by Casey, Susan
Peter radioed to confirm that, sharks or no sharks, we were done for the day. He would be staying on the island to work on the whaler, which appeared to have a busted fuel filter. There were other chores to be dealt with as well, something about a ruined pipe, and also there was a Giants game on. I fully understood my abandonment. Why would you spend time on Just Imagine unless you were forced to? But it was only two o’clock. A long afternoon, evening, and night stretched in front of me.
I went below, figuring that I’d lie in my sleeping bag for a while, reading a book I’d brought about the role of predators in nature, and then maybe do some chin-ups. Wooden handholds sprouted from the yacht’s ceiling in various spots and they were ideal for this exercise, although I believe these grips were intended for more prosaic uses, such as staying upright while the boat was barrel rolling. Anyway, they were my favorite feature, perhaps because the handles seemed excessively sturdy and unlikely to break. I was up to seventeen chin-ups now, a lifetime best.
The sailboat pitched irritably, making reading impossible. I crawled into my bunk and tightened the straps. Somehow, this wasn’t how I’d envisioned shark season: sitting alone and foodless in foul conditions on a sailboat that seemed bent on retaliation for having to be part of it. And where were the Sisters?
By now, I’d imagined, I would have known them by sight. After all, we were neighbors. I pictured the Big Girls asleep in deep and twisted subaquatic caves, gliding out when the time was right, like Ferraris that were only rarely driven. Though technically it was still early in the season, Peter had phoned Scot to discuss the lack of female sharks. Scot continued to wonder about the role of the squid boats; the lights and the underwater noises of the nets being hauled in and out, and the heavy engines roaring, he felt, would certainly affect the animals’ hunting patterns. “They’re smart. They’ll go elsewhere.” But, he added: “It’s not over till it’s over.” During October the average number of shark attacks was one per day, though there were sometimes as many as five. Right now we were seeing sharks daily, but mainly when they were bumping the decoys. There had been fewer than usual live attacks, with seals and blood and much exposure of teeth. Peter recounted this conversation to me, noting that “when Scot gets here, the mojo will change. You’ll see, things can turn quickly.”
I fell into a half nap and awoke with a jolt just before sunset. Though the anchor chain was still wailing and grinding, and the sailboat was surging and straining against its ropes, things seemed oddly quiet—the absence of the whaler, I realized, meant there was nothing for Just Imagine to pummel. Feeling disoriented, I poked my head up through the hatch. Instantly I could see that the water had become stormier, and the sky was in on it too. Through the Gap, surf swept across the raking two-tiered reefs of Maintop Bay with a force I hadn’t seen before. The wind was building.
Alarmed, I flipped on the Weather Voice, just in time to hear the report from the Point Arena buoy: “SMALL CRAFT WARNING. Winds twenty to thirty knots; seas ten feet at eleven seconds.” The Voice delivered this information with mechanical unconcern. But as the sailboat resumed its night noises in the quickly falling light, I felt less nonchalant. Compared with these new, scarier numbers, last night was, in fact, a “fresh breeze.” I hailed Peter, who was in the middle of cooking dinner. He tried to calm me down, adopting the faux-soothing voice that air traffic controllers use in movies when all the pilots are dead and they’re trying to walk someone who’s never flown a plane through landing a 747. “It looks bad out here,” I said, struggling to tamp down the panic in my voice. “Even the squid boats are gone!”
There was a long silence. “Over? Peter? You copy?”
“This is what I was worried about,” Peter answered wearily.
These were not the most comforting words I’d ever heard.
“This sailboat can’t roll over, can it?”
“No, no, no. There’s no way. It has a big old keel.”
I was momentarily reassured until he continued: “The problem would be if the rope or the anchor chain broke, and the boat swung toward Tower Point…”
“What do you mean if the rope or the anchor chain broke?”
“I think I’d better come out.”
