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

by Casey, Susan

  I followed Nat as she walked to the coast guard house, entering through the back door into the kitchen. Two wooden crates, each the size of a suitcase, sat on the floor. She grabbed them and carried them outside. When opened, the boxes were divided into eight small compartments, like private berths in a railcar. Each contained a hoary bat. The bats were a mottled sienna color, with veined, complicated-looking wings that gave the appearance of gothic hang gliders. They had giant ears. As Nat gently lifted them one-by-one out of the cage, they unfurled themselves to fly off, making pissed-off clicking and hissing noises.

  I reached out a finger to stroke one of the cute little angry bats. Its head snapped forward to bite me; it was in no mood for placatory gestures. Nat, wearing leather work gloves, liberated them all, although she almost missed one that was wedged deeply inside its compartment, curled behind a branch. The bat showed us its mouthful of pinlike teeth, rasped and clicked a blue streak, and then whirled off into the night.

  Back at the birthday dinner, celebratory shots of Jack Daniel’s were being tossed back as aperitifs. “I think this is a big year for bats,” Peter said. “We’re already at seventy.” As it happened, Peter was the first person ever to observe hoary bat sex. “It looked like one bat, just one fat bat,” he said. “But then I realized, ‘Hey, they’re doing it!’” He’d taken photographs and sent them to bat experts, who had become very excited. All these years, all the technology in the world, and no one had managed to get an eyeful of this event before. Nor had many people been privy to humpback whale sex, until one day in 1986 when three of them swam up to Saddle Rock and mated on the spot, while Peter watched through a scope. Thus, he became one of the first to know that humpback whales have sex in threesomes, with the third whale acting as a sort of assistant.

  Just another item to add to Peter’s astonishing list of sightings, along with the unheard-of great white shark behaviors and the countless rarer-than-rare birds and the time sixty-one blue whales cruised past the island and the morning in 1996 when he came upon the first northern fur seal pup to be born at the Farallones, after the species had been virtually wiped out 160 years earlier.

  But perhaps the most bizarre thing he had ever witnessed here, in recent history anyway, involved a shark named Jerry Garcia.

  Jerry had gotten his name on a cold and blustery fall day in 1995, when Peter had watched as an expensive-looking powerboat arrived at the Farallones, hung offshore for about fifteen minutes, turned, and left. It was odd for a boat to make the pilgrimage in weather so rough. “The wind was blowing thirty knots,” Peter recalled. But he suspected he knew what the boat was up to. Jerry Garcia (the leader of the Grateful Dead, not the shark) had died the previous August, and Peter had it on good source that sometime during the week friends and relatives would be coming out to scatter his ashes in the vicinity. He looked on with Ed Ueber, the manager of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, who was visiting the island, as the boat tossed in the waves and Garcia was flung to the elements. “They really should have a chumming permit,” Ueber noted. “But…I didn’t see anything.”

  The next day Peter encountered a new shark, a twelve-foot male with a crooked, partially lopped-off tail, and in homage to the previous day’s events, he christened the shark Jerry Garcia. From then on, he and Scot spotted Jerry regularly in Maintop Bay, where he was observed hanging out with other Rat Pack sharks. (There was some consideration given to changing the Rat Pack’s name to the Deadheads, but it never quite took.)

  Then, on October 4, 1997, two marauding orcas attacked a white shark in Maintop, flipping him onto his back and, working in efficient tandem, holding him there until he drowned. The smaller of the two orcas swam around for a while with the shark sticking out of her mouth, toothpick-style, and then proceeded to eat him in front of a boatload of wide-eyed tourists on Superfish. When the showdown commenced, Mick had radioed Peter and told him he’d better get out there, and fast.

  Peter and two interns arrived in time to observe the two orcas pinning the shark down by his nose. It was Jerry Garcia. The kill was masterful. “Orcas clearly know what the hell they are doing,” Peter said.

