by Casey, Susan
I had been up to the lighthouse before, but only in the haze, and the expanse of the view startled me and brought on an unexpected sadness. The raw grandeur was almost too much to take in, a reminder of trifling human scale. It felt terribly lonely.
Scot turned and gave me a half wave as I summited, glancing over for a nanosecond before returning to his ocean surveillance. I asked if he’d seen anything that looked potentially sharky. “Nothing yet,” he said. “But it’s almost high tide.” Most shark attacks took place during high tide; this was another piece of the great white puzzle that the Farallones had supplied to the world. Because—think about it—unless the sharks were watched all the time, and from a fixed position, how would anyone ever figure this out? You needed the continuity. It was one thing to spot a great white, note its location, track its behavior for half an hour. Maybe, if a researcher were especially lucky, he would be able to determine its sex, which requires getting a good look at the shark’s underside—the males have two long claspers. (As one might guess, this is not an easy thing to do.) But things got far more interesting if you actually knew the shark. For instance, if you happened to know that a particular shark was Spotty, a large Rat Packer with a lopsided grin, and you kept track of his appearances over the seasons, you could draw the following conclusion: Spotty had been coming to the Farallones for eleven consecutive years, almost always in the company of Cuttail. And then you might take it one step farther: Did they travel together all the time? Or were they simply sharing some turf? Scot and Peter were hoping to put satellite tags on both sharks next season to find out. Such a discovery would be huge. If these two had been hanging out together for a decade, how could anyone go on thinking of white sharks as rogue assassins, the ocean’s killing machines? Rather, they’d be animals with intelligence enough to choose their friends, and to keep them close by.
Prying secrets from the great white shark wasn’t a job for dilettantes; it required a rigorous system that extended all the way down to a dress code. The Farallones were hard on a person’s wardrobe. Clothes got covered in mud and blood and bird shit, whipped with salt water, fog, and rain. Everyone on the island wore heavy work pants and the kind of footwear one might select for hacking through the Congolese jungle; to this Scot added a jacket, a hoodie that he kept cinched around his head whenever he was outside, and polarized sunglasses that covered half of his face. Underneath the sunglasses, Scot’s eyes were ice blue, with the intensity of lasers.
I looked down over the backside of the peak. A misstep in any direction would result in substantial air time before landing on the spiky granite below. The island seemed to be made of six-dimensional rock, striated by a million tiny crevices and fissures casting disco ball shadows in every direction. It was rock as imagined by a cubist on peyote, a mad jumble of stone veined by seawater and runneled with elemental abuse. The whole place was pocked with caves and holes and long twisted passages that led to other long twisted passages. During big storms the island actually vibrated and hummed, making what frightened visitors often described as a “moaning noise.”
DURING THE FIRST FEW YEARS HE WAS UP HERE, SCOT’S SHARKWATCH shift often lasted for twelve hours straight. He bought a heap of photo equipment for the project, paying for it himself, and the lighthouse bristled with telephoto lenses. Launching the Dinner Plate was dicey when the water was rough, and the water was almost always rough, so until 1992, when they got a bigger boat (fourteen feet!), the lighthouse was the best place for viewing the attacks. Spending whole days at the light—standing on concrete, at the mercy of the weather—was hard on his legs, and sometimes on his psyche, but the vigil had its rewards.
During the long waits between shark attacks there was always something amazing to see—a pod of dolphins cruising by, or a squadron of whales breaching and spouting. Sometimes a fantastically rare bird would put in an appearance, wildly off course in its migration. The Farallones were famous for these sightings, and they happened regularly, especially during the fall. Birds that ought to be at the North Pole or winging over the Serengeti would instead blunder their way down to the lighthouse or land on one of the three small trees on the island. Red-flanked bluetails and Eurasian wigeons and Xantus’ murrelets—they all showed up here eventually. Once, Scot watched as an African pink-backed pelican touched down in the middle of a flock of standard-issue brown pelicans, looking like an exotic stuffed toy that had fallen from the sky.
