BARRACUDAS

If ever there was a fish that's gotten a bad rap solely for being bad-looking, it's the barracuda. A barracuda can grow to be up to six feet long and is slender, tough, and fast as lightning. It is armed with a prognathous lower jaw (it extends forward beyond the upper one) studded with dozens of jagged, needle-sharp teeth designed to tear prey to shreds. A barracuda looks mean, menacing, and deadly. (I speak here specifically of the great barracuda, the largest of the more than twenty species that roam the tropical waters of the world.)

The image is a phony. The great barracuda is capable, no question, of causing serious bodily harm to any of us. But it has no inclination to do so. It feeds on fish, and its speed and weaponry are so formidable that it has little difficulty catching and killing whatever it wants.

There have been very, very few cases of barracudas biting people. All those I've heard of were almost certainly accidents of misidentification. A swimmer wears a shiny watch, ring, or buckle into the surf, where visibility is poor, and a barracuda mistakes a flash of reflected light for the shimmer of fish scales. It bites, instantly recognizes its error, and vanishes. Sometimes the bite is so fast and efficient that the person doesn't know he's been bitten.

Divers are used to seeing barracudas appear from nowhere. These fish hang around and gaze with fixed eye at whatever's going on, 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 evaluating 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. It is done in circumstances where swimming against the current is difficult, dangerous, or downright impossible. Divers leave the boat in one location and drift along with the current. They hold a line tied to an inflated ball that bobs on the surface so the captain of the boat can keep track of them. Then the boat picks them up 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, touches the shore right there. The Gulf Stream then 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. They are instantly 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. We 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. We weren't roaring along fast enough for him, so he sped up 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. He was swimming against the current, kicking as fast as his fins would flutter and breast-stroking with his arms. He stared at us through the faceplate of his mask, his eyes wide with fear. He was actually making headway, and when he reached us, he kept swimming until he was behind me. Then he stopped struggling, grabbed me, and climbed aboard my back.

I looked at Wendy, who was looking at Clayton. Clayton was pointing somewhere ahead. He was exhausted, and 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 come up behind and perhaps startled a shark that had turned toward him, scaring him out of his wits. Then I saw Wendy pointing and then the dive master pointing. There, a few yards ahead and below, was what looked like a big school of big sharks. They were 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, 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 Dick barracudas, barracudas on steroids.

I couldn't believe it. Even allowing for the fact that, underwater, everything looks a third again as big as it really is, these monsters couldn't be real. They looked 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.

As we continued to drift together, these great creatures paid us no attention whatsoever. In fact, they moved aside to avoid contact with us, and 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. 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.”