  No one had ever seen the ocean’s two top predators battle it out in gladiatorial style. News outlets around the globe ran Peter’s underwater video of the aftermath, during which the orca cruised by the camera with a scrap of Jerry Garcia’s liver hanging from her mouth. Scot and Peter’s favorite clip came from the CBS Evening News, which featured the story under the portentous headline: “Battle of the Century off the California Coast.” Dan Rather introduced the segment, informing viewers that the video they were about to see was the first filming ever of the “two sea titans facing off.” But, Rather added, “when push came to shove, it was no contest. It was brains and blubber over the lean, mean teeth machine.”

  From a research perspective the most fascinating part was this: immediately after Jerry Garcia was killed, all of the Farallon sharks vanished. Just lit out of the place, every last one of them. Scot and Peter waited six weeks for the sharks to return, but no one showed. “It was like the cops had arrived and shut the party down,” Peter said. Ron concurred; no sharks. But as far as making a scientific pronouncement that the sharks had fled, hunch and a single event weren’t proof enough.

  And then it happened again, on November 19, 2000. And again, Peter was there. The island was ultrasharky at the time; the previous day six sharks had visited the decoy board in succession, and there had also been an attack involving multiple diners. But when a pod of orcas hit a shark just north of Shubrick, scattering pieces of tissue in a giant slick, the other sharks bolted. This time, however, several of them were wearing satellite tags, and when the data came back they showed that within hours Tipfin, for one, had plunged over the edge of the continental shelf and hightailed it back to Hawaii. Attacks ceased instantly, and the ghost-town ambience underwater was once again confirmed by Ron. “It’s eerie when there are no sharks here,” Peter recalled.

  Another incident meant more mysteries: How did the sharks collectively know to scram? Why didn’t the orcas move into the prime hunting grounds here, since they obviously could? In the course of my research I’d come across a reference to a band of orcas slashing its way through Fisherman’s Bay in 1937, snatching seals off rocks and terrifying a boatload of people who were being unloaded at North Landing. This didn’t happen anymore; orcas were rarely seen within a mile of the islands. But why? The food was here. What sort of subaquatic zoning rules allowed for the sharks to have the drive-thru more or less to themselves?

  It was almost midnight when the journal entry was completed, the birthday cake was reduced to crumbs, and the dishes had been washed. Peter had planned to spend these next few hours spying on the squid boats from the lighthouse, documenting the seabird havoc, so rather than row me back to Just Imagine, he suggested that I stay on the island. This was a swell idea, I thought; the idea of rowing Tubby in the dark was not very appealing. Especially as during dinner, Peter had admitted that there was a part of Fisherman’s Bay that he dreaded passing over, noting that it was “definitely shark territory.” Brown had nodded in agreement. “You know as well as I do that they could just annihilate Tubby. Just get there. Go straight to the sailboat as fast as you can.”

  The main house was full, so I carried an armful of blankets over to the coast guard house. I wore my headlamp as I walked up the stairs, which creaked ominously the way stairs always do in horror movies. Its beam illuminated stains on the ceilings. I threw my blankets down in the only bedroom that had a mattress, a terrifying old thing lying on a cracked linoleum floor. Black handprints smeared the wall at knee level. The air was heavy and dark and still, although the room was painted a soft peachy color.

  Back home, if someone tossed me a pile of flea-bitten blankets and directed me to a filthy mattress in a haunted, rodent-infested house with no power or water, I would be less than enthusiastic about bunking down. But here I was, and, actually, I was content. Lying
in the dark, listening to high-pitched mice sounds, I wondered why.

  Being on this island, I decided, bestowed the luxury of forgetting. Forget the news, the chaos, the jihad, all the crazy zealotry and eviscerating hate. Forget the relationship travails of Britney Spears and forget transfats and absolutely forget about fourth-quarter results. This didn’t make the world seem smaller. Instead, it was liberating, like slipping off a lead backpack. And the sense of freedom was so enormous that it made everything else—lack of first-run movies, or never having clean pants—seem trivial. This place was harsh, but when you were here, your world was manageable. There were never more than seven other people to contend with, and every boundary was sharply defined: from where the land ended and the ocean began, to how much food was left in the pantry. You couldn’t control it, perhaps, but you could defend it.