The solitude, the long, dramatic views, the challenge of the task—it all suited him. Scot was not a big talker. He appreciated routines. And though he got along well with people, he also liked to be alone. In Scot’s ideal life, all of the hustle and commerce, frantic movement and paperwork stayed so far off his personal horizon that he would never even have to see it, much less become caught in its tentacles.
As a kid, he was crazy about fish. Scot would watch people angling off the Tiburon seawall for hours, hoping for a glimpse of whatever they caught. There was something about seeing a fish flashing through the water that seemed magical, like finding a piece of hidden treasure. One day he was out on a fishing boat when someone landed a small leopard shark. The creature was burnished bronze and silver with a catlike face, perfectly symmetrical spots, and a sinuous elegance. Scot was instantly struck by its beauty. The leopard shark didn’t flop around in a panic; it moved straight across the deck like an alligator, with an air of self-possession. That image never left his mind.
He knew then that what he really wanted to do was to study sharks. But more important, he wanted to study them in their element. That, he thought, was the only way you could ever understand them. Forget about sitting at a desk writing grant applications or leaning over the computer plotting numbers on a graph. Trying to figure out the life of an animal by staring at a screen struck him as futile. For a time he worked as a deckhand on local fishing boats, a job that was great for viewing marine life but not so great for getting his foot in the door as a biologist. Scot realized quickly that advanced shark access required at least one college degree, but he had struggled with school in the past and worried that he was dyslexic. Eventually, he found a school called World College West that wasn’t afraid to try things differently. Scot supplemented its new age approach with marine biology courses at the nearby College of Marin, where he hooked up with a gifted teacher named Gordon Chan and realized, for the first time, that he actually loved to learn.
His education extended to a bird census in Alaska, the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, and six months in Kathmandu, where he lived with a Nepali family and learned to speak the language. Back in Marin, his homework included intercepting the flatbed trucks of fishermen as they cruised the streets of Point Reyes, proudly hauling the bodies of great white sharks that had died in their halibut nets. When the sharks were butchered, he asked for—and received—the surplus parts, and then he and Gordon Chan would dissect them, trying to figure out how it all fit together.
In the field, Scot’s curiosity, dexterity, and unorthodox science background sparked innovations like the decoys, the pole cameras, and the video surfboard. He was determined to come up with newer, more effective ways to spy on this community of sharks. Other great white shark researchers had come and gone at the Farallones, doing interesting work, just not staying very long. And not everyone is suited to life on an isolated set of rocks in the Pacific. In order to make it on this island, a researcher had to be hearty, adaptable, and emotionally together, with a deep sense of respect. Scot was all that. And more than anyone else, he seemed able to think like a shark.
Even the Cousteaus couldn’t hack it. In October 1986, Jean Michel Cousteau and his crew steamed into the Farallones aboard a 103-foot-long boat called the Alcyone and promptly began to shower the place with blood and guts to chum for sharks. They anchored off East Landing for several days. Peter had received instructions from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to accommodate them in any possible way, and he stood by on Southeast Farallon for their call. They never radioed the island. On th
eir third day, he watched from shore as two big, bloody killfests took place less than one hundred yards from the Alcyone’s bow. He decided to launch the Dinner Plate, to go out and tell them that they were missing the action. Pulling alongside the ship, he hollered a greeting, but no one responded. He couldn’t see a soul from the water, so he drove around to the stern and peered onto the deck. It was a bright autumn day, and the entire Cousteau crew was sunbathing, clad in bikini briefs. They looked up from their sun reflectors with irritation. One man waved him away, saying, “Yes, yes. We will call you later.”
Afterward, in a book titled Cousteau’s Great White Shark, Jean Michel bitterly recounted his time at the islands: “We were equipped with cameras and an antishark cage…but we did not see even a single dorsal fin. When gallons of fish and animal blood failed to lure great whites during the Farallon expedition, the Cousteau team began to question the abundance of sharks in the area.”
