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

by Casey, Susan

  As the Flying Fish broncoed through the surf, the vast grocery supplies swayed and clinked on the stern deck. I lurched my way up to the wheelhouse, where Guiles and Dave were drinking coffee and talking shop. Earlier, I’d learned that the Flying Fish was the boat that released Sandy, the captive shark, back in the eighties. I asked Guiles about the trip.

  “That,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a big circus.” His boat had been jammed with media people and aquarium people and many cases of beer, and Sandy had been so out of it, there was some concern that she was dead. Guiles himself had certainly thought so. “I picked her up right by the head, and we stuffed a bilge pump in her mouth so the water would flow over her gills. Then all of a sudden she tried to bite me. She was plenty alive.” When they slid Sandy into the water, she’d dropped like a stone, arrowing straight down in a stupor, and smacking into an underwater cameraman who’d jumped in to document the release, before pulling herself together and shooting away. TV cameras whirred topside. “And then at eleven thirty that night, after the news, my insurance company called.” The representative made it exceptionally clear that, in the future, should Captain Guiles decide to host live great white sharks aboard the Flying Fish, he could consider himself just slightly less insurable than the space shuttle.

  We were approaching the outer waters of the Farallones, an area where white sharks were often encountered swimming lazily along the surface, and where Guiles had once even hit one. He described the time a sixteen-footer had porpoised alongside Flying Fish at railing height, at least six feet above the surface, trying to rip salmon off fishing lines and soaking the passengers: “Shark was so close I could’ve slapped him right in the face.” Another time, fishing near Stinson Beach, a popular swimming spot in Marin, he’d seen two white sharks silhouetted in the surf right near the shore, less than ten yards from a group of boogie boarders. Even so, in his opinion, it was the makos who were the true badasses of the shark world. “Extremely aggressive. Nasty as hell. Makes a white shark look silly.” He picked up the radio and tuned it to channel 80, the island’s working frequency. “Peter, Farallon Island, Peter, Farallon Island, Flying Fish, over,” he said.

  Peter answered immediately. “Roger, Flying Fish, Farallones. Good morning.”

  “You guys order a pizza to go?” Guiles said, cackling. “Well you’re gonna have to wait awhile. It’s really rolling. We should be there in about an hour.”

  He clicked off the radio and turned to me. “You know what the most dangerous thing is out here?” he said. “Not the sharks. The weather.” He described being caught out on the far side of the islands when thirty-foot swells rose up and barely making it back in one piece, though the weather had been lovely when he’d left the harbor that morning. And by all accounts, this wasn’t an unusual experience.

  As if on cue, the Farallones rose on the horizon, looking terrible and beautiful. By the time we reached the East Landing buoy, Peter was already waiting in the whaler; there was a shark attack under way over by Saddle Rock. I looked and could see the clutch of gulls. There was no time for my usual anxiety about clambering between boats; I jumped from the Flying Fish into the whaler. As we blasted over, I settled into the spot I liked next to the steering console, where it was possible to grip the rails on both sides. Peter grinned at me from under his baseball cap.

  We floated in the slick, watching a tattered hunk of elephant seal bob up and down with no apparent takers. It seemed the sharks had come and gone already, although Peter claimed that often, just when you thought an attack was over, the second string moved in to polish off any remains. One time he’d been watching a lone scrap of seal just like this one for twenty minutes, when he’d noticed a tag attached to what was left of its flipper and reached over the side to make the ID. At that exact moment, a shark emerged from below and snatched the seal right out of his hand, its jaws less than a foot away, its eye rolled back and ghostly white.

  There were several large boils around the seal but no probing dorsal fins, and then Just Imagine arrived from the north and glided toward us, looking somewhat majestic. This was a serious boat. Its long hull was navy blue with a white deck, its sails were furled and smartly secured by marine-blue tarps. On deck, waving, stood a tall, beefy guy with thick glasses and a mat of gray hair, unshaven and blissed out–looking in a worn purple T-shirt, chinos, and a crinkled sun hat. We decided to abandon the carcass and lead Just Imagine to its anchorage. Peter yelled directions to Tom and said that we’d meet him over in Fisherman’s Bay. In the background I could see the Flying Fish idling, waiting to pick up the yacht’s crew. Dave was leaning over the stern, spooling out the fishing lines.