  In spite of the geographic isolation, no one was ever truly alone on this island. It was a fact that spun me 180 degrees away from my New York life, where I often felt cut off both from the natural world and from any close-knit group of people, and where I spent my time stamping out rather predictable days. Here, nothing went as planned because there were no plans. You just never knew what was on the agenda. Great white sharks would swim up to you and hoary bats zipped into the trees and Steller’s sea lions formed harems and blue whales practically brushed the shore and mountain bluebirds and yellow-breasted chats and dusky warblers fluttered down like wayward confetti. The common denominator was this: Only wild things came here.

  Chapter 8

  Both bites were very close together, suggesting that the shark bit twice in rapid succession, rather than attacking, releasing, and attacking again. The oblique angle of the bites suggests that the shark came from below, hitting the boat with a lot of force at a 45-degree angle.

  —FARALLON ISLAND LOGBOOK, NOVEMBER 5, 1985

  SEPTEMBER 25–29, 2003

  The weather was changing. Drifting in zinc-dark water off Indian Head, the sky pressing down on us like damp laundry, Peter and I sat in the whaler and fished. Since the Giants weren’t playing today, the transistor radio stayed in the glove box, and out here, away from the bird gallery on the island, there was silence. I cast a line from the bow, and on the glassy surface I could see exactly where it hit. It was one of those times when you could practically feel the barometer falling and the ocean taking a step back, winding up for something nasty. The light was steely and the air had turned so cold that we both wore parkas. Peter dialed the radio to the marine weather forecast. An official-sounding, computer-generated voice came on: “Point Arena to Point Pinos, winds northwest ten to twenty knots, seas three to five feet at eleven seconds…,” it droned, sounding totally self-assured, the way only software can. All day and all night the omniscient Weather Voice churned out readings from data-collecting buoys along the coast. These automated buoys were anchored at sea, and they collected minute-by-minute measurements of wind speed and direction, pressure, wave height, and period (the number of seconds that pass between two waves). A shorter period meant rough water, with the peaks tumbling fast and relentless. When the period was equal to—or less than—the height of the wave, there was trouble. Ten-foot waves coming every ten seconds was an equation that sailors dreaded, the oceanic equivalent of a bucking bronco. Ten-foot waves coming every eight seconds was worse. And, of course, conditions could get much meaner than that, and did.

  The Voice was hypnotic, looping on and on with a metronomic cadence. In the past, live people had provided the marine weather, but when thick accents and even some broken English started creeping into the reports, making it possible to mistake, say, “winds fifty miles an hour” for “winds fifteen miles an hour,” the robot voice was instituted. At the Farallones, close attention was paid to the readings from the Point Arena buoy, only one hundred miles north of here. This spot usually received the same weather that was headed toward the islands, but about five hours earlier. As we listened, it became clear that Point Arena was getting punished, and that later tonight so would we.

  In the gloomy light I could still see clear to Middle Farallon, poking out of the water with all the insouciance of a predate zit. One time, during shark season in 1988, several admittedly hungover biologists had peered out from Southeast Farallon and been startled to note that there were actually two Middle Farallones. When advised of this, Peter ran to the lighthouse to check it out: sure enough, a second twenty-foot mound lay next to the original. Further examination revealed the new lump to be the carcass of a blue whale, and everyone wanted to take a closer look, so an expedition was hastily arranged. The Dinner Plate couldn’t be launched due to a boom malfunction at East Landing, so Peter had pushed off from North Landing in a Zodiac, along with another biologist who’d decided to bring his six-month-old baby along for the ride. As they neared the whale, they began to see the fins, two-and three-foot-high black dorsals, slicing like knives. There were at least four great white sharks on the case, ripping immense horseshoe-shaped chunks of meat from the whale, and suddenly, being three miles away from the island in a ten-foot rubber dinghy with a six-month-old baby on your lap seemed like an ill-advised equation.

