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

by Casey, Susan

  The wind was picking up briskly as Peter swept the Zodiac close to the rocks. “Jump, jump, jump!” he said. “There’s a set coming in!” I jumped with the usual lack of savoir faire, landing in a kind of modified spread eagle. We didn’t speak. No need for goodbyes; we’d be taking the yacht business up on the mainland as soon as we got there. Clambering aboard Superfish, I noticed that Scot had tied the whaler to the buoy and was standing, inscrutable in his polarized sunglasses, untangling a rope as he waited for the Farallon Patrol boat to arrive. We waved stiffly to each other across the water.

  Mick grabbed my bag and welcomed me aboard. He had a standing-room-only crowd today, due to the whale convention. Also, it was Saturday and Fleet Week had begun, tilting all of the Bay Area toward the ocean. From the looks of several people sitting with their heads bowed low, slumped on the coolers, the rough conditions had already taken their toll. I ducked into the wheelhouse.

  “Where’s Just Imagine?” Mick asked. Obviously, there was a yacht-sized parking spot now open in Fisherman’s Bay.

  I stared uncomfortably into the middle distance. “Uh, well…”

  “It didn’t get damaged in the storm, did it?” His brow furrowed with concern.

  “No, no,” I said, waving my hand toward San Francisco, as though the sailboat was there right now, tucked securely in its port. “It went off because of the weather.” Technically speaking, this wasn’t untrue.

  He didn’t press me, but I could tell he knew there was more to the story. Though Mick would’ve been an ideal person to confide in, and may have even been able to help, he was also a member of the Farallon Patrol. We were trying to keep the yacht incident as quiet as possible.

  We pushed off from Fisherman’s Bay and turned south on Superfish’s customary circuit of the island. I leaned in the doorway while he drove. Before we’d even rounded Tower Point, his radio buzzed; it was Peter. “Superfish, there’s a carcass in Mirounga. You might want to check it out. We can’t go because we’re about to do a landing.” I could hear the frustration in his voice.

  “Ah, the landlord’s collecting his rent,” Mick said. He grinned. “Roger.” Though they didn’t know it yet, today’s whale watchers had just scored.

  We rounded Saddle Rock about as fast as a sixty-five-foot boat could possibly go, and before we were even past it, I could see that this attack was a big one. The slick spread for thirty yards and was carpeted with gulls; fins slashed away at the surface. Mick cut the engines at a respectful distance, and people pressed themselves against the railing. There were two sharks in attendance that I could see, and possibly more, and when one of them lifted its head, there was a chorus of gasps. In the background, I vaguely heard Superfish’s naturalist explaining the scene, but her voice seemed to be coming from far away. We were deep in Rat Pack territory, so I wasn’t holding out any last hopes for seeing a Sister, but the action was consuming—this was by far the showiest attack I’d witnessed. One shark seemed especially aggressive, and from my vantage point he appeared to be relatively pint-size. I remembered the guys telling me that the sharks who lost their cool at attacks or snapped at the boat were generally the young ones, while elders like Bitehead and Whiteslash behaved with statesmanlike restraint.

  The sharks spent the better part of an hour running around with pieces of the seal. As things quieted down, I heard Mick on the radio enthusiastically describing the attack to another captain.

  “There was blood all over the place, and thrashing and splashing, and a big old carcass!”

  “That’s a beautiful thing,” the other captain replied. The radio crackled with static as they reflected appreciatively on the commercial potential of having sixty people go back to San Francisco and report that they’d watched great white sharks tearing apart a seal at close range.

  “Love those sharks,” Mick said. “Bring on the sharks.”

  Superfish turned to the next order of business, whales, and as Mick headed to the west, there were suddenly shouts from the back deck. One of the sharks had cruised up to the boat, his curiosity as palpable as that of the neighbor’s golden retriever. Video cameras whirred; people yelled with surprise. He was checking us out, and he followed Superfish down Shark Alley, hanging at the surface right off the stern, until he decided that we were not food and he left.

