by Casey, Susan
He radioed to Peter that “there was someone in Maintop Bay,” and Peter, of course, assumed he was referring to a shark. Upon learning that it was, improbably, a person, he rushed out in the whaler—floating in Maintop was not a highly survivable proposition in November—and somehow managed on his own to roll the two-hundred-pound man into the boat. A coast guard helicopter beetled out and airlifted the man, whose name was Bill Kaboose, to the hospital. During the entire rescue, Kaboose remained in shock and never uttered a word. And afterward, they never heard from him either, not so much as a thank-you note. They did find the remains of his boat though, and the fishing equipment that had been on it was handily deployed to cast surfboards out to sharks. In recognition of what a trick it must have been to haul Kaboose from the bay, the marine sanctuary granted Peter the O’Neil Award for Seamanship. It was an unlikely story with a crowd-pleasing ending: “I do like to think that the Shark Project saved one life,” Scot said.
This afternoon Peter and I were floating hopefully off Shubrick, getting heaved around so badly by swells that we’d been about to give up, when Kristie radioed down from the light with news of an attack. “It’s over in Maintop.” Peter glanced at me, started the engine, and said, simply, “Hang on.” And then he hit the throttle so hard that the whaler literally took air, bouncing off the troughs.
First, the mass of gulls came into view as we rounded Sugarloaf, and then, there it was: the body in a crimson slick, the brightest color for miles. Everything else was muted in the fog and asphalt light. Peter pulled the whaler close to the beheaded seal and cut into neutral, grabbing for his pole camera. I fumbled with the topside camera, having difficulty and filming the inside of my jacket for a time—one hand was locked in a death grip around the rail and the other was shaking to the point of uselessness. I didn’t like Maintop Bay. It churned like a malevolent washing machine, and the rocks were close by.
Instantly, the shark appeared alongside us. It was the largest I’d seen, at least sixteen feet with the girth of a trailer home. Every detail of the scene put my nerves on edge: the menacing water, the heft of the shark, the alarm-bell-red blood, an extra-aggressive band of gulls screaming overhead. For the first time I could see how easy it would be to end up in the water during an attack. Peter alternately filmed and lunged toward the console to reverse the whaler from its path toward the rocks. The shark tore a slab of seal and went down, giving us a moment to get it together, but then it surfaced in the next second and seemed almost angry at the boat, whipping the side with its tail, and soaking us. The seal had been ripped in three, and the pieces began to drift apart.
“Watch for other sharks,” Peter said, standing on the gunwale, staring down. I leaned over the edge trying to make out shapes or shadows or boils in the lightless water. “There!” he yelled, pointing toward me. A hulking body swept by, and I focused the camera. The shark charged to the surface, jaws slashing at a piece of the carcass, coming in for its close-up. It was the sharpest, closest look I’d had at a great white shark’s face and its alien head and the white underbelly of its throat, which was bulging, and at that moment it was as though time stopped. By now I’d seen more than a dozen white sharks, but I still felt the same raw amazement every time one loomed beneath us. It never diminished, not even slightly. Rather, it grew. This was a standard sentiment. Scot had spoken to the Animal Planet crew about his own sense of awe: “I’ve probably seen more white sharks attacking more things than almost anyone on the planet, so I have a respect for what they can do. And it’s something I’ll never shake.” His response to me was simpler: “I feel sorry for anybody who hasn’t seen one.”
We stayed in Maintop for an hour, filming and struggling to stay off the rocks. The slick dissipated, and as the seal was whittled down to kabob-sized remnants, Peter turned up the Giants game, which had started during the attack. It was a make-or-break playoff game, and if they lost, they would be eliminated in their World Series run. He seemed more keyed up about baseball than any of the other action. “I’ve seen that shark before,” he said, throwing the whaler into gear. “I recognize the spot on his right side. It’s a large male.” This was disappointing news. The shark was massive enough, I’d thought, to have been a Sister. Not by a long shot, Peter told me, laughing. “When you see a big female, you won’t believe how badass they are.”
