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

by Casey, Susan

  Tipfin was the only tagged shark, however, who went that far west. When the other satellite-tagged sharks left the Farallones, they all swam southwest, to a patch of ocean located approximately 1,500 miles off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico. They remained there for as long as eight months, indicating that this remote place is where they spend much of their lives. Though the gathering spot lacks seamounts or islands or any other notable features, its significance is surely anything but random, and not just among the Farallon set. White sharks tagged at Guadalupe Island and elsewhere in California headed straight to the same area. Scot had long suspected that something unusual was going on when they weren’t at the Farallones; he’d noticed that by the time the sharks disappeared in December they had managed to fatten themselves up, but when they returned the following autumn they were much thinner, sometimes unrecognizably so. Often they were trailing remoras, small pilot fish that are found in more southerly waters. The epic trip described by the tags explained the where, but not the big mystery: why? “So the question is,” Scot said, leaning in and raising his eyebrows dramatically. “What the hell are they doing out there?”

  Clearly the sharks weren’t wasting energy heading out into the wild blue yonder for no good reason. Feeding? Pupping? Perhaps, but neither of those theories quite fit. Chasing down seals in the open ocean didn’t make sense in terms of energy expenditure; and the likelihood that the region served as a kind of nursery for baby white sharks was diminished by the presence of so many males. Scot and Peter had the beginnings of an idea, one that couldn’t be proved yet but was captivating nonetheless: that this gathering spot might be the great white’s ancestral mating ground, a destination with ancient significance that is roadmapped into the sharks’ DNA.

  Whatever the reason for this hot spot, the tags had done their work. Identifying the region was the first step to protecting it. Findings from the tagged sharks had recently been published in the prestigious journal Nature, with Peter and Scot among the authors. Central to the discoveries was a marine scientist named Barbara Block. Block, a MacArthur fellow and by reputation a force of nature herself, had helped pioneer the pop-off satellite tags and planned to affix four thousand of these and other devices not only to sharks but also to sea turtles, squid, albatross, elephant seals, and whales, as well as tuna and other predatory fish. She was one of the leaders on a project known as TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Pelagics), a twenty-million-dollar study aimed at discovering how marine animals journeyed through the Pacific, where they traveled to eat and mate and breed. These creatures spent their lives jetting through the sea, across routes and byways and submarine plains that only they knew about, and for the most part, the only time they were glimpsed was when they ventured close to shore.

  TOPP, in turn, was part of a billion-dollar study known as the Census of Marine Life that aimed to spend the next decade determining what actually lived in the world’s seas, and what kinds of animals were likely to live there in the future, given the way things were going. The census was massively ambitious, breathtakingly difficult—and long overdue. “We haven’t spent enough time exploring our own planet,” Block pointed out on her website.

  High-powered, well-funded, politically connected, and world-renowned, Block and her team were dream collaborators for the Shark Project. She was encouraged by the fact that twenty-two great whites had been tagged in only four seasons at the Farallones and that, in most cases, the animal’s history (and gender) was known. Next September, she intended to send out at least two dozen tags. A major goal for the 2003 season was to tag some Sisters; to date all but two of the jewelry-wearing sharks were Rat Packers.

  I could see that Scot and Peter were excited at the prospect of tagging so many sharks, but a little worried about how they’d manage to do it. Especially now. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the Farallones; requests for access were flooding in from the media. The latest one proposed that Brad Pitt, rumored to be fascinated by great white sharks, come out to host a wildlife special. (Fish and Wildlife authorities vetoed the idea immediately.)

  As our plates were being cleared, the bartender emerged from behind the bar and walked over to our table. He was a dark-haired bear of a guy in an apron, holding a bottle of pinot noir, and he must have caught the BBC documentary that had entranced me. Pointing to Scot, he said, “You’re the guy with Stumpy!”

  Scot nodded. He was used to this. “Yeah, I’m that guy.” He gestured toward Peter: “He’s the other guy.”