  The naturalist sidled up beside me. “Susan?” she asked. “Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these sharks.” I’d already been introduced as a Shark Project intern, so there was no escaping it. My head itched under my baseball cap, under the hot sun, under my long-unwashed hair. Sixty faces stared, eager for insider shark information.

  “Uh, well, there are a lot of great white sharks here at this time of the year,” I said, trying to sound cheery and knowledgeable. “Most of them even have names.”

  After my highly abridged description of the Shark Project, a guy in his early twenties approached. “Is it boring to be on the island?” he asked, waving dismissively toward it. His nose wrinkled as he spoke, as though being marooned there would be a kind of hell. I replied that, no, it was the opposite of boring.

  “Don’t you miss the clubs?”

  I was rescued from the conversation by a blue whale rising so close to the boat that we pitched up and down in its wake, and its spout misted the people who were standing downwind. Almost simultaneously, another blue whale fed within slingshot distance, raising its magnificent body in a sort of half breach and crashing to the surface with an exuberant splash. They were everywhere, gleaming in the sunlight as the water poured off their flanks.

  We were several miles west of the islands now, plowing through seething, roller-coaster swells. I had my hips braced against the wall and ten fingers wrapped on the railing as I watched the whales. Mick’s deckhand Morgan, standing next to me, commented that my hands were “trashed,” though he voiced it like a compliment. I looked down at them, covered in cuts and scaly rope-burn patches, fingernails chipped and packed with grime—he was right. And the vehicle responsible for trashing my hands was somewhere out here. I stared dumbly at the unquiet Pacific, across a few of its sixty-four million square miles.

  The likelihood of finding the yacht dropped off dramatically after forty-eight hours, we’d been told, as the search area swelled. A single-engine airplane could travel only sixty miles due west over the ocean; after that a twin-engine plane was required, the cost of which would quickly exceed the value of the sailboat. I’d been responsible for Just Imagine, and I had misplaced it. Everything had come unraveled, undone.

  IN NO TIME AT ALL SUPERFISH WOULD BE STEAMING BACK INTO SAN Francisco harbor, past the chaos of Fleet Week, past the radio distress calls born of too many gin and tonics, past that grand symbol of civilization, the Golden Gate Bridge, into the thick of human doings. And I was going with it.

  I looked back at the Farallones. They sparkled and glinted with an unfamiliar golden cast. I’d seen them washed in a dozen shades of sepia and I’d seen them crusty white and sometimes, from afar, I’d seen them turn as blue as the ocean around them. They’d appeared to me like hazy shadows, and in hard-edged silhouette. But I’d never seen them glow like shards of glass. In the molten light they resembled a forgotten aquatic kingdom, briefly risen from below to bask in the sunshine. Morgan, standing next to me, nodded toward Southeast Farallon. “Looking at those islands, you get the feeling nature could just take over,” he said. “Anytime it wanted.” There was profound humility in his voice.

  Maybe that’s what had been missing. Enough humility. The mix just hadn’t been right. A human footprint was barely tolerated at the Farallones when it was small; anchoring a sixty-foot sailboat there was like a big, clomping jackboot. Icarus, with his well-intentioned wax wings, learned it the hard way, too.

  And as we passed the islands for a final time, I knew that below us things were as they should be. The sharks patrolled and the urchins marched and the rockfish hunkered down for another century or two and the seals looked both ways before crossing. Come
winter, Tipfin, Spotty, Gouge, Cuttail, Bitehead, Cal Ripfin, and everyone else who had come around for the season would drop over the edge and head to their secret places, knifing into the unknown. Maybe they would return next September, or maybe, like Stumpy, they would transmute into legend. Like so many creatures in the ocean, they left a trail of mystery behind them. And they left me standing at the surface, looking down into the water.

  There’s another world, and it’s in this one.

  Epilogue

  We know. Somehow we know when there’s a shark around. It’s a kind of sixth sense. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to document what it is exactly, but if you have it while you’re surfing, I’d pay attention to it.