It was past nine o’clock when Peter rowed across Fisherman’s Bay in the ten-foot swells, something that was surely advised against in Tubby’s owner’s manual. The hatch opened, and a gush of wind and ocean noise whirled into the cabin, followed by Peter’s boots coming down the ladder. I sat at the table in my headlamp. I was embarrassingly relieved to see him, especially since he’d brought me some food. “What’s that noise?” he asked, his brow scrunched in concern.
“Which one?” The sailboat was performing a symphony of ominous noises, Satan’s orchestra tuning up underwater. As the gusts broadsided it from the west, Just Imagine listed so heavily to the east, toward Tower Point, that the starboard portholes were almost submerged.
“That grinding noise. It sounds like something’s scraping on rock. I haven’t heard that one before. I’m going up to see what’s the deal with that anchor chain.”
Peter crawled back up the ladder and out into the wind. Ten minutes passed. I began to worry that I’d have to go up on deck and he’d be gone, an unexplained puddle of blood in his place. But a few moments later he emerged down the hatch. “Man, it is howling out there,” he said, shaking his head. He held a shredded, utterly destroyed length of rope—the remains of a line that Tom had looped around the anchor chain for support. With this additional line secured off the bow, the sailboat had less play. With its destruction, the newly loosened anchor chain enabled Just Imagine to sway with a lively whipsawing motion.
“I am not unworried,” Peter said, examining the rope.
The gravelly rasping of the chain across the edge of the reef had intensified. It was impossible to ignore the change in tone. “Okay,” he said, turning to me and speaking slowly. “If Just Imagine were to swing all the way over and smash against the rocks, Tubby would be our bailout. We’d jump in Tubby and get outta here.” I was in agreement: a ride in the rowboat was a better option than a midnight swim.
An ominous rumbling noise erupted topside, followed by a loud staccato of objects skittering across the deck.
“What the hell was that?”
“The gas cans, and probably a spare radio or something. We better save it before it goes overboard.” Peter went back up the ladder, returning a moment later with a video-camera case and a tin can.
“I think the bucket went for a sail,” he said.
This was a loss. The plumbing situation was dire. I needed that bucket.
Suddenly, there were several more thunks and a rambunctious surge from the bow, followed by a loud moaning. “What was that noise!” It was his turn to sound surprised.
“I don’t know. But it’s not the first time I’ve heard it.”
“Well, I’d like it to stop right now. Because that’s a new noise since I’ve been on. Now it sounds like the…”
“It’s not a new noise. That noise is very familiar to me.”
Peter sat at the table, looking uneasy. “I’m wondering if another rope broke,” he said. I handed him an oversized plastic mug of red wine and took a long drink from my own. Now we were surging back and forth more erratically. “We’ll know if something major happens,” he said. “If it does, our whole motion is going to shift. And it hasn’t. I don’t think.”
An ugly noise clanged up through the bottom of the boat. It was a full-on collision sound, the type of thing you’d expect to hear if you hit a solid object, a rock maybe, or the wrecked remains of the boat that was stupid enough to anchor here before you. But it was only the force of the waves churning across the bay. A radio and some batteries went crashing to the floor, whacking the naked lady in the head.
“Sailboats are made to withstand this kind of weather,” Peter said. He didn’t seem entirely persuaded, though. “In the open ocean they go through far worse than this.” What he didn’t say—h
e didn’t have to—was that when the boat was actually sailing, it was free to track with the wind.
I asked if he and Scot had ever been out on shark attacks in truly dicey weather. It was hard to imagine tooling around in the whaler next to a few feeding sharks in conditions like these.
“Oh yeah, lots,” he said. “Most of the times they’re not really worth it. The slick goes away fast, the boat’s just pitching, and you’re trying to film. There was one really crazy one, though.”
A furious storm had come up a few years ago, he said, out of nowhere. It was late September, prime shark season, and he’d been on the water when he spotted two large fins about a mile north of Sugarloaf, just sitting there quietly, like periscopes. At that point the weather was completely benign, and there were no gulls swarming, no blood slick. Curious, he radioed Scot, who was at the lighthouse, and then he drove toward the fins. Suddenly, the sharks began to thrash, kicking up enormous crests of water. Scot saw it too and sprinted down to launch the Dinner Plate.
