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

by Casey, Susan

  The breakdowns weren’t happening only on land. As the weather turned testier so did Just Imagine, and we were on each other’s nerves in a big way, locked in a battle of wills: I wanted to be here, and the yacht didn’t.

  The list of busted and haywire systems grew daily. For about a week now, for instance, the battery voltage—the power source for running everything from the lights to the radio to the water heater—had been falling steadily for no apparent reason. Peter and I had spent time with various manuals trying to fix it, but we had failed. Whenever the voltage dipped below a certain level, a jarring alarm buzzer would erupt, usually in the middle of the night, at which point I had to start the engine immediately and run it until the battery had recharged. This always made me nervous, as if by powering up I might cause the boat to lunge forward, rip from its moorings, and plow into Tower Point, or thunder into the open water. So I tried to conserve power. I kept the internal lights off and wore my headlamp at all times. The only light that resolutely stayed on at night was the mast light, which would—in theory—prevent any vessel (squid fishing or otherwise) that had the notion to anchor in Fisherman’s Bay from ramming into the bulky, parked object blocking its entrance.

  Meanwhile, the plumbing was still dishing up surprises. The red ooze had crept up through the kitchen sink while I was washing dishes, and the toilet malfunctioned at a clip that manners prevent me from describing in full detail. In an attempt to fix it, we had gone so far as to pry up one of the panels in the floor to get a better look at the septic system. Down in the gaping hole lay a snarl of rubber pipes in a nasty broth of greasy gray water—I supposed this was the bilge. I’d heard the word used in reference to marine waste products, and this qualified, to say the least. There was a dull film on the water’s surface, and it smelled like it had been sloshing around down there since approximately the era when the naked lady had been carved. Thankfully, Peter seemed to know his way around a septic system. I stood back as he reached purposefully into the maw. “Hmm. I think this is the blackwater line that isn’t pumping…,” he said, fingering an ominous-looking pipe. BBLLAMM! A valve exploded, sending a hose clamp shooting straight up into the air like a champagne cork and then clinking down into the murk. A violent hissing noise issued from the hose. “Oops,” he said. “Hope that wasn’t something we needed.” I looked in the bathroom and noticed that the toilet had flushed. But the victory was short-lived. Within the hour the head had vacuum-sealed itself shut, and when the seat cover was forced open, it spat up blackwater with Exorcist-like vigor.

  Last night’s fifteen-knot winds had the boat pitching and surging like an amusement park ride, and a cacophony of groaning and grinding noises filled the cabin, making sleep impossible. They reverberated up from the anchor as its chain rubbed back and forth across a rock edge. The image of a prisoner trying to saw off a pair of handcuffs came to mind.

  Admittedly, the whole floating shark research platform concept was being tested at the moment. But it was also true that things kept happening to remind me of why I still wanted to be here. On the island, two extraordinary bird sightings had set things abuzz: a Baird’s sparrow and a red-tailed tropicbird. Both were off-course migrants that were exotic to begin with; in fact, Peter had laid eyes on a Baird’s sparrow only once before—and throughout all of California the bird had been glimpsed on only four occasions. (Three of the four sightings had taken place at the Farallones.) Kristie had spotted the bird near a patch of scrub vegetation known as “Twitville,” and Peter had positively identified it, not a simple thing to do. (If you leaf through a bird guide, within the span of twenty pages of sparrows you’ll notice that only minuscule markings set them apart, and sparrows are canapé-sized to begin with.) The red-tailed tropicbird made its home in the far northwestern reaches of Hawaii. It was a showy white bird with a single red tail feather that trailed behind it like the train on a Valentino gown. This specimen had no business being here, but here it was, swooping around for the better part of an hour. Peter had described the sightings to me over the radio as “fucking radical.”

  And earlier this afternoon there had been an impressive attack off Indian Head involving at least five sharks. The seal was a full-sized adult with a seemingly endless supply of blood, and the water off the west point of the island had been whipped into a scarlet froth as the waves tumbled against each other from all directions. The sharks had been thrashing near the whaler, and then one of them had breached, but sort of in reverse, leading with its tail. Peter suspected that they had gotten too close to one another while feeding and “freaked,” I believe was his biological term. It had been far too crazy to put in a tag, although Peter had recognized one of the sharks: “That’s Tipfin, man!” Back from Hawaii for another season.

