Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea

by Peter Benchley

  Divers are accustomed to seeing barracudas appear from nowhere, as if by teleportation, hang around and gaze with fixed eye at whatever’s going on, and then disappear with the same impossible speed. Sometimes they come very close and hover, motionless, watching; usually, they establish and somehow maintain a precise distance from the divers, advancing and retreating without appearing to flutter a single fin.

  I have never heard of a barracuda seeing a human being, watching, studying, and appraising him, and then turning on him and biting him. Never.

  Which was no comfort at all when one day I took Wendy and then-twelve-year-old Clayton drift diving off Palm Beach, Florida.

  Drift diving is diving in—and with—a strong current, and it is done in circumstances where swimming against the current is difficult, dangerous, or downright impossible. Divers leave the boat in one location, drift along with the current—holding a line tethered to an inflated ball that bobs on the surface so the captain of the boat can keep track of them—and are retrieved by the boat far down-current when the dive is done.

  Palm Beach is perfect for drift diving because one of the world’s great currents, the Gulf Stream, effectively touches the shore right there as it sweeps north, and eventually northeast, warming the Atlantic waters all the way from Bermuda to Newfoundland and points east. Dive boats can deposit divers only a couple of hundred yards offshore, where instantly they’re seized by the warm, four-knot current and carried along with the entire movable feast that inhabits the Gulf Stream.

  Four of us jumped into the choppy water—we three and a dive master, who held the line tied to the floating ball—and quickly sank to the calm and quiet thirty or forty feet down. The water was so rich in nutrients that it was cloudy; visibility was terrible, and Wendy and I made sure to keep our eyes on both Clayton and the dive master.

  There wasn’t much to see, however, and Clayton soon became impatient. Not content with the speed with which we were roaring along, he increased his velocity by kicking with the current.

  Within thirty seconds he had vanished into the gloom.

  Though Wendy and I were both concerned, we weren’t particularly worried: he couldn’t stray too far, and he could only stray in one direction because he couldn’t possibly swim against the current.

  Then there he was, suddenly, chugging directly at us, against the current, kicking as fast as his fins would flutter, breast-stroking with his arms, staring at us through the faceplate of his mask, his eyes wide with fear. Implausibly, he was making headway, and when he reached us he kept swimming until he was behind me, and then he stopped struggling, grabbed me, and climbed aboard my back.

  I looked at Wendy, who was looking at Clayton, who was pointing somewhere ahead as, in exhaustion, he breathed so fast that bubbles exploded from his regulator in a constant stream.

  We looked, following his finger, but saw nothing. I was beginning to assume that Clayton had inadvertently come up behind, and perhaps startled, a shark that had turned toward him, scaring him out of his wits, when I saw Wendy pointing and then the dive master pointing, and there, a few yards ahead and below, was what looked like a big school of big sharks, just cruising along in the current, as if waiting for food to be carried to them.

  But they weren’t sharks. As we drifted closer and closer, and they slowly rose to meet us until we were actually drifting among them, I saw that they were barracudas, and not merely great barracudas, for the word great doesn’t do them justice. They were super-, mega-, Moby barracudas, barracudas on steroids.

  I couldn’t believe it. Even allowing for the fact that, under water, everything looks a third again as big as it really is, these monsters couldn’t be real. They were at least twelve feet long. Which meant that they were really nine feet long.

  Nine-foot barracudas! They were two feet high and one foot thick, and each one’s mouth looked like a Swiss army knife open for display. Their eyes stared at us with the blank serenity of the invulnerable.

  It took me several minutes to rein in my mental hyperbole. As we continued to drift together, and these great creatures paid us no attention whatever—they moved aside, in fact, to avoid contact with us—I could finally see them in proper perspective.

  There were probably a dozen of them—it was hard to tell, for they drifted in and out of sight—and each one was probably five or six feet long and very high and very thick. As I gazed at each silver giant, I now saw, instead of ugliness, the beauty of perfection, for in their world these creatures were supreme. They went where they wanted, ate what they chose, and feared no living thing.

