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

by Casey, Susan

  Peter reached into the boat’s glove compartment and pulled out a transistor radio, which he strapped to the railing. The San Francisco Giants were playing the Houston Astros in the National League playoffs, an event that ranked right above surfing in the leisure hierarchy of his mind. And he wasn’t the only baseball fanatic on the island; all of the bird biologists were rabid fans. Yesterday he and Brown, an avid Red Sox fan, had spent a long time on the radio debating the merits of Barry Bonds versus Pedro Martinez with the same eye for detail they brought to the identification of a vagrant oriole or pipit. Perhaps it simply came down to a love of watching small objects whizzing through the sky.

  Peter fiddled with the dial until the sounds of a sports announcer and a roaring crowd boomed out. He picked up a fishing pole and began to untangle the line that was attached to the surfboard. “Listening to baseball and watching for sharks. What could be finer?”

  While waiting for news of attacks, we drifted in the sun with the decoy set out. The board received some halfhearted attention, a few drive-bys, but no one was getting serious enough to bite it or even bump it. The most extreme move was a mild tail flick. Just the fact that they were out there, unseen perhaps, yet always a possibility, thrilled me. But the sharks’ new take-it-or-leave-it attitude troubled Peter. It supported Scot’s theory that the cage divers’ constant use of the decoys was desensitizing them, and that for future research purposes, decoys might not work at all. The sharks’ lack of interest was all the more unusual since it was early in the season, and few of them had managed to kill a seal yet. High tide came and went without an attack.

  As the hours ticked by, more than a dozen fishing boats began to mass off East Landing, resembling a small, itinerant town. This was the Monterey squid fleet. We’d seen them yesterday too. They worked through the nights, shining powerful lights that lured squid to the boats, which they then scooped up in purse seine nets. Unfortunately, the lights also attracted the nocturnal seabirds, which flew toward them, only to be picked off by the gulls.

  Commercial squid fishing was legal within the marine sanctuary, oddly enough, but traumatizing the seabird population at the wildlife refuge was not. The two jurisdictions overlapped here. Peter had already received an email from the Fish and Wildlife Service asking him to keep an eye on the squid fleet.

  Peter piloted the whaler through the gang of boats. Most of them were about sixty feet long, Just Imagine’s length, but stockier. Some had already caught squid and were in the process of brailing in their nets. In these waters the species was Loligo opalescens, or California market squid, an invertebrate shaped like a toy rocket, about eight inches long and milky in color, with dime-sized eyes that could see twice as well as a human’s. Contrary to most people’s expectations, Kevin told me, squid were wily and clever, some of the more intelligent creatures in the ocean. And among the most athletic—they traveled through the water by jet propulsion, leaving fish in their wake. For mating, these animals favored orgies. It was thought that they communicated with each other using their own language of color, pattern, and luminescence; instantly, they could turn themselves spotted or striped or dark as ink or a shimmery pearl color to lure other creatures toward them, or to fake out predators. Scientists had determined that squid made rapid and complex decisions, reacting to situations as they arose. For instance, when they realized they were trapped, they would panic and swim against the net.

  We wove in and out of the herd, looking to trade a six-pack of Negro Modelo for some fresh squid. As we approached the first boat, we saw that there was a sea lion twisted in its net, a victim of bycatch. The animal was struggling frantically as it was hoisted out of the water. A crew of fishermen dressed in fluorescent coveralls lined the railing, looking uncomfortable. Their only options were to cut their nets so the sea lion could escape, or shoot it, and they sure as hell weren’t going to cut their nets. Our presence made them visibly edgy—if you’re about to kill a marine mammal, execution-style, in a wildlife refuge, you don’t exactly want spectators. They angled the nets away from us so we couldn’t see what they were doing. Rather than gawk, we drove away.

  A dingy black boat that was occupying Stumpy’s territory agreed to give us some squid, although the captain seemed surprised by the request. They were a dry boat, he said, and didn’t care for any beer. Kevin leaned over to pass a bucket across, and as he did, he found himself looking straight into the eyes of a mako shark head, freshly severed. We took our bucket of squid and got out of there, scooted back to Just Imagine as the sun set.