  After more than an hour of feeding and investigating things on the surface—the whaler, its motor, a surfboard—the last shark had slipped away. At least five individuals had been caught on video, most likely a gang of Rat Packers. If a Sister had been part of the group, the others would have scattered rather than lingering so confidently. “Well that was gnarly,” Peter had said happily and then turned up the Giants’ game on the transistor.

  Now he’d gone back to the island for the night. I’d watched him sprint to shore in Tubby, haul the rowboat onto the rocks at North Landing, and then set off down the path at a jog, ready to return to the warmth of the house. The sky was gloomy and cold, with stormy plumes reaching down to the north. I stood at the bow and watched as the squid fleet fired up their stadium lighting and positioned themselves for the night. Heavy chop slapped Just Imagine, and in turn the sailboat backhanded the whaler, tied alongside.

  I clicked on my headlamp and went down into the cabin. “Tonight won’t be that bad,” I told myself, as I settled into the banquette with a dinner of crackers and cabernet sauvignon. “A little windy, maybe.”

  My assessment changed within the hour. According to the Weather Voice, the wind was gusting ten to twenty knots, with six-foot waves arriving every ten seconds. Which, if you went by marine charts, was a “fresh breeze.” To me, this seemed akin to describing a raging, blackout drunk as “slightly tipsy.” There was nothing breezelike about these conditions. The whaler hammered at the side of Just Imagine with direct, cracking hits. The noise grew louder and eventually became so disturbing that I crawled on deck to shift the bumpers and retie the lines. Outside the wind whooshed by, the yacht was slippery from fog, and both boats swung from side to side as I tried to undo bowlines and cleat hitches without losing any digits. Sea lion barks and elephant seal snorts echoed off the rocks, and above me the lighthouse cast its beam into the night, as though searching for something, rather than pointing it out.

  Falling off a sailboat in the night would be a bad way to go. Especially one that was tossing in the middle of the Pacific. What could possibly be lonelier than being swallowed by the abyss, stripped of anything that might maintain your illusion of control, and of all the comforting reminders of land? Imagine the terror of meeting a great white in the total blackness. First, it would circle. Next, the bump. On the first pass the shark would hold back, completing its due diligence, brushing by—perhaps you would feel its distinctive skin, covered in sharp-edged denticles, which are literally tiny teeth. (A shark’s skin alone can draw blood.) By the time the shark returned for a second bump, however, it would be officially hunting you…. I shook my head, dismissing the image. Clinging to the cable railing, I made it back into the cabin and was promptly knocked to the floor when Just Imagine hit a high roller. Back home, some sailor friends had recommended that I crawl through the sailboat during bad weather to avoid getting batted around like this. At the time, I’d thought that was funny: Crawling. As if. But I wasn’t laughing right now. I got down on my hands and knees.

  The plastic dishes that had been in the sink picked themselves up and crashed to the floor. (Few things on the boat were glass, for obvious reasons.) Now, every thirty seconds or so, Just Imagine was rearing up and then slamming down,
sending anything that wasn’t strapped down careening through the cabin. I thought about radioing Peter, but there was nothing he could do. Plus, my radio had gone skidding across the floor, and I had no idea where it was.

  At the moment it was hard not to think back on all that had gone down in Fisherman’s Bay: the drownings and the shootings and the egg mishaps and all the capsized and wrecked boats and the Sisters making stealthy loops on the bottom like phantom jets. The bow seemed more stable somehow, so I made my way up there, crawling into the captain’s bunk and padding myself on all sides with mounds of blankets. Unfortunately, being up front meant I was that much closer to the keening anchor chain, and by now the wind had begun to actually howl. A dozen eggs that had been sitting in the galley smashed against the opposite wall. Books flipped off shelves; batteries bowled from port to starboard and back again.