  In Fisherman’s Bay, we pulled up beside the sailboat and said our hellos. Along with Tom there were now two more men on deck, Bob and Brian, who also had gray, desert island hair. Tom said they needed an hour to clean up the cabin and pack their things. They all looked scruffy and contented, and I felt my heart sink a bit at the news that the three of them had been living on the boat for two weeks and had not yet started to clean.

  As Peter and I pulled away from Just Imagine, intending to cruise around the island while we waited, Superfish arrived at the mouth of the bay with Mick at the wheel and a full house of whale watchers gathered at the stern. All the passengers were squeezed along the port-side railing, watching us, and the boat listed dramatically. Kevin, the marine biologist, was on board, and we drove over to pick him up. He was a Stanford Ph.D. candidate who specialized in sharks, especially great whites, and he worked for Dr. Block.

  The crowd parted to let Kevin climb over the edge. He passed two hard-sided equipment cases down to Peter, and then jumped lightly from Superfish into the whaler with the kind of surefooted ease that suggested he had maybe been born on a boat. He was a striking person, in his early thirties and athletically built, with jet-black hair and dark eyes and a smile that could light up a small midwestern city. As he reached up to grab his duffel bag from Mick, I noticed that all the muscles in his forearm were sharply defined.

  We quickly made introductions, and Kevin told Peter that he’d brought six tags and another six were on their way. Kevin had just returned from Alaska, where he’d been tagging salmon sharks, a bulldoggish cousin of the great white that thrived in cold water, razoring its way through schools of salmon. Before that he’d been in Costa Rica, attempting to tag leatherback turtles as they crawled onto the beaches to dig their nests. And he’d spent July in Southern California working with a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium that was attempting to capture a baby great white shark for possible exhibit. The aquarium had earmarked $1.2 million to accomplish this—the shark was intended to be the institution’s “mascot.”

  According to Kevin, the aquarium was sensitive to the dismal history of captive white sharks and determined not to make any of the same mistakes. The project had been planned with military precision and advised by eminent scientists. Monterey Bay was perhaps the most reputable aquarium in the world, and if any group could successfully present a great white shark to the public, they could. As I thought about it, I realized that I liked the idea of people getting to see one of these fish at close range. Though there’s something fierce and romantic in the notion of one last untamed animal, after seeing a great white you could never think that we’d be better off without them. But it would take a combination of skill and luck to pull this off without another dead shark lying at the bottom of a tank. For five weeks Kevin and the rest of the team had cruised around near the Channel Islands, where baby white sharks were known to gather at this time of the year. Three days before the project’s end, they’d retrieved a five-foot female who had gotten tangled in a halibut gill net. She was transferred into a five-million-gallon pen in the ocean, where she was tagged and later observed eating some salmon. It all seemed promising, the shark was perfect, but the lease on the tuna pen ran out and they ended up releasing her rather than attempting to move her to Monterey before conditions were right. (The plan had been to ke
ep shrinking the size of the holding area until it approximated the million-gallon aquarium tank.)

  Actually, California had been breaking out in white shark happenings all summer. On August 24, Deborah Franzman, a fifty-year-old teacher who counted swimming with seals among her hobbies, was fatally attacked by a sixteen-foot great white at Avila Beach, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles. It had been nine years since a white shark killed someone in California, and the shark message boards and chat rooms buzzed. Some thought Franzman had been courting danger. “Swimming with seals? Why didn’t she just put a dinner bell around her neck!” wrote one member before being chastised for insensitivity by fellow shark enthusiasts.

