by Casey, Susan
I had a few questions of my own. Last night, deep into the wee hours, I’d heard whoops and guffaws and the sounds of raucous festivities echoing across the water from White Holly. That, in combination with yesterday’s photo shoot involving the bikini-clad woman, had piqued my curiosity. “What are you guys doing over there? And what’s up with that shark cage?” I asked Crazy Louie.
“Oh, that. Photo shoot. Very poorly planned out. Very dangerous,” he answered, waving his hand dismissively and then proceeding to recite a poem, something about biting a grizzly bear “in the balls.” As he regaled me, the helicopters hovered, churning up a whirlpool of backwash, and then, out of nowhere it seemed, six fighter planes thundered by in formation, buzzed the island, and boomeranged back over the skyline as quickly as they’d come. Hundreds of sea lions, frightened by the noise, stampeded into the water. Startled, I hailed Peter. “What was that?”
“The Blue Angels,” he said. “Practicing for Fleet Week. What a nightmare. They’re not supposed to fly this close to the island. I’m going to write a citation.”
“Ask him if I can come ashore to talk to them about sharks,” Karl said, nudging me.
The Chinooks had been saddled with oil tanks and massive timbers, and they yawed over White Holly, trying to deposit them. Craning my neck to watch the loads swaying back and forth above, while the sailboat rocked in the waves, I began to feel queasy. I stopped looking into the sky and focused my eyes on White Holly. It seemed as though someone had badly miscalculated how large a vessel would be needed for this job; there didn’t appear to be much room for all the junk. At one point, the shark cage was smacked by a dangling diesel tank and crumpled in the middle like a crushed soda can. Bundles of steel swung crazily in midair, occasionally bashing the ship itself and almost taking out several of the deckhands. Crazy Louie flinched. “He’s a talented captain, but young,” he mused. “We’ve had a coupla close calls…. Oh! Would you look at that! Damn near took the rear fantail shroud off!”
Peter radioed to tell me there was an attack in Maintop Bay. “Not that we can get to it,” he added. As the helicopters struggled, fuel ran low from all the hovering, and they signaled that they were done for the day, and planned to head back to the mainland. On the island, the biologists watched the contractors run for the last chopper like it was the fall of Saigon.
As they lifted off and veered to the east, Crazy Louie turned to me. “Come over tonight,” he said. “And if you want, you can bring those biologists. We’re going to have a big party.”
“Yeah,” Karl said. “Could they tell us a bit more about the sharks maybe?”
“But we’re out of booze,” Crazy Louie added. “Can you bring us some booze?”
“We’re out of food too,” Karl reminded him.
“No, we’re not out of food! We’ve got food!”
“Well I guess we’ve got, like, some eggs and stuff.”
“Over on the White Holly, we like our parties.”
I declined as politely as possible, citing logistical problems: launching boats, night, sharks. As they shoved off in their runabout, I rushed down into the cabin, crawling into the captain’s bunk and curling up in the fetal position. The last thing I wanted to do was attend a party on a boat. I wasn’t sure if it was the seething turbulence from the Chinooks, or the motion of the boat in its new position, or the idea of egg-based snacks over on White Holly, or the apple I’d just eaten, but I had become seasick, a condition I’d feared for weeks.
After handling the Small Craft Warning nights and the days spent rolling around off Maintop and Indian Head, I didn’t think that anything could bring this on, never mind a conversation or a piece of fruit. In fact, I’d become downright cocky about my sea-worthiness and had stopped taking my daily Dramamine. Mistake. This was a distressing turn of events; seasickness raised the misery index to impossible levels. Darwin himself despaired over this state, referring to it as “no trifling evil.” I lay there for an hour, occasionally running up on deck to retch over the side. Even with this additional distraction, I couldn’t help but notice the lineup of iron-colored clouds, poised on the skyline like invaders. The wind was lying low for the moment, but I could sense it changing moods, preparing to sweep the ocean into disorderly swells.