I wanted to know how he managed to see anything when the water was this dark—and no, I didn’t see the spot on its right side. Both he and Scot had the startling ability to track the sharks as they moved around the boat, even to the point of knowing where the animals would surface after they dove. On a clear-water day, they could pinpoint the creatures, even when they were twenty feet underwater. Whereas most of the time, to me, it was like staring into black paint.
“You learn to read the shadows.” He paused. “That, and being at about five hundred of these attacks.”
He drove into Fisherman’s Bay. “No shooting the Gap today,” I noted. The surge channel was engulfed in foam.
“Not unless you want another character-building experience.”
The sky was closing in. “We’re done,” Peter said absentmindedly, adding, “You can drop me at North Landing.” He was focused on listening to the ninth inning, so he didn’t catch the color draining from my face. This offhanded instruction, drop me at North Landing, had huge implications. It was not unlike someone casually saying, “Jump when the plane hits thirty-five thousand feet” or “Pass me that eyeball.”
To complete this routine task, I would have to do advanced nautical things. I’d have to maneuver the whaler in North Landing’s pinched entrance, between sets of breakers, steering close enough to the rocks for Peter to jump off, and then nimbly exiting before the next swell barreled in. This would require skillful reverse driving, with no accidental shifts into neutral. Then, as the light fell, I would have to return to Just Imagine, align the whaler in fifteen-knot winds, and tie it off. I had never docked alongside the sailboat without at least one person helping, reaching out and grabbing hold of a bumper or a line. And even with assistance, those attempts had not been pretty.
What choice did I have? I tightened my grip on the wheel and went for it. It took five passes before Peter was near enough to shore to leap off, and even then he had to scramble a bit, and water slopped over the top of his boots. There was a brief ricochet off the rocks and an uncomfortable whining noise when I hit reverse a little too hard. It could have been worse. I’m pleased to say, however, that the docking was perfect. Although somehow the whaler’s railing got ripped off.
SCOT AND I SAT IN THE SUN ON JUST IMAGINE, UPWIND OF THE HISSING fixture, drinking a brand of beer called Red Seal. The beer’s slogan was “Vita Brevis,” and even though the seal on the label still possessed its head, there couldn’t possibly have been a more appropriate beer for the Farallones if a microbrewery itself had sprung up at the base of Lighthouse Hill. Scot had arrived yesterday, looking handsome and feral and as though he’d never spent a day indoors in his life, and damned if the weather didn’t change on a dime. Wind slackened, fog blew off, clouds bleached away their tarnish.
An experienced fisherman and deckhand, Scot knew his way around boats. After examining the whaler’s splintered edges, torn railing, and walloped side, he’d taken one look at Just Imagine’s mooring and shaken his head: No. Peter visibly relaxed. He’d expressed relief to me when Scot had arrived, that now there was “someone else to shoulder the responsibility of all this.” “All this,” I was acutely aware, meant me and the sailboat.
We had to move Just Imagine over to East Landing in any case; when the maintenance project kicked into high gear, and the Chinook helicopters roared in to pick up the debris, they would be flying low over Fisherman’s Bay, and the vortex from their rotors would whip the surface into a gin fizz. The sailboat couldn’t be there. The copters would be zooming into a tight pickup zone and then slinging several tons of old timbers overhead; no one was prepared to guarantee that this operation would go
off without a hitch. I envisioned a one-hundred-foot log dropping from the sky and spearing Just Imagine’s deck.
Scot had spent yesterday afternoon cleaning and checking his gear, meticulously arranging all the equipment he’d need. In a place this chaotic, things could go sideways in an instant, and he’d witnessed enough trouble to know that thoughtful preparation was important. I admired this philosophy. Somehow, though, I hadn’t managed to incorporate it into life on Just Imagine, a seat-of-the-pants existence surrounded by broken systems and random upsets.
Today the three of us had hit the water with Seal Baby, a decoy Scot had fashioned out of gray carpet. In the past, Seal Baby had been attacked virtually every time it was dropped into the water. When I admired its lifelike appearance, Scot flashed a smile. “It looks like a seal, baby!”