  There was a heavy tug on my line, and I began to reel it in. Catching something never took more than a few minutes here. Our quarry was rockfish, wacky-looking bottom dwellers, ancient and armored, with long spines and quills webbed into an elaborate weaponry of fins. Because they came in endless combinations of vivid colors—tangerine with mustard speckles or olive green dappled with neon lime, or vermilion and scarlet swirled together in an iridescent sheen—they seemed like Dr. Seuss characters. They had cartoon names, too, like the treefish and the gopher and the quillback, the chilipepper, the cowcod, and the dwarf. There was even a fish down there called the sarcastic fringehead.

  My catch was a ling cod, a spotted, flatheaded fish with a face that would scare small children. I hauled it up on deck, backing away as it jerked and shimmied, heaving its gills and slapping its tail. Peter reached down with a tape measure. It was twenty-three inches long, one inch undersized. Picking up the ling cod, something that I was deeply reluctant to do myself, Peter gently pried the hook from its wraparound lips. Then he slipped it back into the water. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Bud,” he said, as the fish shot back to its home in the netherworld.

  We were going to have to keep fishing. Grocery-wise, I was down to a hunk of Ghirardelli chocolate, two boxes of crackers, four fast-blackening bananas, and a case of wine. Rockfish were a major addition to the menu. The other day Peter had brought out some eggs from the island, and we’d scrambled them with the meat of an olive rockfish that was accidentally killed when its air bladder burst through its mouth. Many of the rockfish lived a good ways down, fifty feet and deeper, and when they were yanked to the surface, the rapid pressure change sometimes caused this to happen. When it had been lifted into the boat, the fish looked like it was blowing a giant, tissue-colored bubble. It was gross, and both Brown and I had turned away, pretending to be very interested in something on the horizon while Kevin and Peter tried to figure out the most humane way to put the tiny olive out of its misery. They debated piercing its swim bladder, a supposedly painless option, but even though Kevin actually had a needle, neither of them knew precisely how to do it. So they’d opted for the gaff, and behind me I’d heard the fish’s head make a squelching noise, like a ripe cantaloupe hitting the pavement.

  I had no choice but to embrace my new rockfish diet. This morning, Kevin had departed on Superfish, and arriving shortly thereafter was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee, who would remain on the island for the next eleven days, along with a team of coast guard contractors. They were here to execute the elaborate maintenance project and debris removal that had prompted Peter to base this year’s Shark Project from a floating platform in the first place.

  Marching orders from the mainland were to stay out of the way while all this work was going on. Both landings would be shut down and, except for Tubby, no boats could be
launched. In general, this restriction didn’t make much difference; it had been anticipated, Sharkwatch could continue, and we were already working from the water. However, federal officials on shore meant no more casual visits for me—for food, for a change of scene, for anyone’s birthday. Not even for emergencies.

  “Okay, sharkies. It’s twelve minutes to high tide,” Peter said, looking at his watch and then up at the sky, where he picked a flesh-footed shearwater, “a pretty rare bird,” out of a pack of sooty shearwaters zinging by under the low ceiling. He had just cast his line, and I was trying to spot the flesh-footed oddball through my binoculars when suddenly Peter saw a dorsal fin. It was an almost imperceptible blip, just a few inches of dagger above the surface, and if there had been any chop at all, it might have been invisible. He whirled around. The fin popped up again, only ten feet away now and circling tighter. “Mako!” he said. This was a different brand of shark, a five-foot missile with a shorter, slightly rounded dorsal fin. The mako pirouetted around the whaler as though it were cutting through glass. As the shark flashed by we could see its aluminum-blue back, so metallic that it seemed like it ought to have rivets. “He’s looking for a ling cod,” Peter explained. Makos were notorious for dogging the catch as it was brought to the boat, neatly severing the flesh so that fishermen felt a quick release of pressure on their lines and then found themselves reeling in a disembodied head.