The realization hit hard: I couldn’t take another night of this. I turned toward the stern and considered Tubby, flailing away at the end of its tether. I would do it; I’d row ashore. I radioed Peter, sounding plaintive. I might have even cried. I told him that I was at the end of my rope, that the noises had started up anew, that I’d just realized I was anchored on the exact spot where the passenger ship Lucas had gone down, killing twenty-three. “Mayday,” I said. Uncle. Please. The Fish and Wildlife crew had gone—could I possibly come onto the island for a night? Just one? I would row ashore myself, I told him. The radio was cutting in and out, but I could hear the alarm in his voice. “No! Do not row across East Landing. Stay out of Tubby!” He did the humanitarian thing, as I’d known he would, and came out to fetch me in the whaler.
My legs felt wobbly, as though they didn’t quite belong to the rest of my body, as I walked from East Landing to the house. The ground spun underfoot. Scot stood on the front steps. I told him that I had been seasick and now I was landsick. “Just go with it,” he said. “You’re going to be spinning for at least twenty-four hours. I think it’s a good feeling, myself.” I didn’t. Sitting down made it worse, though, so I decided to go for a walk. This turned out to be an unfortunate move. An hour later, still disoriented, I returned to an empty house. As I sat in the kitchen, wondering where everybody was, Peter and Scot came in, flushed and happy, and told me that I’d missed a great attack. Where had I been? While I was ambling around in search of equilibrium, there had been a glorious sunset hit in Mirounga Bay. One of the sharks in attendance was the infamous Gouge, killer of Swissy, the rehabilitated sea lion. They had recognized Gouge immediately, due to the three distinctive scars on his head. Last year the wounds were fleshy and raw, but they’d healed neatly and Gouge was back on the job. Scot had tagged him, and for an hour they drifted in Mirounga Bay as the light fell and various sharks swooped in to check them out. They sat down at the kitchen table and cracked open beers, comparing notes on who they’d seen.
Everyone was exhausted from the helicopter rodeo and relieved that the island was back to its sparsely populated state. The contractors had cleared out so quickly, however, that much of their gear had been left behind. Several lumpish bundles still sat on the helipad, and tomorrow, apparently, another chopper would return to collect this pallet of personal effects and residual trash.
I brightened slightly at dinner, perhaps due to the fact that it was my first hot meal in a depressingly long time. “I’m back from the edge,” I thought, reaching for a third helping of enchiladas. “Things can only get better from here.”
In the journal it was noted that today’s new arrivals had included a burrowing owl and a white-throated sparrow, as well as a dozen humpbacks and thirty blue whales, but the real news was that it had been a three-attack day, the first of the season. October and November both provided their share of multiple feeding events, but so far this season the sharks had been hitting singles. Typically, the action came in waves; sometimes things would be eerily quiet, and at other times there was hardly a moment to spare between attacks. Under livelier conditions, it wasn’t uncommon to encounter four or five individuals at a carcass, all of them amped up from the presence of blood and eager to sniff around at the whaler. In fact, the researchers would sometimes have to back away from the scene because things were getting, in Scot’s words, “too hot.”
“Well, we’ve got at least one hungry shark out there,” Scot said. “Gouge was really interested in the boat.”
According to Kristie and Elias, who’d seen it, the Maintop attack had involved an impressive amount of blood, which quickly dispersed in the fifteen-knot winds. I described the breach near White Holly and the ensuing shark fever on board
, as well as the urgent requests for Peter and Scot to head out there—with a case of beer or two, preferably—and deliver a shark talk.
That night I had a luxurious and restful sleep, free of unexplained jolts and collision bangs. The sense of relief lasted until precisely eight o’clock the next morning when Peter stuck his head in the door to inform me that it was blowing thirty-five knots of wind with a monster swell. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere today,” he said. At dawn, he and Scot had listened, speechless, as the Weather Voice reported waves at the Point Arena buoy measuring nineteen feet at eighteen seconds.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. We’d suspected that more wind was heading our way, but where had this come from? This was rogue weather, mighty and freakish. And none of it had been predicted by the Weather Voice. I looked outside. Roiling white breakers filled the window.
