"He reached down for the other fin, jerked it off, and, man!" Paul motioned with two fingers upraised over his head. "We headed up... we hit the surface, first thing we hear is these bozos," he points at Pelayo and I, "singing ... 'But I would not feel so ALL ALONE ... EVERYBODY must get STONED!"' along with Dylan on the boom-box. Then the empty black jack bottle shatters on a beam right above us.
"Christ, I thought. They finished it off. So we swim to the back of the boat with these guys singing away-joined by some rig workers now. We clamber aboard ... and they go crazy howling. You guys"-Paul nodded towards us again-"were shit-faced"
"Last dive of the day." Pelayo shrugged. "Man, we like to die laughing when we see Bob, his naked ass, all scratched and stuff."
"But Bob's in no mood for that shit." Paul chuckles. "He was rattled. Badly shaken up. And he starts screaming 'SHUT UP! JUST SHUT THE HELL UP!' Remember, guys?" Paul's laughing now, and Tom too.
"Do we!" Pelavo roars. "Man, he was shaking one fist at us and scratching the urchin wounds and hydroid burns on his ass with his other hand. 'SHUT UP YOU BUNCHA ASSHOLES!' he kept screeching. Finally he started crying. I mean bawling like a hysterical old woman, shaking-shivering like crazy-let's face it, poor guy'd been through some spooky shit-enough to spook anybody. Anyway, he's wild-eyed, red faced, veins poking outta his forehead. Looked like his head was gonna explode."
"Naturally that just made it worse." Paul said "We were doubled over. I mean dying, looking up at the rig-workers lined up at the railing laughing along with us. Bob was raving. Looking up at them. Then down at us. Then he's trying to punch us, still naked. Going nuts. We thought we were gonna have to tie him up with the anchor rope. Finally he slipped on a tank and went down, bashing the hell out of his knee."
"By now we could hardly breathe," Pelayo laughed. "I can still see him, blubbering and moaning, on top of the tanks, his white ass poking out, all red and scratched up. Then I snuck up behind him and started pissing on his ass.... He came up swinging the gaff."
"Till I grabbed him in a hammerlock from behind," Paul laughed. "`It's the treatment!' we kept yelling. He was kinda new to diving at the time. `Chill out! You're supposed to piss on urchin wounds, man! The uric acid helps cure it, helps cut the stinging.' Anyway, he didn't dive with us for the rest of the season."
"Didn't dive with anyone," Pelayo corrected. "That was two years ago. But he started again last year. You'll meet him tonight at the camp-out on the island, Tom. I get the feeling the topic may come up, hunh guys?" Pelayo and Paul chuckled.
"He stays away from those pipes, though." Paul nodded. "Y'all about ready?"
"Just about," I said while reaching for a tank.
We'd exaggerated just a little. Shrink the sharks, scratch the Coast Guard and captain stuff, change the name "Bob" to "Lance." Change "wolf eel" to "big ball of monofilament fishing line," and the story pretty much corresponds with events.
"I'm about set," Pelayo said while fiddling with his spear gun bands. "On-the-Ball? Hand me my fin over there, will ya?"
Terry "Poppa Smurf" Migaud, at fifty-one, the grand old man and historian of the Helldivers Dive Club, was diving with club mates Stan Smith and Louis Rossignol, both over twenty years his junior. I won't get into a detailed physical description of Terry. His nickname is quite apt. His philosophy of diving is equally succinct. "We're always looking for a little excitement," he shrugs. A typical rig-diver here. No pretense, no artifice; a stand-up guy. He's a lifelong New Orleanian and a Helldivers Club member for going on thirty years. For years he held the Louisiana shark record with a 407-pounder speared in 1984-then Stan "The Man" Smith burst upon the scene.
On this dive these three avowed shark slayers were together, prowling the shallower rigs (70-foot depths) just east of Breton Island. While we sought peace of mind in deeper, cleaner water, they sought huge sharks in shallower and murkier water. Their six-foot spear guns were customized for maximum range and penetration, the shafts strained for release against six bands of extra-thick surgical tubing apiece. Their riding rigs were ready, either to ride with a speared shark or to finally "tie him off" to the rig itself if air ran low-if they weren't too tangled or narked.
Big predators-apex predators-need a place to hide. Just the sight of them sends their prey scurrying. They also need a place to seek revenge against those who presume to muscle them off their "apex" perch-Helldivers, for instance, or big game hunters, their terrestrial counterparts.