  “How is Stumpy?” the bartender asked, pouring us a round on the house.

  “Ah, we haven’t seen her in a while,” Scot said. “It’s sad.” I wondered what he hated more: the unexplained absence of his favorite shark, or having to admit she was gone to people like the bartender, for whom Stumpy was merely a myth, a folk hero disguised as a fish.

  The bartender, it turned out, had a shark story of his own. He was a surfer, he explained, and he’d recently had an encounter with “the man in the gray suit” near the Bolinas channel. “I was out there by myself in the morning. All the birds disappeared. It got deathly quiet. I started looking around, and all of a sudden this submarine came by me.”

  Scot smiled knowingly. “So you got out…”

  “I was outta there so fast. I hit the sand and I was still paddling.”

  Peter had a different perspective. “I actually want to see one when I’m surfing. I’d want to know who it was, though.” I envisioned him sitting on his board trying to make out the shark’s scar pattern—Was it ZZ Top? Or Two Scratches?—while around him other surfers fled the scene.

  Scot shook his head and laughed. He leaned toward me and stage-whispered: “Peter’s crazy.” He paused. At one of the tables in the dining room, a drunken chorus of “Happy Birthday” broke out. “Sure would be nice to see the old stump-tailed girl again,” he added, staring at the bottom of his glass.

  That feeling of longing—for a person, a place, or, in this case, a shark—was something I understood. It could smack you, wavelike, delivering actual, physical, pain. It could sneak up on you as a tiny catch somewhere near the middle of your throat. Or it could tug at you with the force of gravity, like a magnetic attraction that was impossible to shake off. Right now, after a few hours of Farallon news and shark updates and big plans for next season, after hearing about all the action while being far removed from it, I wanted to be closer. This was undeniably greedy; I’d already been out there twice, which was two more times than anyone else got to go. Why couldn’t I just be happy with that?

  Perhaps it was as simple as this: At the Farallones, encounters with the rare and the unusual—and even the miraculous—were common. You had the sense that every possibility was still open, even the ones that were unreasonable to hope for. Anything could happen. It was an upside-down place where every normal assumption was challenged, a parallel universe where Peter, Scot, and Stumpy became celebrities and Brad Pitt was told to stay home.

  Somewhere along the line, my desire to return had become a need. And although I didn’t fully understand it, I was surprised by the force of the urge. I wasn’t ready to ask just yet, but sitting in the Station House bar, a docket of Scot’s shark photographs on my lap, I vowed to myself: I’m going back.

  Chapter 4

  Rest assured that this gull asks only two questions of any living thing: First, “Am I hungry?” (Answer: yes.) Second, “Can I get away with it?” (Answer: I’ll try.)

  —WILLIAM LEON DAWSON, BIRDS OF CALIFORNIA, 1923

  AUGUST 3–7, 2003

  Kingfish was a handsome boat, and I loved her on sight. She floated in the glassy dawn water of the Sausalito Harbor, all fresh green paint and buffed decks and gleaming brass—thirty-seven feet of immaculate systems, bobbing peaceably in her slip. Tony Badger, the skipper, tall, silver-haired, and natty in a black beret, and his petite brunette wife, Margaret, stood on deck to welcome me as I walked down the dock pushing a wheelbarrowful of groceries. I knew there was a precise nautical term for the type of bo
at Kingfish was, but I couldn’t think of it. Whatever. In about five hours I would be back at the Farallones.

  This time it was official. I’d proposed to write a series of longer articles about the islands and had spoken at length with Joelle Buffa, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s manager of the refuge. Buffa is whip smart and a devoted guardian of the place, as well as a working biologist specializing in birds. When the generator exploded and the power went out and the plumbing needed to be replaced entirely and the coast guard suddenly decided that, after forty years, they were not going to deliver water anymore—Buffa was the one who got the call and had to figure out a way to fix the problem. Entertaining visitors was not high on her priority list. And considering the mugging that the wildlife took for so long at human hands, it was both defensible and easy for her to turn every applicant down cold. But she didn’t give me a flat-out no when I first approached her, so I had flown in for a meeting at her office near Palo Alto. She was small, sharply pretty, and all business in a crisp U.S. Fish and Wildlife uniform, and she had an amazing set of eyes: jade-colored with hazel starbursts in the irises. As Buffa looked me over with the x-ray stare of a customs interrogator, I pled my case. I wheedled and cajoled. I practically begged. And in the end, she granted me one of the only weeklong permits that had ever been awarded; it came, not surprisingly, with many conditions attached. Condition number one: I was to choose a week that did not fall during shark season.