  In the sailboat’s galley, Peter pan-fried the loligo with a little garlic. Today’s catch didn’t taste like the light, springy calamari you get in good seafood restaurants. Our squid, when cooked, turned an unappetizing mauve color, swimming in a viscous pool of its own grease. It was repulsive, like eating a strip of rubber doormat. “Maybe we didn’t prepare it right,” Peter said. I felt a racking stomachache come on, and washed the dishes doubled over in pain.

  Suddenly, I smelled something truly fetid coming from the bathroom. I opened the door. Gallons of murky red liquid sloshed around in the shower, burbling up through the drain. It had the combined stench of sewage and gasoline, but it looked like watered-down blood, with chunks of something floating on its surface. “I think the red stuff might be diesel fuel,” Peter said, grimacing. “I don’t know about the other bits.” Ridding ourselves of the alien fluid required opening the “sea chest,” a closet that contained the sewage pipes. Setting aside the question of why diesel fuel was spewing into the shower, Peter twisted a couple of wrenches and pumped various handles, as Tom had instructed. The red glop slowly headed back down the drain, to hell or wherever. I didn’t care, so long as it was gone.

  THE NEXT DAY, WHILE I WAS SITTING ON JUST IMAGINE’S STERN DECK picking mashed anus flies out of my hair, Peter announced that he wanted me to learn to drive the shark boat. I stopped picking flies and stared at him. He went on to explain that during the week between Kevin’s departure and Scot’s arrival, there would be times when I would have to handle the whaler alone, maybe even in stormy conditions. I might have to dock it alongside Just Imagine after, say, dropping him off at North Landing. I might have to maneuver the boat during a shark attack so he could put in a tag or capture a video ID. I might have to rescue somebody who got into trouble with Tubby. Maybe, when no one else was around, I might have to deal with some unforeseen marine emergency.

  Until this moment, it was true, I had ducked every technical item on the checklist out of certainty that, whatever it was, I was the least qualified person to do it. But Peter was basically telling me that I couldn’t afford to think that way anymore. On occasion it would just be the two of us working our shark flotilla, and I needed to be skilled and reliable and on top of all things nautical.

  This plan made sense, of course, but it terrified me. Although I did know how to drive a boat. Sort of. Since I was a kid my family had kept a summer cottage in Canadian lake country, and before a road was put in recently, the only way to get there was by water. My father always had an inboard-outboard cruiser of some type; these days it was a twenty-foot Sea Ray. Over the years I’d been taught basic boating skills and been something less than a natural: I could never remember, for instance, which side of the channel the red buoys should be on. And I failed to master steering a boat in reverse, even after a decade of trying. In my checkered boating history there were mangled propellers and sheared cotter pins and dead engines and less-than-gentle encounters with docks and, one time, there was even an explosion.

  I tried to imagine docking the whaler against Just Imagine by myself—getting it into the right position, gauging the wind and the waves, throwing on a brief burst of reverse and then neutral, and then cutting the engine, all as precisely timed as a tango. After which: leaping six feet over the railing onto Just Imagine’s deck with fore and aft ropes in hand, tying a smart bowline followed by a half hitch on both ends of the whaler at just the right tension. (I’d seen Peter and Kevi
n do this many times.) But the only image that came to mind was one of being sandwiched between the two pitching boats with no way out from above and the Sisterhood below. I remembered Tony Badger sternly telling me, “If you fall over the side, even in good conditions, your chances of getting out are zero. ZERO.” He’d held up his thumb and index finger to form a circle, in case I didn’t get it. “I know it sounds crazy, but people die right next to boats all the time,” he’d said.

  As Peter outlined the course of my boating instruction—“You can start right now!”—I watched Kevin rowing across Fisherman’s Bay. When he arrived, he casually jumped out of the teetering rowboat, vaulted across Just Imagine’s wounded starboard, and secured Tubby with an effortless and elaborate pair of knots. He had the boat thing down cold. But it wasn’t only boats; every time a tool was needed for anything—cutting a piece of rope, gaffing a fish, unbending a hook, performing open-heart surgery—Kevin simply whipped it out of one of his pockets, and solved the problem on the spot. Basically, he was wearing a Home Depot in his pants.

