. He picked urchins, working solo from his boat, an immaculate aluminum crabber with a sky-blue shark stenciled on the gunwale. The boat was named GW, the letters of which reversed out of the shark in white. I could see a lone figure standing on deck in a hooded wetsuit. “He keeps a real low profile,” Scot said. “Doesn’t even have a deckhand.”
“His boat is spotless,” Peter said, shaking his head in admiration.
“Spotless,” Scot repeated.
Clearly, they were in awe of this guy. And, after seeing firsthand what lived in these waters, so was I. Peter radioed the GW to see if we could come over and say hello, the Farallon equivalent of dropping in on your neighbors.
