3
South Australia, 1974
Part 2

The journey for The American Sportsman had not begun in that cage in the home range of the great white sharks: the cold, dark waters near Dangerous Reef in the Neptune Islands. Rather, the shooting schedule had been designed, wisely, to introduce me gradually to diving with sharks in the wild. The TV crew wanted me to get used to seeing sharks underwater. They hoped I would learn from swimming with some of the less imposing species that while sharks are indeed powerful and efficient predators, they know that human beings are not desirable prey.

No one—I least of all—wanted me to be so frightened that I'd refuse to participate in the “money shots.” Those were the moments of peril with great white sharks that TV viewers would tune in to see. In the past, some celebrities had frozen at critical moments and refused to go on. Sometimes they invented elaborate excuses that included suddenly being called to meetings with Hollywood moguls. Somehow these calls had mysteriously made their way to places so remote that they were unreachable by phone, wires, or radio. (There were no faxes back then, no cell phones, no satellite dishes, no pagers.)

We began on the Great Barrier Reef, where there was no danger of seeing a great white shark because, supposedly, great whites didn't exist on the Barrier Reef. The water there was considered too warm; white sharks preferred the cool seas of South Australia (and California, New York, and Massachusetts). Also, the Barrier Reef was well charted, well known, and visited year-round by thousands of divers. The ports along the East Coast were populated by knowledgeable seamen who could choose specific parts of the reef to dive in, depending on what the clients wanted to see.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of our planet's largest living organisms, an interconnected complex of creatures that is fifteen hundred miles long. It's the longest, the biggest, the richest reef system in the world. It has wild areas, restricted areas, populated areas, tourist areas, and conservation areas.

It was decided that I should learn how to dive with sharks by beginning with what Australians call bronze whalers. Bronze whalers are relatively small sharks (five to seven feet long) that tend to gather in schools. They are generally regarded as controllable by people experienced in dealing with them, although they can be dangerous when their territory is threatened or when they're fighting over food.

Our first morning on the reef, Stan Waterman had assembled the underwater housing for his 16mm movie camera. He had decided to take the empty housing into the water first, to make sure it wouldn't spring a leak and flood his camera with salt water.

He strapped on a scuba tank and I followed him, eager to get as much experience as possible under safe conditions (as I had been assured they were). We sat on the swim step at the back of the boat—the gaudy reef and sandy bottom were clearly visible through no more than thirty feet of clear water—rinsed our masks, and rolled forward into the sea.

The first couple of seconds of every dive are discombobulating. When you're surrounded by bubbles escaping from your regulator and your equipment, you're blind and deaf. Up feels like down, down like up. Very quickly, though, your eyes adjust, and your inner ear orients you in this new space. You hear the comforting sound of air being inhaled and exhaled through your regulator.

When we regained our senses, Stan and I nodded to each other and started down.

He saw it first and recognized it immediately. I might have seen it, too; I don't remember. But I do remember noticing its peculiar features: the pointed snout, the blue-gray upper body and stark white underbelly, the perfect triangle of pectoral fins and dorsal fin. And one of the dead giveaways I would soon learn to recognize: the apparently toothless upper jaw, lip rolled under, concealing the rows of sheathed daggers.

It was angling up toward us, slowly, as if idly curious. Stan touched my arm and looked into my eyes. There was something so earnest in his gaze—the eyes that normally shone and sparkled were as flat as slate—that I knew instantly what he was saying: Stick with me, do what I do, for we are being approached by a Great … White … Shark.

My first instinct, of course, was to turn and flee, but by now the shark was within ten or fifteen feet of us. Even in my terror I knew that flight would send a one-word message to the animal: food. So I followed Stan.

Holding his camera housing before him, Stan swam slowly down, directly toward the shark. I could see that this was not, in fact, a big great white, though part of my brain registered it as the size of a rhinoceros. It was about ten feet long, a young male. It was probably still adapting to its world, learning about water temperature, hunting grounds, feeding methods—and now, analyzing prey.