  When at last we surfaced and were back on the boat, Clayton said, “I think I’d like to be a barracuda.”

  Rays

  The oceans are full of rays of all kinds, colors, shapes, and sizes. All are “cousins” of the sharks, in that they’re technically elasmobranchs; their bodies are structured not with bones but with cartilage. They include everything from sawfishes to guitarfishes to manta rays, eagle rays, and stingrays, and—except for the most bizarre of accidental circumstances—they’re harmless to humans.

  But what about stingrays? I hear you yowling. They have stingers, don’t they? They can sting you, can’t they?

  Yes, they can, if you step on them. But so can bees. And a bald eagle can claw your eyes out, and a German shepherd can rip your throat out, and a raccoon can give you rabies. But the chances are, they won’t.

  Anyone who needs convincing of the general benevolence of stingrays need travel no farther than the Cayman Islands, where local dive groups have established a dive site called Stingray City, in the sand flats off Grand Cayman. Stingrays gather there in numbers far too large to count, and they wait patiently for the boats that arrive daily with divers and food. The rays swim up to you, under your arms, between your legs, around your head; they envelop you with wings as soft as satin; they feed from your hand, and if you have nothing for them, they move on to someone else. (Even stingrays can make mistakes, however: a few years ago, one mistook my son-in-law’s wrist for a tender morsel, and actually bit him. The hard cartilaginous plates in the ray’s mouth caused a nasty bruise but didn’t break the skin.)

  It’s very tempting to anthropomorphize stingrays, because not only do they behave calmly and comfortably around humans but, when seen from underneath, they can even look humanoid, if you’ll let your imagination ramble a bit. The nostrils look like eyes, the mouth is a mouth, and the point of the head can become a nose, and … well, you have to be there. Ellis points out that long, long ago, stingrays dead, dried, and doctored were known as “Jenny Hanivers” and were displayed as proof of the existence of mermaids.

  Twenty years ago I had an experience with a ray that changed my life. Literally. Not only did I hurry home and write a book about it—The Girl of the Sea of Cortez—but it altered forever my perception of animals, people, the sea, and the interconnectedness of everything on earth.

  I was in the Sea of Cortez, doing an American Sportsman segment on hammerhead sharks, which for reasons no one has ever been able to ascertain gather there periodically in huge, peaceful schools of hundreds, perhaps thousands, at a time. The gatherings seem to have nothing to do with either breeding or feeding; the hammerheads are simply there, in crowds so thick that, seen from below, they block the sun.

  The underwater cameramen on the shoot were old friends, Stan Waterman and Howard Hall; Howard’s wife, Michele, who’s now a producer, director, and partner in Howard’s film company, was along in the dual capacities of nurse and still photographer.

  One afternoon, when we returned to our chartered boat, the Don Jose, full of macho tales of death-defying diving among the anthropophagi, we were interrupted by a very excited Michele, who directed us to look beneath the boat.

  There, basking in the boat’s cool shadow, was the largest manta ray any of us had ever seen. (We’d soon learn that it measured eighteen feet from wing tip to wing tip; for the moment, all we knew was that it looked as big as an F-16.) Its unique cep
halic fins, which would unfurl during feeding and become supple sweeps to gather food into the immense maw, were rolled up tightly now, and they looked exactly like horns—thus, the manta’s age-old traditional name, devilfish.

  For centuries the manta was one of the most terrifying animals in the sea: huge, horned, winged, with a mouth big enough to swallow a person whole and a proclivity for leaping clear out of the water, turning somersaults, and slamming down upon the surface of the sea, obviously daring any foolish sailor to fall overboard into its ghastly grasp. Equally obviously, such hideous monsters deserved no fate better than death, and spearing mantas used to be a popular sport among the few, the bold, and the brave.