As Peter motored toward the attack, he realized that it was farther offshore than he’d estimated, more like two miles. At the site, an elephant seal carcass bobbed, so slashed up that its edges fluttered like ribbons, and it was surrounded by three large sharks. They were circling but, strangely, not eating. It had all seemed very ominous, portentous even, like Macbeth’s witches around the cauldron, and at that moment he’d turned and noticed that the entire western horizon had blackened behind a wall of clouds. Scot arrived as the winds began to build, took one look at the scene, and recommended a hasty retreat. Neither the Dinner Plate nor the whaler was the right place to be during an ocean squall.
Peter, suspecting they were poised to witness something interesting, was reluctant to leave, but when the winds hit twenty-five knots, he too had turned toward shore. By the time he reached the island the storm had ratcheted into a gale, rain and hail thundered down, and using the boom was out of the question. Scot and the Dinner Plate were trapped in Fisherman’s Bay; the huge swells had made it impossible to round Shubrick Point. Peter ferried him to North Landing and then tied off to the buoy, prepared to ride out the storm with the two boats all night, if necessary. But the storm left as abruptly as it had come, and within an hour he was back onshore, wrapped in blankets.
Unfortunately, tonight’s weather wasn’t going anywhere. But it didn’t seem to be getting any worse, so I lashed myself into my bunk, leaving Peter to the creepy captain’s cabin, and both of us to worry about Just Imagine beelining toward the rocks during the night. As I tightened the straps around my sleeping bag, I realized that I had to give the Farallones this: Even as the place was trying to kill me, I had never felt more alive.
IN THE MORNING, PETER WAS GONE. A NOTE ON THE LADDER EXPLAINED that the boat noises had kept him up and he’d rowed back to the island at 4 a.m. I radioed. “I can’t believe you took Tubby out in that!”
“It was a bit heavy,” he admitted.
Today was another Small Craft Warning day, filled with the promise of more discomfort. But the whaler was fixed, and despite the offputting conditions, we decided to go out. Casting the surfboard at Indian Head, we drifted down Shark Alley. Peter seemed uncharacteristically quiet. I asked him what was on his mind.
“I’m worried that having the sailboat out here has become a bad idea,” he said, looking somewhat pained. He was thinking about the nights I’d spent on Just Imagine being flung around at the mercy of the weather. He was thinking about the groceries that had gone rotten and the toilet that wouldn’t flush and the anonymous blood splattered all over the deck.
I told him that as far as I was concerned, everything was going fine. And mostly, I meant it. Yet I also knew that if the weather continued to deteriorate, the responsible thing to do was get Just Imagine out of here. But that would require Tom, who was traveling this week, to come and pick it up, and anyway, Scot was arriving soon. Surely between him and Peter, they’d be able to fix the mooring.
I was well aware that if the sailboat had to go, so did I. I wasn’t ready for this to happen. I hadn’t seen a Sister. I hadn’t spent time with Scot. If I retreated now, all the drama of shark season would continue without me, and I would be sidelined once again on the mainland.
“This is a character-building experience,” I reassured him, trying to sound upbeat. But he wasn’t looking at me. In the nanosecond before I said it, a small boil had risen near the surfboard, and he noticed it just as the shark surfaced. It was a midsize Rat Packer. He made a fast figure-eight around the board, bumped us, rolled onto his side looking skyward with one black and ancient eye, flicked his tail, and disappeared. The shark’s head was raked with long white scrapes. “That was Plimpton,” Peter said.
The encounter broke the tension and seemed to end the discussion of an exit strategy for the borrowed yacht. And although the night that followed was gruesome, again, and the noises hammered at my nerves and I spent the night staring out at Tower Point, waiting to see it suddenly loom large in the porthole, when Peter radioed to see how I was doing, I told him that things in Fisherman’s Bay were much, much better; really quite good.