  The chance to be with people who possessed these elegant survival skills, I realized, was a big part of what had drawn me here. This was an oasis of competence in a bumbling world, clean and straight where things were usually compromised and bent. Scot, Peter, Ron, and now Kevin—I’d watched them, and the way they operated was different. Necessity dictated it: Fumble around here and the place would spit you out like a watermelon seed squeezed between slippery fingers. The Farallones specialized in the harsh ejection of anyone lacking the perfect balance of the two essential ingredients—humility and skill. I hoped there was still time to get the mix right.

  I had a chance to observe extreme competence at close range later that afternoon when I met up with Ron in Mirounga Bay. Since our first meeting two years ago, we’d spoken at length several times, and I’d come away from every conversation even more intrigued by him; he was unlike anyone I’d ever met. Ron maintained a clearheadedness that few manage to pull off. No adding or subtracting of emotions that didn’t need to be there, no fretting or exaggeration, no what-ifs. And this equilibrium was even more impressive when I learned that he had experienced more than his share of close calls—on the water, with the sharks, and in life.

  “I pushed all the boundaries,” he’d admitted. In his younger days in Southern California, he had experimented with drugs, getting in deep and tangling with the law. Twelve-step programs had helped him steer out of the skid, and diving became his salvation.

  And now things were in order, and stayed that way. Only one problem remained, and it didn’t have a tidy solution. At some point during his drug-using days, he’d contracted hepatitis C. Though at present there’s no cure for the illness, in characteristic Ron fashion he faced it head on, and did everything he could to keep its debilitating effects at bay. He’d become an unlikely convert to holistic living, pursuing alternative treatments that ranged from homeopathics to biofeedback to ingesting bovine liver cells obtained from France. There was very little processed food, pesticides, crap in Ron’s diet. Even his dog, Alice, a chocolate lab, ate organically; her special dog food, a blend of eggshells, vitamins, and raw free-range hamburger, was handmade by two women in Petaluma and occupied the bulk of space in his freezer.

  Healthwise, things were going as well as could be expected, with some days better than others, but at times he felt the symptoms creeping up on him. Under the circumstances his diving days did not stretch out in front of him indefinitely, but he was sanguine: “I just kinda do the best I can to keep going. That’s all I do.”

  When he’d passed by earlier in the week, I’d asked if I could spend a few hours on the GW with him while he dived. “Anytime,” he replied. Urchin picking was 100 percent weather dependent though, and he made the trip only when the market justified it. Lately, the price of urchins had been falling, and he’d reduced his Farallon schedule. But today he was anchored in the middle of Shark Alley with his neon-orange dive buoy set out, and when Peter drove me over, I climbed aboard easily. Ron had customized his boat so its stern sat lower to the water, making it a snap to get in and out of, a valid concern when you worked by yourself in the middle of the ocean. He stood on deck rinsing pieces of his wetsuit in a plastic tub. Peter mentioned that there hadn’t been much in the way of attacks, and speculated that the sea lion bycatch from the squid boats amounted to a free meal for the sharks. “So they’re wrapping sea lions,” Ron said dryly. “Well, that’s just such a surprise.”

  I sat on GW’s aluminum deck while Ron suited up. This was a minimalist’s dive boat, no junk lying around, no snarled ropes, nothing clattering or rolling underfoot. He pulled on sets of elbow and knee pads, sturdy neoprene boots, long, industrial-strength gloves, and a hood that left only the center of his face showing. It was so tight that his cheeks bulged. “Beats wearing a coat and tie,” he said, smiling. But then his eyes turned serious. “Let’s see if it gets busy today.”

  “On the water?” I asked, thinking he meant the squid fleet.

  “No, below. Sometimes when the sharks aren’t on the surface, they’ve got a lot going on down there.”