  I was torn. On one hand, it seemed like a fine time to mix alcohol and sleeping pills to escape the anxiety; this was the exact type of event that sedatives were invented for. Alternately, it would be wise to stay clearheaded in case emergency action was required. Such as swimming. I’d stood on deck yesterday and calculated the distance from Just Imagine to the rocks: 150 yards to Tower Point and about 200 to Sugarloaf. “It would take less than two minutes to swim to the island,” I had informed Peter, with false cockiness. “Yeah, well, that’d be the longest two minutes of your life,” he replied.

  After one particularly extreme round of waves, I voted for the drugs. But still I remained awake—this was like trying to sleep on a trampoline while people were jumping on it. Unidentified stuff continued to catapult around. At two o’clock, and after a few pulls on the ancient bottle of house brandy, I fell into a kind of half sleep. The noises became different: they took on the high-pitched, eerie tones of crying children and voices whispering. Light, feathery, and aquatic, they rose up from the water like an exhalation.

  IN THE MORNING THE WIND WAS STILL BLOWING TWENTY KNOTS, AND the sky was angry and dismal, but—I was still here! It was daylight! The whaler was not on the bottom of the ocean! (Although it was noticeably banged up.) I went topside and scanned the bay, feeling thankful. Suddenly, in the midst of my private celebration, I noticed a large puddle of blood on the deck. And then, right above it, a long smear on the cabin door as though a bloody hand had raked down the side. And in front of the smear, near the bow, there was more blood—a small lake. In fact, there was blood everywhere; it was bright red and so recently spilled that it was still dripping. In a panic, I radioed Peter. He sounded cheerful and well rested and he immediately launched into a monologue about last night’s dinner, going on about the chocolate banana chiffon cake they’d had for dessert—a vegan recipe, apparently; he’d bring a piece out for me…

  Two people cannot speak simultaneously on a radio. You have to wait for one person to finish first, say “over,” and release the transmit button. When I got my turn to talk I was a mess, screaming about whispering voices and pools of blood. Relax, Peter told me, a bird must have hit the boat. And probably, judging by the volume, a sizable bird like a cormorant. In a completely calm voice he advised me to look for a feather so that he could identify it, explaining that if a large bird went down and bled that much, there would definitely be feathers left behind. Right, okay. A bird. I’ll come up with a feather. For half an hour, I hunted all over the deck and couldn’t find a single one.

  Chapter 9

  If Robinson Crusoe had been cast ashore on this island, I wonder how he would have lived?

  —CHARLES WARREN STODDARD, WITH THE EGG PICKERS OF THE FARALLONES, 1881

  SEPTEMBER 30–OCTOBER 6, 2003

  “Well. I don’t think an elephant seal could’ve gotten up here.” Peter had spent the last ten minutes searching the deck for evidence of kamikaze feathers and found none.

  “Not unless they’re able to levitate about six feet into the air and clear these railings.”

  There was an edge to my voice. On the heels of our radio conversation Peter had Tubbied out to examine the blood and, I hoped, figure out who it belonged to. He was taken aback, I could see, by the volume of liquid, and the way it ranged from stern to bow, as though a sprawling avian death match had unfolded across Just Imagine’s entire upper deck. He’d pointed to a green smear near a dollop of blood and said, “This looks like eelgrass. Whatever this was, it was eating eelgrass.”

  “That’s guacamole. From when I threw the rotten burritos overboard.”

  “Oh.”

  We decided to move on; it was clear that for now the source would have to remain a mystery. I was rattled. First, the voices; now this. Of all the blood I’d seen at the Farallones, this batch was the most disconcerting. Maybe that damned Ouija board was to blame. As usual, my views on the supernatural were conflicted. I couldn’t admit to a belief that blood-spraying ghosts had been attracted to the sailboat, but still, I would’ve welcomed a chance to get rid of the board. My nerves were ragged, and I was anxious to get off the murderous yacht, so the two of us set out in the whaler under dishwater skies and relentless chop. Earlier this morning Peter had been tinkering around onshore at East Landing and seen a large shark, potentially a Sister, breach right off Shubrick, clearing the water entirely and landing with an explosive splash. We headed there now.