  I had expected this. As a result of the power struggles and regulatory wrangling of these past two years, the Shark Project had attracted a surfeit of press attention, not all of it positive. In print and on TV, Groth had accused Peter and Scot of treating the island waters as a “private playground,” and of attempting to bar public access. Never mind that this wasn’t true—anyone could visit the Farallones simply by booking a day trip on Superfish. They just wouldn’t get to tramp all over the island, and there was certainly no guarantee that they’d encounter a shark during their one-hour loop. But it sounded outrageous: Who were these arrogant scientists to stiff-arm the American taxpayer, to think they could hog the great white sharks all to themselves? As the feud flared, more requests from the media poured in. Buffa’s only possible response was a blanket rejection: sorry. The few day permits allotted during shark season had been scotched; there were no exceptions.

  Peter’s hands were tied. Unofficial visits were out of the question. Great white research at the Farallones was on probation. My choice was this: I could write about the mating habits of cassin’s auklets, or I could stay in New York.

  I opted for the birds.

  With characteristic optimism Peter had explained that I’d see another side to Southeast Farallon: with all of the breeding seabirds in residence, a couple hundred thousand in the space of a few city blocks, it was an entirely different place. He would be out for a few days during my trip; there was prep work to be done for the fall and he, too, was missing the sharks. The night before, we had met up for drinks in Bolinas. “We’ll go out,” he said. “Drive around. There’ve been some huge, bloody attacks in August.” He took a long pull on his beer and shot me a sly look. “We’ll see someone.”

  THE BADGERS WERE MEMBERS OF THE FARALLON PATROL, A THIRTY-strong flotilla that had been delivering people, supplies, and groceries to and from the island since 1972. This support fleet included powerboats and sailboats of various styles and vintages, all of them spacious enough to accommodate overnight trips. Every two weeks one of the boats would make a run—their role was as critical as the Madrono’s had been in the lighthouse era. Even so, there was no pay involved. Farallon skippers joined the patrol out of a desire for adventure, and for the prestige of association. (Since only badass sailors could really handle the trip, this was an elite crew.) The captains all felt a kinship with the islands.

  When one of them, Ed Kelly, lost his wife to cancer in 2001, he’d spread her ashes in the surrounding waters while making a supply run. Shortly after he’d done this, Peter spotted a shark attack off Shubrick and convinced Kelly to jump into the whaler with him to take a closer look. The shark was a gargantuan Sister with a quarter-moon-shaped scar on her head, and she passed directly under the boat, dwarfing it, like a visitation, like a creature you could only half believe, giving new meaning to the word grace. Peter knew he would recognize this shark if he saw her again. He named her Jane, after Ed Kelly’s wife.

  Peter had coordinated my trip with the Badgers, which was also serving as a supply run of food, mail, and propane. The logistics of shuttling people and supplies to and from the Farallones were devilishly complicated and always involved a chess game with the weather gods. Figuring out who went where, and when, and with whom, and who would buy the groceries and who would be dealing with the garbage coming off the island and who was going to courier the new generator part to the Emeryville Marina at 5 a.m. and hundreds of other details was like trying to untangle something heavily knotted and three-dimensional. Peter seemed to manage it with ease. And the job was crucial: You didn’t want someone who’d been stuck on an island for thirteen weeks left standing in the marina parking lot with five duffel bags of gear, an urgent need for a shower, and no means of transportation. You didn’t want to forget to send groceries to a group of people who’d been down to rice and lettuce for the last several days.