It wasn’t even a total lie. Over the next two days there were no fresh breakdowns aboard Just Imagine, though the weather remained a concern. The island buzzed with chain saws and jack-hammers as coast guard contractors assembled the piles of debris to be carted off by the helicopters next week. From Just Imagine’s deck I watched them standing on the rocks at North Landing, fishing. The Farallones had never been a popular assignment for coast guard types. Several seasons ago, in fact, a crew had protested “in-humane working conditions,” citing the kelp flies. And that particular group had flown in a satellite dish for their weeklong assignment. The guys on the island now, Peter told me, had airlifted in their own food. Their menu veered dramatically from the organic and healthful food the biologists ate and toward Dinty Moore beef stew and nacho-flavored Doritos. Whole palettes of packaged goods had been unloaded as the contractors settled into the coast guard house.
I had some new company in Fisherman’s Bay. Less than twenty yards off the bow, resident for several days now, swam a baby gray whale who seemed to materialize every time I stood on deck. Its prehistoric-looking, knuckled back arched above the surface; her elegant barnacled tail waved playfully. Occasionally, we made eye contact. As far as whales go, this one was truly pocket-size, and Peter had wondered aloud if a shark might not take it out.
No one had ever witnessed a shark attack a whale before, but blubber was the ultimate shark delicacy, and there was no more certain place to find great white sharks than at a newly bloated whale carcass floating somewhere in the Red Triangle. Scot had a network of fishing buddies who would give him a heads-up whenever one surfaced. Unless the carcass was beyond rancid, the sharks would be there, shearing off long strips of fat.
Right now, the Farallones were exceptionally well populated with whales. In the shark boat we’d been almost uncomfortably close to humpbacks that would suddenly surface, often in pairs. The humpbacks were sleek and elegant, acrobats with long tapered fins. Feeding out a little farther were the stately blue whales, the largest animals on Earth. The blues were imposing and humbling as they burst from the water or rolled by, their long backs streaming on forever. At one time two hundred thousand of these boxcar-size mammals had ranged the world’s oceans; now there were fewer than ten thousand.
Back in the whaling days, gray whales were known as “devilfish,” and they were notorious for killing fishermen and charging boats. But, it was discovered later, this had more to do with the harpoons stuck in their backs than innate aggressive behavior, and after the practice was stopped, people learned that grays are downright friendly. In Baja’s San Ignacio lagoon, for instance, they congregate en masse, nuzzling tourist boats and allowing themselves to be stroked, reveling when their bellies are scratched. My whale, as I had come to think of her, was clearly interested in the sailboat. Maybe it had to do with the smell. One little known fact: The
water that spouts out of a whale’s blowhole in such a picturesque way reeks like the most toxic fart imaginable. And that pretty much described the yacht’s odor, especially downwind of the hissing silver fixture.
MAINTOP BAY WAS THE MOST PERILOUS SPOT ON THE ISLAND. IT HAD the most exposure, the biggest surf, an array of treacherous hidden rocks, and fierce currents to suck you toward them. Cast into shadow by Southeast Farallon itself, Maintop was always blacker than the seas around it. For boats it was never the best place to be, as the prevailing northwest winds and the western winter swells walloped it straight on. If you got into trouble in there, you were out of luck. The shoreline was sheer and there was nowhere to ditch in an emergency, something that many people had discovered too late: Maintop had been the site of numerous drownings. Shards of wrecked ships still poked out at low tide. Peter and Scot were always wary as they drove through it, and even warier during attacks. Not surprisingly, the sharks seemed to enjoy the area.
One morning in 1991, Scot had just summited at the lighthouse for his first watch, and he was warming up, doodling, drinking his coffee, when he happened to look up and notice a guy bobbing in the center of Maintop, a bright orange life preserver wedged between his legs. The man was surrounded by a few floating coolers, but there was no boat to be seen. Scot did a double take. He had no idea how the guy could have gotten there, short of dropping out of the sky; no one had noticed any fishing vessels approaching the island.