  Meanwhile, a stone’s throw down the coast, three great white sharks had congregated near the San Onofre nuclear plant and were photographed from news helicopters and by pilots from nearby Camp Pendleton every day for a month. After numerous sightings and subsequent beach closures, the sharks became such local fixtures that they were given the names Sparky, Fluffy, and Archie. As word of the trio’s persistent presence spread, sightseers thronged the windswept beach. “We could have went to any beach in San Clemente, but I thought it would be fun to maybe see someone get bit or chased by a shark,” one visitor explained to the local press. Others had asked the park rangers, “What time do the sharks appear?” When a fourth shark had shown up, it seemed prudent to cancel the annual Labor Day surfing competition. No one could figure out why Fluffy, Sparky, and Archie were loitering around this particular spot, until city officials admitted that they had buried a forty-foot fin whale at this beach two years ago.

  Closer to home, in August, Peter had been startled to receive email queries from a group of open-water swimmers planning a relay from Southeast Farallon to the Golden Gate Bridge on September 20. As a precaution, they said, they would be wearing an electronic repellent device called the “Shark Shield,” and what were his thoughts about this? “I discourage this idea,” Peter hastily emailed in response. “In September the sharks are just back from the mid-Pacific and they’re hungry. I don’t think the electronic wrist watches would be effective given the white shark’s hunting strategy of rushing up from the depths.” Recounting the story to me, Peter scoffed. “So the shark’s thinking, ‘Hmmm, I don’t like this noise,’ but at that point it’s hauling ass upward at forty miles per hour. What’s it gonna do? Make a U-turn?”

  The race, which would have taken place yesterday, had been canceled when the escort boat’s insurance company balked. In fact, no coverage could be had for any boat participating in this competition, nor for any part of the swim, period. The notion that this event had almost taken place disturbed me so much that I’d phoned one of the organizers, a seventy-year-old man named Joe Oakes who also ran a swimming race called “Escape from Alcatraz.” Despite Peter’s warnings, he remained undeterred. I’d mentioned that I was a swimmer myself and that while I certainly understood the allure of open water, given what I’d seen out there I really couldn’t imagine diving in at East Landing and stroking away, particularly in the fall. Oakes laughed. “There are always sharks,” he said in a dismissive voice. He had complete faith in the repellent device, likening its effect to a brisk whack on the animal’s snout. “They don’t like that one bit. Hey, do you want to be on the relay? Get us a boat, and you’ve got yourself a team.”

  AN HOUR LATER, PETER, KEVIN, AND I BOARDED JUST IMAGINE, TYING the whaler alongside. I realized immediately that it was even harder to climb between pitching boats of wildly varying sizes when they were tied together. Fingers mashed between the railings would fare about as well as a caterpillar clapped between two blocks of cement. Poor timing on the swells could easily result in hang time from Just Imagine’s railing or, worse, falling between the boats as they smacked against each other.

  The sailboat was roomy but hard-used, with fore and aft bunks, a pocket kitchen, a semicircular dining banquette, and, surprisingly, a bathroom with a full-size shower. Overall, it looked nothing like the pictures of yachts you see in travel magazines, the ones where assorted Italian magnates and an accompanying herd of fashion models are lounging around on deck drinking Cristal and wearing Pucci sarongs. Just Imagine was to glamour yachts what cargo planes were to Lear jets, what Clydesdales were to Arabians. Its decor listed heavily toward seventies-era rec room—acres of shellacked knotty pine, dusty bottles of no-name brandy, a stained glass porthole, and, in the center of the floor, a groovy bas-relief carving of a woman wearing nothing but long hair.

  Unfortunately, Tom explained, on the trip down from Seattle they had encountered some bad weather and they had jibed and, well, part of the starboard side had been ripped off. We looked: yellow twine and duct tape crisscrossed an area once occupied by a railing. “Best not to walk on that side,” he said. Also, Tom mentioned offhandedly, the refrigerator had gone down, and the plumbing did not quite seem to be working either. I stared at him. “What do you mean the plumbing doesn’t work?” I felt panic. “Well, just now I tried to flush the toilet, but there was this backwash…” He opened a cabinet and pumped a long lever hopefully. “See, there’s no vacuum—hey! What do you know! It’s working!” Something gurgled ominously in the head, followed by a vicious blurping noise. “So there is plumbing?” I confirmed. “I guess there is! That’s cool!” he said, with surprise in his voice. I glanced at Peter and Kevin. I supposed I could drink warm beer and I’d have to donate most of my groceries to the island crew, but plumbing seemed non-negotiable.