Peter Hathaway Capstick titled his best-selling book on African big game hunting Death In The Long Grass. That's where the lions and the leopards stalk their prey. They also leap into it when wounded-then double back on their trail and lie in ambush for whatever caused their pain. Blasted by a high caliber bullet that hits vitals but misses heavy bone, a lion makes for it every time. He's enraged, bleeding, staggering, spouting blood from mouth and nose, drifting in and out of consciousness-no matter; he hangs on. He hunkers down flat against the grass, panting, leg muscles coiled for a savage rush-his last. Blood from his burning lungs foams on his lips and nostrils with every breath. He clutches at his flickering life with a death grip, fighting to clear the haze in the head. Revenge is a marvelous stimulus. "Please!" he implores his deity. "Just five more minutes. Give me enough time and strength to catch this little punk with his little safari outfit who ambushed me at my meal, popped off that noise and sent this searing, throbbing pain into my flank. Let the spark linger in my stiffening joints till the little bastard bumbles down this trail. Give me one last charge, then the vigor for a final frenzy of slashing claw and chomping fang. I wanna hear him scream, wanna see his eyes pop when I rip into his face and mangle it ... I wanna feel his chest shredding under my claws, ripping into human hamburger as he screams. Please, Earth Goddess Gaia ... just ... five (I'm getting weaker) more ... minutes-YES! Here he COMES!"
Under a rig, the murk performs much the same function for sharks: The Long Grass.
"All I saw was teeth coming at me," remembers Bobby Geanelloni when he speared his 350-pounder. And he was luckier than Helldiver Carl Loe.
A few years back, three Helldivers were diving 30 miles off Cocodrie at a fairly shallow rig-120 feet deep. Carl Loe, usually among the more venturesome of Helldivers, was chillin' out this dive. He was sitting on a beam at about 100 feet, shooting sheepshead, of all things. These are small, slow, and clumsy fish. A ten-pounder is considered huge-great eating, though. So they're typically targeted by novices or by meat divers not interested in a huge trophy.
Each species has it's own division at every rodeo and the biggest brought in merits a trophy. So Carl was shooting for the winning sheepshead today, and he had some nice ones strung up already. He was just sitting on a beam near the bottom-his legs actually dangling in the murk. He didn't know that Art Bukafske was in the murk below him, finning slowly through the "Long Grass," finger on the trigger. Terry Migaud had just emerged from the murk and was passing near the stationary Carl when "Poppa Smurf" suddenly saw Carl's body jerk violently.
"That shark grabbed both Carl's legs in one bite!" says Terry. "Then he was trying to twist them off! Jerking back and forth." Fortunately for Carl it was a sand tiger. They have a mouthful of mean teeth, all right, but they're long and sharp, and there are several rows of them. They're made for catching and eating fish-unlike a tiger shark, bull shark, or hammerhead. Those sharks have serrated teeth, made for sawing, tearing and ripping. A sand tiger's teeth are like a trap. They're made for piercing and gripping. Bad enough. But if it had been a hull that grabbed Carl, he might have lost his legs.
The International Shark File and the book Shark Attack list the attack on Carl as "unprovoked," because that's how it was reported in the New Orleans Times Picayune.
"Yeah, those newspapers," Terry and his Helldiver buddies snicker when they read it. "They believe anything. No, no," Terry says. "Believe me, that shark was plenty provoked. That shark had a spear in him." And it wasn't Carl's.
Contemporary dive lore regards th
e sand tiger or "gray nurse shark" as languid and generally harmless. At worst he's the Jekyll and Hyde of the shark clan: schizophrenic, unpredictable. So let's go back a bit: in the 1960s the U.S. Navy compiled a Shark Danger Rating list. It describes the gray nurse as "swift and savage," and somehow rates it atop the tiger shark for danger. So there.
A 1953 book titled Fishes of South Africa by marine biologist J. L. B. Smith says that in that country, "probably most shallowwater attacks are due to this shark ... the jaw of a ten-foot specimen could easily sever a human head or thigh." Dr. Smith watched a sand tiger feeding while underwater. "The upper jaw shoots out, the inner teeth become erect in both jaws, and the snout forms a grotesque pointed hood over this projecting, fang-lined cavity of horror which can snap shut with boneshearing force."
Carl's bones weren't sheared, but Terry vouches for the rest of the description. "Those suckers have row upon row of teeth, man." Carl, however, got no preview of the jaws closing on his leg. He didn't see it, just felt it.
"Man, Carl started whacking that shark on the head with his gun-WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!" says Terry. "Looked like he was digging a posthole. That shark was twisting back and forth, shaking Carl around. Finally after a hard whack to the eyes it let go and Carl starts swimming up, blood pouring out of his lower legs, a green cloud spreading through the water. Then I see Art, coming outta the murk below, gripping his gun for dear life, as if something's trying to jerk his arm outta the socket. Then I see the six-foot sand tiger twisting and jerking and thrashing and biting on the end of his shaft.