  In fact, mantas are harmless. They eat only plankton and other microscopic sea life. They breach (soar out of the water) for reasons no one knows for certain, probably to rid themselves of parasites but possibly, as I prefer to believe, just for the hell of it. Usually, they avoid people, swimming—flying seems more accurate—slowly away from approaching divers.

  Sometimes, however, they seem to seek the company of people; witness the manta that now rested peacefully beneath our boat. Before any of us could ask, Michele told us how she had discovered the magnificent creature.

  The air temperature was well above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The Don Jose was not air-conditioned. To keep bearably cool, Michele went overboard frequently, and on one of her plunges she had seen the enormous ray hovering motionless beneath the boat. She swam toward it. It didn’t move. As she drew near, she saw that the animal was injured: where one wing joined the body there was a tear in the flesh, and the wound was full of rope. Michele supposed that the manta had swum blindly into one of the countless nets set by fishermen all over the Sea of Cortez. In struggling to free itself, which it had accomplished not with teeth (they have none) but with sheer strength, it had torn its wing and carried pieces of the broken net away with it.

  Michele kept expecting the manta to ease away from her as she approached, but by now she was virtually on top of it and still it hadn’t moved. She was, however, out of breath; she decided to return to the boat and put on scuba gear.

  The manta was still there when she returned. This time she was emitting noisy streams of bubbles, and she knew that the manta would flee from them.

  It didn’t.

  Slowly, she let herself fall gently down until she was sitting on the manta’s back.

  Still it didn’t move.

  Michele reached forward and, very gingerly, pulled strand after strand of thick rope netting out of the ragged wound. She had no idea how—or even if—rays experience pain, but if they did, she thought, this had to hurt.

  The manta lay perfectly still.

  When all the rope was gone, Michele carefully packed the shreds of torn flesh together and pressed them into the cavity in the wing. She covered the wound with her hands.

  Now the manta came to life. Very slowly it raised its wings and brought them down again, and very slowly the great body began to move forward, not with enough velocity to throw Michele off its back but with an easy, casual pace that let her ride comfortably along. To steady herself Michele put one hand on the manta’s six-foot-wide upper lip, and off they went, with Michele’s heart pounding in her chest, elation filling her heart, amazement and delight flooding her mind.

  The boat was anchored on a sea mount, an underwater mountain whose peak extended to within a hundred feet of the surface, and with unimaginable grace the manta took Michele on a flying tour of the entire mountaintop. Down it flew to the edge of darkness, then up again to the surface light.

  Michele didn’t know how long the ride lasted—fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour—but eventually the manta returned to its station in the shadow of the boat and stopped. Michele let go and came to the surface: incredulous, thrilled beyond words, and knowing full well that we would never believe her because surely, by the time we returned, the manta would have long since returned to its home range, wherever that might be.

  But it hadn’t. It was still there, still resting in the cool, still apparently—impossibly!—willing to have more contact with humans.

  We decided to try to capture the manta on film. We knew we couldn’t duplicate Michele’s experience, but even if we could get some shots of the great ray flying away, with a human being in the same frame to give a sense of its size, we’d have some very special film.

  When Howard and Stan had filmed the ray itself from every possible angle, they signaled for me to descend, as Michele had, and attempt to land gently on the manta’s back. I had done my best to neutralize my buoyancy so that, once submerged, my 180 pounds would weigh nothing, and now I used my hands like little fins to guide me down upon the animal as lightly as a butterfly.

  As soon as the manta felt my presence on its back, it started forward. It flew very slowly at first, but soon its wings fell into a long, graceful sweep, and it accelerated to a speed at which I—in order to stay aboard—had to grip its upper lip with one hand and a wing with the other and lie flat against its back. My mask was mashed against my face, we were going so fast, and my hair was plastered back so hard that on film I look bald.

  I felt like a fighter pilot—no, not a pilot, for I had no control over this craft; rather, like a passenger in a fighter plane. Down we flew, and banked around the sea mount, and soared again. We passed turtles that didn’t give us a passing glance and hammerheads that (I swear) did a double take as they saw us go by.