As violent storms went, this one was improbably pretty. The water glittered in a spectrum of blue under cloudless turquoise skies, and everything that wasn’t sparkling was frothing. Maintop wore a whitewater cape, and Fisherman’s Bay was a chaos of foam and waves. In front of the houses, surf heaved against the marine terrace, sending up a gauzy veil of mist. If you managed to ignore the gale-force winds, the snarling whitecaps, the fact that the ocean was heaped twenty feet higher than usual, and the stomach-flipping vision of the borrowed yacht getting mauled out front—well, it would’ve been a lovely day.
Yet as terrifying as it was to watch Just Imagine getting buffaloed at East Landing, it was immediately obvious that the sailboat wouldn’t have survived even an hour of this storm double-tied in Fisherman’s Bay. The force of the swells was immense, and today the Gap looked like Niagara Falls. It was as though the ocean was vacuuming, sucking away anything grimy or stagnant or stuck. Even the seals were being rearranged. As the surf fire-hosed the rocks, the gulleys were blasted clean and every last inhabitant was swept out to sea, creating a windfall for the sharks. I pictured them trolling enthusiastically along the shoreline as seals and sea lions pinwheeled off the island. Earlier this morning, Kristie had seen a young harbor seal with its hind end bitten off attempting to drag itself back up onto the marine terrace.
Getting dressed doesn’t take very long when you sleep in your clothes, so in no time I was clawing my way up to the lighthouse, where Scot stood on Sharkwatch. Stepping out of the door, I was walloped by wind like I’d never felt before, demon gusts that could rip you from earth and deposit you in Oz at their leisure. The only way to get through it was to literally double over, bending at a ninety-degree angle from the waist.
I was almost blown from the path several times and was reminded of the old lighthouse keepers’ claims that, during storms, they’d crawled this route. After three weeks aboard Just Imagine, I’d had my fill of crawling, but the Farallones seemed to demand full-time submission. At the top, Scot sat in a metal folding chair against the wall, hands jammed into his pockets, hoodie wrapped tightly around his head. “It’s really nasty out here, that’s all I have to say,” he said, as I crouched beside him. “It’s humbling to think about what it’d be like on that sailboat right now.”
From up here the visibility was so magnificent that you could practically see the curve of the earth. I took intermittent peeks through the scope at Just Imagine spiking in the tumult, half expecting to see it turn a cartwheel at any moment. Now, it was alone out there. White Holly had departed earlier, after radioing a warning to the island that “the weather’s only going to get worse.”
Every few minutes Peter radioed, sounding nervous. “I think the sailboat has drifted. It’s definitely slipped.”
Scot shook his head. “And what do you think you’re gonna do about it, Pete?” he said, exasperated, with the transmit button released. “It’s a storm. Hey, let’s go down there and almost get killed!” He turned to me. “This is what I do. I let him think it out.”
He clicked on the radio: “Okay, I’ll go take a look.” Scot rose from his post and walked to the railing, looking over at East Landing and the boat. Then he came back to the shelter of the wall. “It has definitely slipped.”
“Do you think we should put a rope on it?”
“You’re not getting anywhere near that buoy today. It’ll take your hand off.”
“I think I’d feel better if it was double-tied to the buoy,” Peter persisted.
“The weather’s pretty serious.” Scot’s voice was measured and calm, but it had an intractable edge. “I don’t think we should do anything in haste.” Using the landing today, we all knew, would be an invitation to disaster.
When Scot went down for lunch, I stayed at the light, taking a shift. Walking around the tower’s exposed perimeters in this wind was not advised, but I snuck a look around the side and noticed that Middle Farallon was underwater, completely submerged by waves, just a white, surging hump. I’d heard rumors about this happening during noteworthy storms—also that surf sometimes broke over the top of forty-foot-high Saddle Rock—tales that had formerly seemed abstract and possibly even exaggerated. Apparently not.