Cousteau’s empire aside, no matter how many dorsal fins ring these islands, the world of professional shark research remained brutally competitive. There weren’t enough jobs. There wasn’t enough funding or enough credit. And clearly there weren’t enough study subjects to go around. Scot had visited the great white shark hubs at South Africa’s Seal Island and Guadalupe Island off Baja, and both areas had their disadvantages when compared with the Farallones. The waters surrounding Seal Island were heavily trafficked by white sharks, but the animals were dispersed over a much larger area, making them harder to study. Also, behemoth Sisters were unheard of. Likewise, at Mexico’s Guadalupe Island, many of the sharks ran small. More problematic for research, though, was the fact that Guadalupe was a wild free-for-all involving freeways of chum and no limit to the number of operators that can dunk a cage in the water. These sharks, in Scot’s view, were so tourist-addled that they swam toward the boats in anticipation of food the moment they heard the anchors being lowered. And in Australia, a location previously synonymous with great whites, the populations were fading quickly, despite the animal’s protected status.
You could run your finger across a map of the world, stopping at every location where white sharks are found, and you’d never come close to the kind of perfect research arrangement provided by the Farallones. Scot and Peter had the ultimate spot, and they were proprietary about it with good reason. They were the ones who’d put in the time.
Standing at the lighthouse being blasted by wind and grit, I doubted that I could spend the equivalent of several years of my life up here. Sharkwatch was demanding, and to me, a twelve-hour shift exceeded the bounds of duty—it was an act of devotion. I said as much to Scot. He nodded. “White sharks require patience,” he said, scoping the water. “Pete and I are very patient.” Suddenly, his eyes turned glacial. He clicked on his radio. “The man has arrived,” he announced, in a voice an octave lower than his regular tone. For a second I thought he was talking about a shark, but then I followed his gaze, east toward San Francisco, and I saw a boat emerging over the horizon, heading directly for us. It was still only a speck. I could barely make out a handful of figures dotting its deck through my binoculars, but Scot knew exactly who it was. It was the outside world, pressing in.
“ATTENTION ADRENALINE JUNKIES! THE WORLD’S BEST SPOT FOR SHARK diving is just minutes from Fisherman’s Wharf,” trumpeted the October 2002 headline in Men’s Journal magazine. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to make money on the Farallon sharks. That person was Lawrence Groth, thirty-six, the founder and president of Great White Adventures, a company specializing in great white shark encounters. As his website pointed out, Groth “pioneered the world’s first cage-diving operation at the Farallones that manages an 86-percent rate without the use of chum!” Every morning during shark season, weather permitting, Great White Adventures arrived with six divers, each of whom was paying $775 to be there.
The economic incentive was clear. To me, what was surprising wasn’t that Groth’s operation was here, but rather that there weren’t ten Groths plowing their way out every morning, one after the other, in successively larger boats. But there are good reasons why cage diving hasn’t caught on at the Farallones. The weather, as mentioned, is often nasty; the water temperature hovers around fifty-two degrees. Underwater visibility is a scant fifteen feet—and that’s on a good day. This is a far cry from the warm, clear waters off Baja or Cape Town. Generally, the divers get tossed around like dice in a cup.
Over the years, numerous other cage-diving outfits had tried—and failed—to make it. In fact, none of them lasted longer than a week or two. Groth, a compact, sturdily built guy with a lavish mustache, was more persistent and had deeper pockets than any of his predecessors. Growing up in Hayward, California, he’d heard tales about the sharky Farallones since childhood. When he finally made it out to see for himself, in 1998, a shark breached so close to his boat that everyone on board got drenched. He was hooked.
Groth started his business in 1999, and he started it big—purchasing a thirty-two-foot dive boat called the Patriot, state-of-the-art aluminum cages, and hiring an experienced crew. When asked by a newspaper reporter why he’d invested more than a hundred thousand dollars to set up another cage-diving operation in the spot where so many before him had given up, he answered, “I wanted to see great whites. And I think other people should see them, too. It’s an incredible creature, and it’s right here in our backyard.”