I found myself wondering what we looked like to the shark. Large, loud, bubbling creatures, similar to seals or sea lions in our black wet suits, but with one big difference: we were unafraid (after all, we weren't running but were actually approaching). We might even look aggressive. Still, nothing to be feared. The only things this animal would fear would be larger versions of itself and killer whales.

Quietly, we descended. Even more quietly, it ascended. Are you crazy? Why are you playing chicken with a great white shark?

When we were no more than five feet apart, the shark blinked. Without seeming to flick its tail or alter the pitch of its fins or move a muscle, it changed direction from up to down and passed beneath us. We stopped and turned, and watched the shark disappear into the gray canyons of the deeper reef.

Once safe back aboard the boat, I protested. “I thought … you said … you promised …”

“I know,” Stan said with a grin. “Amazing, isn't it? Can you believe the luck? And I didn't even have my camera!”

“But what about—”

“The first law of sharks,” he said, “is this: forget all the laws about sharks.”

For the next nine days we waited and watched and baited and dove—day and night, hour after hour—and we saw no sharks of any species. We set out chum slicks of fish guts and oil; the crew speared fish and we hung the corpses off the stern of the boat. We prepared savory baits and tied them to brain corals and then hid quietly in crannies in the reef until, one by one, we ran out of air and surfaced. Then we put new tanks into our backpacks and descended again to resume our posts.

We swam free, without cages. Back then most divers thought you needed cages only when you were dealing with great white sharks, or when you were filming large numbers of big sharks that might be aggressive. Now we know better.

The water was warmer than eighty degrees, and our wet suits kept us comfortable for a long time. But eventually the hardiest of us got chilly and began to shiver, and, again one by one, we gave in to the cold and surfaced for good.

With one day to go in this first half of our schedule, we had no film, not a single frame of any shark in the water, with or without people. None of the experts could imagine where the sharks could possibly have gone. Bronze whalers were always around this area. The local crew had been here, all told, for more than fifty years, and they had never seen anything like this. If only we'd been here two weeks before; the sharks had been jumping everywhere. And so on—every excuse ever uttered by every fishing guide and boat captain who has ever struck a dry hole in the ocean.

Our tenth and last day began exactly like the others: clear, hot, flat calm, no breeze, and very little current. The corpse of a big stingray was tied to a brain coral as bait. I dove down and took my position in the sand. I was kneeling (as instructed) exactly thirty-one inches from the stingray. This was the distance needed for Stan to capture, in the same picture frame, me and any shark that might show up.

After about an hour I had emptied my tank of compressed air. So I surfaced, stretched, warmed myself in the sun for a few minutes, changed tanks, and dove down again. Almost weightless, rocked gently by what current there was, snug and cozy in my rubber suit in the warm ocean, I fell asleep. At least, I must have, for I have no memory of time passing or of seeing or hearing anything until I felt Stan tap my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw, less than an arm's length away, a shark the size of a school bus about to assault our stingray bait.

It was a tiger shark. There was no mistaking the stripes on its flanks, the peculiar catfish-like protrusions from its nasal passages, the broad, flat head, and the curved, serrated teeth in its top and bottom jaws. A tiger is one of the few species of shark that has well earned the title man-eater. Its mouth was open, and the upper jaw had dropped down and rolled its teeth into the bite position.

The nictitating membrane—a defense mechanism in many sharks designed to cover the eyeball and protect it from the claws or teeth of struggling prey—had slid up and over all but a tiny slit of the yellowish eye. That was a sign that the shark had decided to bite—had, in fact, begun to bite. I thought the tiger looked like a maniac.

Startled as much as afraid, I must have flinched backward, for I felt Stan's hand pushing me forward.

Thirty-one inches, I thought. That thing is thirty-one inches from my face.

The tiger shark was enormous, at least thirteen feet long. It grabbed the stingray and began to shake it. The huge body writhed, stirring up a cloud of sand and generating pressure waves that rocked me backward. I looked for something to hold on to, to steady myself. But the only solid structure within reach was the brain coral to which the ray was tied. Somehow I thought that to put my hands into the shark's mouth might be … a bad idea.