  —PETER PYLE, LECTURE TO SURFRIDER MEMBERS, SAN FRANCISCO CHAPTER, JUNE 10, 2003

  NOVEMBER 14, 2004

  Pale November sun was beginning to light up Monterey Bay when Kevin and I stepped through the back door of the aquarium. Only a handful of people were inside, preparing for the public’s arrival later this morning. Walking through darkened rooms filled with glowing tanks and serpentine bodies, we wound our way past the penguins and the otters and the swaying forest of kelp and neon platoons of jellyfish, toward the million-gallon majesty of the Outer Bay tank, where a recent arrival had been causing excitement. The thirty-foot wall of glass rose in front of us, casting the pitch-black anteroom into a kind of azure dreamscape. This vast tank was home to some seventy animals—large fish, for the most part—yellowfin and bluefin tunas, bonito, hammerhead and other smaller sharks, slinky California barracudas, a few black sea turtles as formidable as tanks, and five thousand unlucky sardines, whose numbers were dwindling fast. And this: one baby great white shark.

  She was the first thing we saw as we entered the exhibit room, a four-and-a-half-foot-long beauty making dramatic aerials against the glass, flashing her white belly and her black-edged pectoral fins and looking to all the world like an exotic little fighter jet, elegant and fierce at the same time. “There she is,” Kevin said. “Displaying in full form.” His face was illuminated in the blue underwater light, and he looked at the shark with a slightly awed smile.

  This tiniest Sister didn’t have a name and wasn’t slated to get one. (There was only one great white shark in this neighborhood. Under the circumstances, naming her would be an entirely sentimental gesture, at odds with the aquarium’s scientific roots.). She had distinctive facial markings, most notably a bright white clown nose. Earlier, a mask-shaped area of charcoal pigment around her eyes had been rubbed away, but this abrasion had healed nicely and she no longer resembled a piscine bank robber. Most likely, she had gotten scraped during her capture on August 20, when she was accidentally snagged in a halibut gill net near Huntington Beach, hauled aboard a fishing boat, and placed into a live well that wasn’t quite long enough to hold her, her face jammed against a corner.

  Every part of the plan had worked out perfectly. The scientists rescued her, then made the transfer to their four-million-gallon ocean pen, where she fed, showing no signs of stress. After three weeks of observation she was transported north, to the aquarium. On her first day in captivity she snapped up salmon fillets before a cheering crew of marine biologists, many of them visibly moved by the sight. Since then she had eaten regularly, and with such vigor that she managed to bite the tip off her bamboo feeding pole. SeaWorld’s sixteen-day record had been shattered. For now, at least, this white shark was thriving in the tank. Since her arrival in Monterey on September 15, she had gained twenty pounds, grown a few inches, and spurred a 50 percent increase in ticket sales.

  Watching a great white interact in an environment filled with other species was fascinating, and we stood for close to an hour, just staring. Her aura preceded her whenever she made an appearance in the window, and beside her the soupfin sharks and Galapagos sharks and hammerheads looked decidedly flimsy. Even the tunas, some of which were absolute battle-axes, appeared submissive in comparison. She swam with her mouth partially open, showing us her pointy baby teeth, which would later broaden into the heftier triangles that adult white sharks use to go about their work. Her back was colored a silvery gray, far paler than the suntanned Farallon sharks, whose lives did not involve spending time under fluorescent lights.

  When the aquarium opened its doors at ten o’clock, kids burst into the room, rivering around us, pressing their palms up against the glass. One boy, who rode into the Outer Bay exhibit on his father’s shoulders, asked loudly, “Where are the great white sharks?” At that moment the shark emerged from below, buzzing the newly gathered crowd, and provoking a chorus of “wows.” “She’s small but she’s still scary,” another child exclaimed to his mother.

  Exactly one year and nine days had passed since Just Imagine cantered off into the night. After the initial seventy-two hours of concerted searching with spotter planes turned up nothing, it was presumed that the yacht had headed far out to sea, or that it had been stolen. As the weeks wore on without a sign, options expanded to include the possibility that the boat’s bilge had become overloaded, that waves had swamped the deck, that Just Imagine had, in a word, sunk. Then, on November 9, 2003, when hope had been all but abandoned, Tom Camp had received a call from a navy yeoman, who informed him that “the ship Just Imagine has been sighted.”