He had been ramping up his operation ever since, upgrading his boat, increasing the number of trips he made, advertising in places like Shark Diver magazine, investing in an elaborate website, and promoting Great White Adventures in the press. Demand appeared to be strong, and he wasn’t having trouble finding a clientele who wanted to take their chances in these turbulent conditions. People were coming from as far away as Japan.
Nature didn’t always cooperate with the plan, however. There were days when the cage divers would witness something truly memorable, like multiple sharks feeding or a breach near their boat. But these were the exception, and on a typical day, a client paying the better part of a g-note might see the blurry outline of a shark pass by the cage—if there wasn’t too much plankton clogging up the visibility. And then there were the days when they struck out entirely, when the sharks stayed hidden and all the shivering divers saw from their cage was a murky emerald void.
The Patriot usually chose to anchor in Mirounga Bay or off East Landing. Though these areas were undeniably hot spots, from either position at least two-thirds of the water around Southeast Farallon was effectively invisible to them. A whole conga line of sharks could be cavorting on the northwest side of the island, off Sugarloaf or Indian Head or Fisherman’s Bay or West End or Maintop, and they’d never know it. As a result, Groth wanted badly to “work with” Scot and Peter; having close ties to them would mean hearing the lighthouse radio down the attacks, among other things. Clearly, this would be an advantageous relationship for the cage divers.
There was only one problem: Scot and Peter didn’t want anything to do with them. The relationship between the Shark Project and Great White Adventures started off badly and deteriorated from there. The first time Peter encountered the Patriot, Groth was chumming, trailing a slick of mashed-up fish parts and blood. Chumming at the Farallones was heavily frowned upon; on a scale of bad behavior it ranked up there with chain-smoking in someone’s emphysema tent. Peter launched the whaler and drove out to put a stop to it. In response, Groth handed him a letter written by a lawyer in Washington, D.C., asserting their legal right to chum in the island waters.
Shortly thereafter, Groth did stop chumming. Although he acknowledged that the practice was unpopular with the biologists, there may have been another reason for his sudden change of heart. “It didn’t work,” he noted in a September 2000 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. By that time, Groth and his partner had made Peter and Scot an offer: In exchange for providing information on the whereabouts of the sharks, the Patriot would “protect” them from other, le
ss sensitive cage-diving operations. To Scot and Peter’s way of thinking, it was extortion. They declined.
For the rest of the 2000 shark season, things were frosty on the water. When the Patriot began towing seal-shaped decoys around the island, the biologists accused Groth of building them out of heavy lumber that could break the sharks’ teeth. In return, Groth accused Scot and Peter of selling access to the island, and of ramming into feeding sharks with the whaler, sending a videotape that allegedly recorded this to a local television reporter.
The politics became ugly. With the Point Reyes Bird Observatory’s backing, Peter lobbied for rules to limit recreational activities in the area. As things stood, there was nothing on the books to prevent a fleet of pleasure boats from motoring out to the islands on any given day with a six-pack and a surfboard, trying to tease the sharks into an appearance. “Before the shark watching business gets out of control at the Farallones as it has in Australia and South Africa (completely ruining studies at other research sites), we wish to petition the sanctuary for regulatory amendments protecting the sharks and allowing for the continuation of our research,” Peter wrote in a brief to the director of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.
Furious, Groth argued that this represented “restraint of trade” and “tortious business interference.” There was talk of lawsuits, accusations of libel. In September 2001 Groth offered “the olive branch one last time,” urging the biologists to accept his partnership deal.
“They’re bad news,” Scot said in a May 2001 newspaper interview. During the 2000 season, he felt, the cage divers had completely disrupted the Shark Project’s work; in one run of seven feeding events, they’d driven away the sharks at three of them. Groth saw things differently. He envisioned the Patriot as a satellite observation base that could contribute additional data, claiming to have constructed a remote-operated video platform that could film the sharks feeding from afar. This device, which he’d named the GEO (Groth Eco Observer), had, to his mind, “positive research applications.”