  Great white sharks were known to breach when hunting, and their aerobatics had even inspired a video series known as Air Jaws. The footage had been shot in part at South Africa’s False Bay, where torpedoing up through a school of porpoising Cape fur seals is standard procedure. At the Farallones, breaching was less common, perhaps because the doddering elephant seals didn’t require the effort. When Peter witnessed his first airborne shark, in 1982, he’d assumed that the animal was a whale. Over time, however, it became clear that the sharks were doing their share of the leaping. Scot interpreted the breaching as failed seal decapitations, but Peter had other theories. Sloppy hunting, in his opinion, didn’t account for the instances when a shark would breach three or four times in succession. Repeat breaching almost seemed like an attempt at showing off, and he wondered whether it constituted a kind of social signaling or pre-mating display. “Their whole mating system is completely unknown,” he said. “How do they meet? And how do they decide? The males have to do something to get the females.” There was another, less romantic, possibility: perhaps the sharks were trying to rid themselves of parasites, as whales did.

  I was driving. I’d tried to beg off; the water was, in Peter’s appraisal, “snotty,” and I just didn’t feel like it. I didn’t want to have to think, or worry, or demonstrate any kind of skill. I wanted to sit in the whaler’s scooped-out bow staring passively at the surface and wait for some amazing creature to poke its head up. That was all. Peter wasn’t having it. He gave me a withering look that said: wrong attitude. Then, trying to be encouraging, he added, “We’re so overdue for an attack on this side.” And he was right—the Sisters were being elusive. While the newer sharks, the smaller sharks, and the less clued in sharks had been keeping us busy at Indian Head and in Mirounga Bay, we had yet to encounter a shark on the island’s east side.

  The whaler bucked through hatchet-edged waves coming at fast intervals from unexpected directions. It was the kind of water in which a fledgling shark boat driver could bury the bow or bite the tip of her tongue off, should she become careless. Two hundred yards due east of the island, I felt the motor cough and miss a beat. I gunned it, and the engine, pushing back, completely cut out. Sputtered. Quit.

  Peter reached over and tried to restart it several times, with no success. “Don’t flood it,” I warned. He graciously ignored me and turned to the back of the boat, removing the engine cover and checking the fuel lines. The wind was blowing at least ten knots from the northwest, and we teetered in the chop, ripping east, drifting quickly offshore. Rather than mess with the engine long enough to float out of radio range, Peter Maydayed the island for a tow, and within minutes Elias was motoring toward us in the Dinner Plate, dressed in
foul-weather gear and looking valiant, like a toy boat captain on a mission in some children’s adventure story-book. It was a relief to see him; the water had turned a foreboding obsidian, and looking back toward Just Imagine, I saw that Fisherman’s Bay was draped in a dark fog, punctuated by whitecaps.

  Almost exactly above the spot where Peter had seen the shark breach this morning, we threw Elias a tow rope and then scrambled into the Dinner Plate. It was more substantial than Tubby, I reckoned, looking nervously over the side, but not by much. The shark boat was clearly down for the count, so they dropped me at Just Imagine and headed back to East Landing, where the crippled whaler would be winched onto the island for repairs.

  I stood on deck looking out at the unfriendly landscape as Elias and Peter faded into the gloom. The clouds had knitted themselves into a steel muffler, and for now it was a monochrome world. Standing downwind, near several puddles of dried blood, I caught an unmistakable whiff of sewage. The stench could be traced to a silver fitting that looked decorative but obviously was not; a brackish stream oozed steadily from it with a sibilant hiss. While I puzzled over this—why was shit coming out of the roof of the cabin?—a sporty catamaran emerged out of nowhere and made a tight U-turn next to the yacht. Far too tight, in fact. He was traveling fast in close quarters, gambling with his turning radius, and he practically took out Tubby. Not only that; one poorly timed wave and he would’ve swiped Just Imagine’s starboard a lot harder than Tom and his crew had managed to do when they’d jibed. The boat’s name, Big Fat Fun, flashed into view as it swept by, and the fear in the skipper’s eyes was plainly visible. He was alone, dressed in a balaclava and slicker, driving with his motor on and his sails down, and laboring to get out of here as quickly as possible. Breaking the crux rule of boating etiquette, he didn’t bother to wave.