  I lost sight of Ron immediately as he dropped over the side; the instant he entered the water he ducked underneath his boat. He did this whenever he was ascending or descending so as not to present a tempting silhouette on the surface. This was a signature innovation, and a smart one. He’d described the early cowboy days when there were numerous urchin divers out here, and back then no one, not even Ron, had quite enough respect for the sharks. “We’d swim across the surface all the time. Our attitude was ‘Bring it on.’ Right.” The result of such behavior was obvious: Ron was alone here now, and he had developed his own rules, tailor-made to keep him alive. “I thought maybe if I do things differently, I can narrow the odds of something happening,” he said.

  The air compressor chugged, and the yellow air hose that was attached to it snaked sixty feet down into the darkness. Ron dove with a hookah rig rather than scuba tanks, with the hose functioning as an umbilical cord that tethered him to the boat. I watched it, remembering the story he had told me about the time a shark had gotten tangled in the line. He’d been on the bottom prying up urchins and felt himself swaying, as if from the current. Suddenly, he was jerked about three feet upward. Lifting his head, he saw a shark directly above him, the air hose caught between its dorsal and tail fins. The shark had struggled to get free, flinging Ron around like a trick yo-yo. Finally, after what must have seemed like a very long time, the animal cleared itself and swam away.

  I leaned over GW’s edge until my nose was almost touching the water, but the surface was flat and inscrutable, concealing the parallel universe below as effectively as one-way glass. All appeared tranquil for the moment. The radio hissed white noise, and the depth finder blipped across a colorful screen. Earlier, Ron had explained that smaller fish didn’t show up on this sonar, but the sharks were large enough to register as angry-looking red slashes. I watched the screen for a while and didn’t see any. The hose hung off the stern, making no sudden jerking motions, tracking slowly in different directions as he moved across the bottom.

  If you spend time around great white sharks, however, you quickly learn that calm can change to out-of-control on a dime. In fact, Scot had experienced his closest call with a shark in conditions exactly like these. He’d described the incident during my first visit, and I’d been struck by how, even seven years later, he was humbled by it.

  The water had been dark, “glassy calm and dead silent.” He decided to tow the surfboard around, but on this day—nothing. No sharks, not even any boils. After an hour he reeled the board back in. Scot was bent over the edge, leaning to pick it up, when the shark hit, blasting at a steep fifty-degree angle from beneath the boat. There was a heart-stopping crack and the board flew into the air as three thousand pounds of shark breached, six inches from Scot’s hand. It was the sound that rattled him as much as anything, like a gun going off in his ear. For sever
al moments, he stood frozen. It took him some time to regain his composure.

  After this, a new protocol for retrieving the boards was adopted: no body parts hanging over the water. Recalling the incident, I backed away from the side.

  An hour later there was a rush of bubbles and, quite suddenly, Ron was back on the deck. He pulled off his mask and unbuckled his thirty-five-pound weight belt. “Ahhh, there’s so much krill down there,” he said, shaking off the water. “All these things swimming around in front of your face.” He made swatting gestures.

  “See any sharks?” I had to ask.

  “Nah, couldn’t see anything. With all the krill, it’s like looking around in a dark closet. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.” He began to winch up his urchin bags, three enormous nylon-mesh sacks that each held seven hundred pounds of catch.

  Peter and Kevin came back over, tied off the whaler, and boarded the GW. Kevin asked how the urchins were looking. Fantastic, apparently. The roe was fat and the color was a bright orangey-yellow. Ron offered to let us taste one. Now seemed like a good time to knock back an urchin; these were of such exquisite quality that sushi chefs in Tokyo would be fighting over them tomorrow morning when the fish market opened.

  As with oysters, urchin desirability is a combination of size, taste, and aesthetics. Ron explained that the Japanese, who bought most of the California stock, liked theirs just so: symmetrically circular and less than four inches in diameter, the smallest legal size. He was highly selective about what he picked, and given that he was the only one diving out here, his Farallon-caught urchins were unique—the equivalent of truffles. Even so, there was stiff competition. “China and Russia started selling urchins to Japan,” he said. “Boy, it’s hard to compete with those guys. Even though their product is of a lesser quality.”