The shark's teeth sawed off one wing of the stingray. Then, swallowing, it swam away, swinging in a slow circle to approach the bait again.

As the cloud of sand cleared and settled, movement somewhere above made me look up. Halfway to the surface, perhaps fifteen feet away, was a second tiger shark, this one as big as a midsize sedan. It was swimming with agitated movements, and it looked angry.

I knew why it was frustrated. In the world of tiger sharks—and several other species—the biggest feeds first. This smaller animal, which we decided later was about eleven feet long, had no choice but to watch as the tasty meal was consumed by the larger fellow.

Again the big tiger bit down on the stingray, seeming this time to take the entire brain coral in its mouth. Its teeth tore the carcass to pieces. Shreds of gray-black skin flew out through the shark's gill slits and sank to the sand. Tiny fish snatched them up and retreated to eat them in the shelter of the reef.

I was paralyzed, not from fear but from fascination and concentration. And then—

Oh, no.

I couldn't breathe. Trying to inhale was like sucking on an empty Coke bottle. Quickly I looked at my air gauge: zero.

I was out of air.

For once I didn't panic, and I didn't shoot for the surface. I knew the risk of an air embolism. If you ascend too fast, holding your breath, the air in your lungs will expand and blow a hole in a lung. Then an air bubble can travel to your heart or brain and kill or cripple you. If I was going to try a free ascent, I wanted to do it properly: drop my weights, open my mouth, and exhale constantly as I swam for the surface.

But I also knew that there was, in fact, at least one more breath of air in the tank, though I'd have to ascend to get it. Air that has compressed as a diver descends expands when he ascends. Unless you have truly sucked a vacuum into your tank, chances are there's a bit of crucial, life-sustaining air left.

Of course, to be on the surface above two tiger sharks, one feeding and one angry because it couldn't feed, was not an ideal situation. Still, it struck me as preferable to drowning. Besides, I didn't intend to stay on the surface for long. I looked up and saw the boat above me. If I went up at the right angle, I should be able to surface near—if not exactly at—the dive step on the boat.

I turned to Stan and made the out-of-air signal—a finger drawn across the throat. Then I rose off the sand bottom, slowly, as quietly as possible. I straightened my legs for the first time in more than an hour and started to kick.

Both legs cramped at the same time and in exactly the same way: my hamstrings sprang taut, snapping each leg up under my body. That left me with useless legs, feet, and fins. The sudden pain made me gasp … except there was no air to gasp.

Now you are in trouble. … What to do, what to do, what to do?

I pulled the release on my weight belt. Twenty-five pounds of lead dropped from my waist, so immediately I began to rise.

A breath of air became available, and I gulped it down. I was careful to leave my mouth open to let my exhaling breath escape.

The last thing I saw before my head popped through the surface was the second tiger shark, swimming in circles beneath me. Alerted by my noisy ascent, it had swum over to see what was going on. Its body was tilted slightly, so that I could see its eye watching me.

No worries, mate, I thought. Just put an arm out and let 'em pull you aboard the boat.

Frightened and disoriented by the pain in my locked legs, I extended an arm and … nothing. Nobody grabbed it.

I spun in place, and … Well, no wonder. The boat was ten yards away and drifting farther. No! Impossible! The boat was anchored. … I was the one drifting. I was caught in a surface current and being swept away.

I raised my arms, hoping to communicate that I was helpless in the water. Somehow that message got through to our director, Scott Ransom. He grabbed a rope, flung himself off the stern of the boat, and swam to me. Together we held on to the rope, and the crew pulled us to the boat.

I never once looked down. If the tiger shark was pursuing us, I didn't want to know.

Thus ended the “easy” part of the shoot, the get-acquainted-with-sharks part. From here on, I knew, matters would become serious. We were headed south, to Dangerous Reef. There I would climb into a flimsy cage bobbing in a sea of blood, and a crew of experts would do their best to get a great white shark to approach the cage and try to eat me.

Why? I wondered. Why did I have to write a novel about a shark? Why not a novel about … I don't know … a puppy?