As I was wrapping up my two hours, I noticed that a pint-size helicopter had touched down on the island; it was here, obviously, to retrieve the contractors’ remaining gear. The craft looked about as sturdy as a packing crate, and watching it getting cuffed around by wind was only slightly less terrifying than training the scope on Just Imagine. Clearly, the air version of the Weather Voice had also blown the call—what were they doing here in a gale? Two men struggled onto the helipad and attached the netted bundles to a sling that hung from the struts. The helicopter whirled into the sky, hauling a load that appeared heavier than the machine itself. No more than ten seconds after liftoff, as it swung over Mirounga Bay, a gust hit, the chopper tipped dramatically onto its left side, the sling released, and every last bit of cargo went hurtling into the sea.
It all seemed to unwind in slow motion. And the helicopter hadn’t paused for a second when this happened; it had made a bee-line for the mainland and was already out of sight. Now the water was dotted with a bobbing herd of objects. I could make out a bright blue cooler, along with oil barrels, plastic kerosene containers, and some large white scraps of plastic. Kristie appeared at the top step to the lighthouse. She’d seen the helicopter’s load crater into the ocean too. “Did they mean for that to happen?” she asked, looking stunned. I radioed down, in case everyone else missed it: “The helicopter just dropped everything. Everything! Right over Shark Alley.”
At the house I found Peter standing in the living room, staring at the rafts of garbage tangled in the surf. The wind wailed like a siren. “Everything’s just crazy right now,” he said, almost in a whisper, as if to himself.
Trying to be reassuring, I said, “The sailboat looks like it’s handling it.”
He perked up and nodded. “That steel hull and all. And, you know, I think the swell might be coming down.”
Personally, I’d been thinking it was getting bigger. But I didn’t say so.
The front door burst open, and a rush of wind swept into the house. “It’s fucking raging out there!” Scot said, fighting the door closed. The wind gauge, he told us, was reading forty-knot winds with gusts up to fifty.
“We’re in a full-on gale,” Peter said.
The Weather Voice prattled on in the background: “Point Arena buoy: seas nineteen feet at thirteen seconds.” That stopped the conversation cold. White Holly’s prediction had been right—it was getting worse. Scot sank into the couch. “We’ve got the wind and the swells. This is about as bad as it ever gets out here.”
“Let’s go wrangle some plastic,” Peter said, trying to shake off his mood. “I need to do something physical.” The three of us headed across the wind-scoured marine terrace toward the water, where a vast yard sale of junk had begun to wash ashore. Peter kept trying out scenarios for making it to the sailboat.
“I think I could get a rope around that buoy,” he said, as we walked.
Scot shook his
head. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do, Pete,” he said. “We can’t take a boat out there.”
The aptly named (for the moment, anyway) Sewer Gulch was sheltered from the pounding surf by a narrow channel, and many elephant seals had piled into it, coiled around one another and surrounded by hoses, cracked shards of Styrofoam, half-empty bottles of salad dressing, individually wrapped antacid tablets, single-serving envelopes of ketchup, mangled flip-flops, shredded tarps. The seals looked enormous and mightily pissed off. Without hesitating, Peter walked to the edge of the rocks and carefully lowered himself. At his approach the coven writhed and belched, rearranging their seal pile as if to better position its more aggressive members for a sortie.
After a moment they seemed to calm down, and Peter was able to roam among them, gathering the pulverized junk and passing it up. At around 5 p.m., Elias radioed down from Sharkwatch with disconcerting news: “Peter, just thought you might like to know: Little Tubby’s flipped over. It’s upside down.” This was a blow, symbolic if nothing else, and Peter climbed out of the gulley and walked toward the landing to view Tubby’s predicament for himself. Scot and I followed.
“I can’t remember the last time something flipped out here,” Scot said, looking across at the sailboat. Peter was silent, staring through his binoculars. There wasn’t anything positive to say, really. Just Imagine was doing a frantic pogo, and Tubby was down for the count; I could see its flat white underside turtled in the surf. Ten seconds was about all we could stand to watch, and the three of us picked our way across the marine terrace, depositing the helicopter debris in piles near the house, before going inside.