  I shook hands with Tony and Margaret and was introduced to Tony’s sailing partner, John Boyes, who appeared on the dock. John was fit and energetic, clean-cut and square-jawed and shipshape. He, too, wore a black beret cocked on the side of the head. It must be a sailor thing, I figured. Also making the trip were the Badgers’ son-in-law, Pelle, and a PRBO intern named Parvenah, who was riding along so that she could see the islands for the first time. One of the perks of being a patrol captain was permission to come ashore if time and weather permitted, but Kingfish frequently sailed in the roughest conditions, and in all their trips to the Farallones, the Badgers had never made a landing. This morning, however, the weather was placid, and disembarking seemed like a possibility.

  Tony and John hustled around, checking gauges and doing complicated things with ropes. As we pulled out of the marina, Tony delivered a tough-love lecture about what never to do while on Kingfish: where never to stand, how never to walk along the railing, which buttons never to lean against. He spoke in a drill sergeant’s voice, with John occasionally adding his own stern directive. Clearly, this was not their first rodeo. In fact, Tony told me, he had raised his two daughters on a boat this size, and they had sailed the world like a seagoing Swiss Family Robinson.

  Both men stressed that it was critical to watch out for ship traffic as we pulled under the Golden Gate. “If we’re going to hit a boat this is where it will happen,” Tony said grimly, as if this was something that occurred on most days. I could see what he was getting at. A marine layer of fog clung to the water, and even this early there were fishing boats of all sizes buzzing around in every direction, most of them without radar. Thousands of container ships the size of three football fields hauled in and out of this port every year, and they moved at deceptively fast speeds, materializing out of the mist without warning, bearing down on smaller boats like blind locomotives.

  “The San Francisco Bar is the most dangerous stretch of water on the West Coast,” John announced. He explained that the channel was only fifty feet deep in places, the tides inhaled and exhaled at a brisk six knots, and a series of crazy currents cut through it all, running as fast and wild as rivers. When you threw in some swells, the effect was like dipping a spoon into a shallow bowl and whipping it around for a bit. The waves bashed and tumbled over one another, bouncing off the bottom to create a trampoline effect on the surface, and in general making things unpleasant and quite dangerous.

  “They lose about three boats a year in here,” Tony added. I looked out at the water as we passed under the bridge. Gone was the harbor calm of twenty minutes earlier. In its place was a black and roiled ocean, pocked with sudden whitecaps and foam-swept cr
ests.

  It wasn’t just the twenty-seven miles to the Farallones that had kept people away. It was these twenty-seven miles. Tony was right to be vigilant. Others had taken the crossing less seriously, and paid for it. Countless accidents had occurred en route, even more upon arrival. Flipped boats, crushed boats, abandoned boats, swamped boats, boats bashed to slivers by rock—there had been more lost boats at the Farallon Islands than anyone could count. Tricky seas conspired with sudden, poleaxing weather changes to create instant emergencies, and even the most experienced skippers could find themselves caught out. During a two-man race around the islands in the eighties, a catamaran radioed Mayday; during its last transmission someone was heard to scream, “A wave just came through the cabin!” The crew was never found.

  Over the years the coast guard had called often on the marine radio, asking the biologists to be on the alert for missing vessels. On more than one occasion, rescues had been made. One blustery November morning at around 6 a.m., Peter had just come downstairs when he heard a knock at the front door. Since everyone else on the island was upstairs, asleep, this was interesting. On the front stoop two Vietnamese men stood in street clothes, gesticulating wildly. “Boat! Boat! Boat!” was all they could manage in English, but they were clearly upset and they led Peter to Fisherman’s Bay, where a snarling southeaster was pounding their twenty-four-foot skiff to matchsticks on Aulon Rock, also known as the Tit because of its nipple-shaped peak. At the top of the Tit, two other men crouched in a small lee; one of them, an elderly fellow, was clad in an orange bathrobe.