  I stood off to the side while everyone else attempted to create a mooring setup that would stay secured for the duration. The process was anything but simple: Should the bow face north or south? How far should the sailboat be from the buoy in the middle of the bay? What about the anchor? How many ropes? It went on. Peter and Kevin climbed into the whaler, untied it, and idled beside us so they could ferry the ropes to the buoy, while Tom and Bob argued about where Just Imagine should lie. The spot they chose was quite far offshore, straddling the mouth of the bay. It was obvious that whatever shelter the cove offered would be next to useless in this spot, especially in the event of northwest winds (which happened to be the prevailing winds). This anchorage also aligned Just Imagine with a gap between Sugarloaf and Arch Rock, so that westerly gusts would come barreling through at a ninety-degree angle to the boat, broadsiding it. Peter noticed this immediately and asked if the yacht shouldn’t be moved in slightly, but Tom wanted to hook the anchor on a reef edge that traversed the area. He crouched at the bow holding the windlass, a device that lowers and raises the anchor. Slowly, the chain paid out. Tom spoke to Just Imagine as he was doing this, and after several minutes of encouragement, he suddenly yelled, “Oh no, oh no, OH NO, GODDAMMIT!”

  “What’s wrong?!” I asked, alarmed.

  “Oh, I thought for a second there I lost the anchor,” he said, looking relieved. “But I caught it just in time. That wouldn’t have been pretty.”

  Given that Just Imagine was now more than two hundred yards from the buoy, Peter and Kevin had to tie four ropes together to reach it. This, of course, made for three weak links, and as a precaution they looped another set of ropes along with the first. When they reboarded, I could tell they were startled by the way that the yacht was now secured on both ends—ropes off the stern, anchor chain off the bow. Tying a boat up this way, stretched like a hammock, is not usually recommended as it prevents the boat from tracking with the wind, and sure enough, even though the gusts had died down and right now there was really nothing but a breeze, Just Imagine began to buck from side to side. Peter and Kevin stood at the stern with their arms crossed, looking perturbed. They were convinced that if the wind picked up there might be real trouble, but Tom and Bob, who had strong opinions about the matter, were adamant.

  We climbed down the wooden ladder into the cabin to get a lesson in how things worked. As we moved through the interior, Tom spent a long time rhapsodizing on the craftsmanship of the woodwork, fondling objects he found squirreled away inside cubby
holes, and giving us a thorough inventory of the moldering food that was left over from the Seattle trip. The contents of the broken fridge had been spoiling for more than a week. I couldn’t wait to throw the rotten lunchmeat over the side, see what came along to check it out.

  He glossed quickly over the instrument panels, which looked like something you might encounter at NASA mission control. Colored switches, lights, gauges, keys, and dials lined the wall nearest the hatch. There was talk of which knobs to turn and which buttons never to touch, which dials should be monitored and which warning lights could be ignored. He explained the workings of the arcane 12-volt electrical system in about twenty words, mentioning offhandedly that if an earsplitting buzzer went off, as it was sometimes apt to do, we should shut down everything immediately, call him, and maybe go ashore. Peter took notes. I was suddenly very tired and distracted, catching only odd snatches of instruction.

  Moving to the fore, Tom opened a wood-paneled drawer of documents and maps, explaining that this was where he kept Just Imagine’s important papers. Joking, I noted that these, then, were the things we’d need when we took the yacht to South America. Tom wheeled around to look at me, his face hard, the laid-back demeanor nowhere in evidence. “I’d have the police after you so fast,” he said, in the low, measured voice of someone completely unamused. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then, noticing the tension, we all laughed uneasily. Clearly, he did not think my joke was that funny. Surely though, he couldn’t think I was serious. In that split second, I’d seen something akin to panic in Tom’s eyes. Here he was, explaining the ins and outs of his precious boat to a group of strangers: how to run the engine, what to do and not do with the propane valve, how to unscrew the special handmade rack that held the dried fruit. And then he would be sailing in the opposite direction, leaving us in charge, having moored his baby in one of the most notoriously dangerous marine spots on Earth.