  After leaving the island, it turned out, the yacht had drifted for thirty-one days, eventually floating into the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range three hundred miles south of the Farallones and fifty to sixty miles offshore, southwest of the Channel Islands. Astonishingly, it had managed to round Point Conception, a wickedly turbulent stretch of ocean that even boats with crews often have trouble navigating. The yacht was making a run for the Mexican border when the navy helicopters descended, hovering low over its bow and barking through a bullhorn that someone had better damn well start responding to their radio hails. More silence. Large, mute, unidentified vessels tooling around in a sensitive military zone are not looked upon kindly, and the gunships were radioing each other, discussing whether to blast the bejeezus out of it when a sharp-eared coast guard operator overheard the plan being finalized and intervened, identifying it as the “derelict boat” from the Farallones.

  A salvager from Ventura had braved tempestuous night seas to motor out and corral the yacht, armed only with compass coordinates that were several hours old. He knew, of course, that Just Imagine might be miles away from the spot where it was initially sighted, and upon his arrival the situation looked unpromising: his radar swept across a black and empty ocean. After several hours of searching, to no avail, he’d turned to head back toward shore when he received a faint hit on his scope. Something was out there, right at the edge of his range. Just Imagine. So he’d roped the sailboat like a runaway steer and clambered aboard as it heeled wildly, and then towed it back to the Channel Islands Marina. Damage was not insignificant: the steering system was demolished, various antennas had snapped off, and almost anything that wasn’t busted before was busted now. Still, things could have been far, far worse: the bilge was almost full, presaging a long ride to the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t pretty inside the cabin, either. Smashed bottles and sodden papers and pieces of garbage had been hurled randomly and exuberantly from fore to aft; coffee grounds lined the floor; mold and mildew flourished, cupboards were jacked open and emptied of their contents, my underwear was strewn across the kitchen. Perhaps most disturbingly, the antique Ouija board had managed to travel all the way from one end of the yacht to the other, somehow maneuvering its ten-pound bulk out of my partially zipped duffel bag, making its way up three steep stairs in the cabin and lodging itself under the dining banquette. This incredible journey unnerved me almost more than anything. (The board has now been safely and permanently disposed of.)

  And the verdict for the yacht’s delinquency? The anchor had ripped clean off, tearing its beastly thick anchor chain apart like a piece of taffy, and joining the other underwater testaments to nautical hubris that littered the Farallon reefs. All tha
t remained were a few yards of mangled links. Off the stern, a frayed inch-thick rope trailed forlornly: Tubby’s tether. The rowboat did not survive the journey, and she would be missed.

  Yet while material things like yachts and notebooks and cameras and demonic Ouija boards survived the misadventure basically intact, the personal damage would prove more difficult to repair. During the second week that Just Imagine was at large, Tom had placed an ad in a local sailing magazine called Latitude 49. REWARD: LOST AT SEA the attention-grabbing headline read, juxtaposed against a photograph of the yacht, and accompanied by a paragraph outlining the situation. Some of the other Farallon Patrol skippers saw it and called PRBO, concerned. At that point the whole story came out, and no one was impressed. Lawyers got involved. As the person in charge of the island, Peter was called onto the carpet, and lost his job. Sadly, he no longer works at the Farallones.

  Putting a painful situation into the most positive light, he reckoned that, in any case, it was time to begin a new chapter of his life. “I’m taking a break from predators,” he told me, outlining his plans for two new ornithology books. His tenure at the islands, he realized, stretched back to a time before the media caught the irresistible whiff of great white sharks and came hammering at the door, when permits weren’t even required—why would they be? You couldn’t get onto the island unless someone wanted you there. (The military was right: It would’ve made a hell of a fortress.) In the seventies and eighties, Farallon biologists were often visited by their wives and children, friends and family members dropped by, local artists were granted internships to write poetry or paint, inspired by the scenery. Individual judgment, rather than regulations, dictated actions. “Because you were just out there,” Peter explained. “And no one was going to be helping you.” Since those early cowboy days, however, out of necessity or design, the mainland rules and bureaucracies had migrated west.