One great thing about the carpet seal: When it was mauled, as it was so often, Scot didn’t have to see its terror, or its awareness of impending death. The fact that Seal Baby had no face, no eyes that could bulge to the size of cocktail coasters when scared, that was ideal, and part of the decoy’s design. Despite his obvious lack of queasiness, Scot hated to witness suffering and had remained affected for years by the image of a sea lion he’d once seen trying to exit the water with half its body missing. Around here, you didn’t have to look far to find a fate that painful. Ron had once watched, horrified, as a baby elephant seal that was being pursued by a shark tried with every ounce of its strength to scramble aboard the GW, the panic seared into its bewhiskered little face. Ten days ago, Kevin and I had rowed Tubby into a pocket cove so we could examine a shark-bitten sea lion that had managed to drag itself onto the rocks. The animal had three furrows raked across its torso, each at least two inches deep. The wounds were extreme, though the sea lion would likely survive them; these creatures managed to heal from the most vicious maimings, like torn and mangled lumps of Silly Putty that, when squeezed together, somehow became whole again. Not without visible agony, however, and we were struck by the emotion on the creature’s face. Its eyes blinked slowly and sadly, and it gave off a deeply resigned air as flies burrowed into its wounds.
This morning under restless but sunny skies we’d cruised Mirounga Bay and Indian Head, and trolled around on the east side too, accompanied by about fifty humpbacks, fifteen blues, and my gray whale. Seal Baby stayed in the boat; deploying it was Scot’s call, and he was preoccupied with another passion. “Look at all the crazy invertebrates!” he said, leaning over the side with a plastic measuring cup, reaching to scoop up one of the countless types of comb jellies that lived in these waters.
Along with the toadstool-shaped yellow and orange Chrysaora jellyfish that migrated past the islands, most of which were larger than a human head, there were platoons and battalions of smaller, weirder jellied critters. Their names were tongue-twisting mouthfuls—heteropods, ctenophores, siphonophores, scyphomedusae—and floating around next to the boat they looked like tiny science-fiction characters. Before I came to the Farallones I’d never heard of these animals, which isn’t surprising—they are as evanescent as soap bubbles.
The jellies living nearest the surface had transparent bodies, but their edges twinkled and flashed, as though traced by fiber-optic cables, blinking and undulating like neon signs. They were delicate; if you weren’t looking for them, you’d easily miss them hovering, but once you realized they were there, you could never stop seeing them. They came in a boggling array of shapes and sizes and colors—from the praya siphonophore, a filament made of hundreds of individuals (think of a chain of people holding hands) that could exceed 120 feet in length, to the gumball-size sea goose-berry. Some resembled elephants with glowing eyes, and some looked like rabbits whose floppy ears swept prey into their mouths. Some were wing-shaped; some looked like they were made of zippers; others brought to mind elaborate, psychedelic spaceships. Many of them stung, including the siphonophore known as the Portuguese man o’ war, and all of them were carnivorous predators who survived by eating plankton, fish larvae, and each other.
In their element they were hearty little cannibals, but their gelatinous bodies collapsed when caught in a net. Scientists could only hope to bring them up in a pail or a glass container, carefully raising them to the surface suspended in water. Even that method didn’t work much of the time, though; the jellies still deflated or shuddered into pieces, and besides, some species were completely transparent and eluded all capture. None of them preserved well; in many instances, the animal could be studied only in photographs, or by someone floating next to it in the water. And that, too, was difficult—many of them lived at great depths.
Scot dipped the cup into the water and came up with a strand of minuscule red dots suspended in what looked like a clear piece of spaghetti. It was a siphonophore, one that had a light but wicked sting. “I want to feel it,” Peter said, rolling up his sleeve to expose the soft skin inside his forearm.
“If you really want to feel it Pete, put it on your eye,” Scot said. He placed a glob of it on Peter’s arm and then touched the filament to his own wrist. “Susan? Do you want to feel it?”
I put out my wrist. It stung, but not that much. Anyway, it hurt less than rope burn, which I’d already received this morning.