  The world grew dark, and for a moment I was afraid—I knew we had gone very deep, but I had no way of knowing exactly how deep because I couldn’t let go with one hand to retrieve my depth gauge. If we’re too deep, I worried, I’ll run out of air, or get the bends on surfacing, or—

  Just then, as if to reassure me, the manta returned to the world of light. It rushed for the surface, gaining speed with every thrust of its mighty wings, and I had the sudden, terrifying conviction that it was going to burst through the surface and take to the air—and me with it—and when we slammed down again on the water I would be reduced to pudding. But long before it reached the surface, the manta swerved away and began to cruise twenty or thirty feet below the boat.

  Finally, it slowed, then silently stopped directly in the shadow of the boat. I let go and made my way to the surface.

  Like Michele, I didn’t know how long my journey had lasted, and there was no way to find out. My air tank was almost empty, and Stan and Howard had each run through a full load of film, which meant that I had been under water on that magical ride for at least twenty minutes. But how deep, and for how long, at what depth? The only way I would know how much residual nitrogen remained in my system—the villain that brings on bends—was to wait. If I came down with the agony of the bends, in my joints or my guts, I’d know I had gone too deep for too long. If I didn’t, I’d know I hadn’t. Simple as that.

  The manta, meanwhile, remained beneath the boat. Over the next three days, every member of the crew had a chance to swim with or ride on the manta, and always, without exception, the wonderful ray returned its passengers to the same exact spot beneath the boat.

  As soon as I returned home, I began to write, for a story had been born, entire, in my head. I wrote it at record speed (for me) and with thoughts, feelings, and perceptions I didn’t know I had.

  It was published as the novel The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, and though it’s now out of print, I’m delighted that readers (especially young ones) are still discovering it, for it is my favorite of all my books about the sea.

  Though the book still clings to life, I’m sorry to report that the magical manta rays of the Sea of Cortez do not. Too many fishermen lost too many nets to the mantas, and so they hunted them down and killed them.

  Squid—Giant and Otherwise

  Of all the creatures that have ever lived in the sea, none, I warrant, has generated more groundless fears and fabulous fantasies than the giant squid. Jules Verne had a giant squid attack the submarine Nautilus in 20,000 Leag
ues Under the Sea. I wrote a novel about a giant squid, titled Beast, which NBC made into a miniseries. And Richard Ellis, who knows more than I ever will about giant squid, published a fine, comprehensive, and accessible nonfiction book called The Search for the Giant Squid.

  Ellis’s title is particularly appropriate, for almost the entire history of man’s relationship with this most formidable of all invertebrates has been a search, and a fruitless one at that. One of the main reasons—if not the main reason—for our endless fascination with this monster of monsters is that so very, very little is known about it. And the reason for that is that despite twenty-first-century technology and vast expenditures of money and time by battalions of intrepid scientists and adventurers, no one has ever seen a giant squid alive in its habitat—that is, the ocean. What fragments are known have been gathered from studies of specimens either dead or dying in the nets that have ensnared them.

  Here, in a combination of facts from Ellis’s encyclopedia and my own experiences, conversations, and reading, is a distillation of what’s known about giant squid.

  Their scientific name is Architeuthis, which translates from the Greek (roughly) as “first among squids,” not first in line but first in importance, as in “squid of all squids” or, in today’s parlance, “Man, you de squiiiid.” There are more than a dozen different species of Architeuthis, most named for the place their corpses were found, but amateurs like me bundle them all together with the single name Architeuthis dux: king of kings of squids. Sort of.

  They are the largest of the more than seven hundred kinds of squid that live in the world’s oceans. The biggest one accepted by science—the dead animal, found decades ago washed up on a New Zealand shore, was complete—was definitively measured at fifty-seven feet long, from its tail to the tip of its two “whips,” or feeding tentacles. (Unlike octopuses, squid have ten arms, eight short ones plus the two whips.)