Peter held his arm up to Scot’s and mine. “It’s a bonding thing.” Scot looked away uncomfortably. I was beginning to sense that he didn’t think much of the yacht arrangement. Complex logistics—the kind of juggling act that Peter thrived on and the convoluted set of circumstances that brought me here—bugged him. He did not invite distraction: not from me, not from the motley fraternity of coast guard contractors who’d descended upon the island, not from the world’s relentless fascination with the group of sharks he studied. I’d noticed that, while Peter often gave public talks about the sharks and referred to them with personal pronouns—“Whiteslash is one of our biggest females”—as though it was just one big happy family out here, Scot was guarded, keeping his shark experiences tight to his vest, reserving them for scientific papers and for special occasions. When he was at the Farallones, his attention was directed 100 percent toward the natural world. Though he was always friendly, I recognized that a journalist’s presence was an extra concern that he could’ve done without.
The siphonophore glistened in the measuring cup as Scot held it up to the sun. Back on the island he had built several Plexiglas aquariums, which he’d arranged against a black background so that the jellies stood out. When the shark action was slow, he studied the ctenophores and the siphonophores and the salps (“a completely unappreciated life-form”), videotaping them and tinkering endlessly with the lighting. The resulting films were magnificent, as intricate and luminous as the creatures themselves.
“How about giving Seal Baby a bath?” Peter asked. We were not exactly beating off the sharks. Scot seemed reluctant to set out the carpet seal, though he didn’t give a reason. “It definitely doesn’t feel active,” he said, sniffing the air, laser eyes scanning the water, taking it all in. “But I’ve seen years when it’s started out slow, and then it rocks.”
“SEAS TEN FEET AT TEN SECONDS,” THE WEATHER VOICE HAD ANNOUNCED yesterday morning. “Winds fifteen to twenty-five knots.” The promised weather from Point Arena showed up around dinnertime, and all night the boats continued to try to destroy each other, the whaler fighting back with the jagged edge of its railing. As usual, I got slapped around too. We’d planned to move Just Imagine in the next couple of days; it couldn’t be soon enough. I was hanging on by my fingertips, I felt, in Fisherman’s Bay. In a moment of paranoia last night, I had pulled out my notebook and written in block letters: “THIS COVE WANTS ME GONE.”
The Voice weighed in with another Small Craft Warning tonight, with conditions predicted to deteriorate further tomorrow, and then it laughed, a long, diabolical machine cackle. Okay, it may not have laughed. But given my dread-filled and sleepless nights of late, this was demoralizing news. And there was no end in sight. The long-range forecast, which
came from another channel, was beyond grim.
Things were tense in general. Yesterday the Patriot had approached us, one of the skippers waving chummily as though they’d hoped to pull alongside and shoot the breeze, and Scot’s face had turned to stone as he pointed the whaler in the opposite direction and hit the throttle. I was somewhat surprised. Recently, it had seemed that the relationship between the shark researchers and the cage divers was thawing slightly. In fact, earlier in the week the crew of the Patriot had actually hailed us to point out a shark attack that was happening beside them. Peter and I had zoomed over to Mirounga and seen three sharks jetting around, including an outsized Rat Packer named Cal Ripfin. Cal was easily identified because the top of his dorsal fin was chewed off, the result of trying to snitch a carcass from one of the Sisters last season.
For years now, though, Scot had held out the hope that the same frustrations that had shuttered the other cage-diving operations would get to this one. That wasn’t happening. On the contrary, Groth was building his business, adding dive dates to the Farallon schedule.
And it was disconcerting on the island, everyone felt, having all these contractors running around with demolition tools, hosting spare rib barbecues, and chain-smoking. The biologists had nicknamed them: there was Fat Bob, Old Bob, Lumpy Bob, Noriega, and the Drunk Guy, among others. Each of the houses contained an entirely separate culture, and the two were coexisting uneasily. Everyone was snappish. I wasn’t in the best mood, either. Conditions had not improved aboard the bad ship Just Imagine. The plumbing was spewing frightening substances, voltage buzzers continued to wail, and the repertoire of distressing noises had expanded dramatically. Sunshine had been scarce; I’d spent entire days in the chop and gloom, without so much as a peanut butter sandwich. In fact, my food supplies were now a fond memory. I hadn’t even gotten a rockfish lately.