"Now it made sense. Turns out, Art, that crazy sucker, was down in the murk and had shot the shark. It was twisting around on the end of the cable, mouth open, biting like crazy. Carl's legs happened to be around, and-wham!-they got grabbed."
Picture that smoky stuff always hovering over the ground in the old Wolfman and Dracula movies ... I mean the old ones, 1930s stuff. Better yet, think of the stuff released on the disco floor around midnight, in the midst of the pounding, deafening beat, at the height of the twirling frenzy, when we were all hopelessly crocked, red-faced, idiot smiles; prancing, gyrating, bumping, leaping, groping madly throughout the floor, fondling all the chicks who had blown us off earlier in the evening, and who were now getting that glassy-eyed giggle and a fondle right back. Picture the smoke that, though it covered the flashing floor to a depth of two feet, barely reached the top of our heels, and thus left the magnificent flares on our angel-flights unobscured as we leaped and pranced, flapping gloriously in full view, fanning the smoke in great billows ...
Well, that's what the bottom murk looks like at a rig, same consistency, same visibility-a layer of thick fog stretching anywhere from 10 to 50 feet from the bottom, sometimes 100 feet, but usually more like 20. The bigger and more sedentary fish-snapper, grouper, jewfish-generally seek it for protection. They're either in it, or hovering right above it. And since sharks are ambushers, this murk makes an ideal place for them to ambush prey, as befits the apex predator of this realm.
That is, until the Helldivers' show up. Today, Terry, Louis, and Stan-clutching their six-foot spear guns, were hoping to inculcate a few lessons about "apex predation" to these big, toothy, swaggering bastards. And they weren't looking for small ones either-none of those little four- or-five-foot blacktips and spinners that follow you up to the boat, snatching bites from the snapper or AJ on your spear. None of that. They needed at least a 400-pounder just to tie Terry's record of a few years before.
A bit to the west of us some divers from Baton Rouge, the Bayou Bandits, were getting in their last licks.
"Man, I was feeling no pain down there," Clay Coleman says. That "down there" was about 220 feet. Clay shot a 150-pound Warsaw Grouper at about 160 feet. He was diving the Mississippi Canyon Rigs that day, so he had another 400 feet of Gulf below him.
"Water was cobalt blue that day." he says. "You know how that is-how easy it is to just drift down, and down-and down."
If ever there was a "tempting, all-embracing vastness" that Hans Hass warned about, it's the 600 feet of purple-blue water surrounding the massive coral-encrusted beams that stretch to seeming oblivion under the set of oil platforms known as the Mississippi Canyon Rigs ... those big legs stretching down into the blue void ... schools of massive fish finning below.
It's more than a temptation; it's almost a suction. Like the jagged peaks that beckon mountain climbers to ascend, these blue depths beckon our descent. To look from afar is simply not enough. Add prey and the lure becomes irresistible. Cayman's Wall comes to mind but, but in sorry second place. It can't compare. Yes, "The Wall" stimulates the instinct to explore. Mississippi Canyon does likewise, but titillates with prey. So the hunting instinct kicks in, too. The effects of these glittering depths, the surreal structure, and the big fish on a healthy male in scuba gear with a six-foot spear gun are downright aphrodisiacal. Clay succumbed.
You can never actually see the bottom on a Louisiana rig-dive. The bottom at Mississippi Canyon was 600 feet down. "You just see those beams and crossbeams stretching down and down into the blue void. And in that cobalt water they look so close. Next thing I know I'm at 180 feet, then I see a huge Warsaw grouper on the other side of the rig. He looked like a Volkswagen. So I start finning over, slowly-but he wouldn't let me get too close. After a few minutes of stalking and with him heading down, I said I better take him-the shot's a little long, but it's now or never. So-schlutink! But I hit a little low, under his eye.
"Then, whoom! Down he goes, and me with him. I know those big Warsaws. There ain't no stopping them at first. Just ride him out, I'm thinking. And sure enough, there was no stopping this one. I was rushing down with him, but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I had to stop him. This rig was over 500 feet deep. My head'11 crumble like a thin-shelled egg, I remember thinking. My freakin' eyes'll pop out my head like ping-pong balls-all kinda crazy shit started going through my head. So I'm looking around for a beam to wrap my cable around, get some leverage on this big bastard. But he's heading down and down. I guess I wasn't too narked out cause I knew I had to stop himknew I was probably getting too deep.
"And I sure as hell didn't wanna let go of the gun. I'd already lost a couple and the ole-lady was hassling me about the expense. So like I said, I couldn't been too narked out to remember this. Well, finally a crossbeam got between me and him and I looped the cable around it, but right at the gun.
"Aha, I'm thinking. Now I got him! So now I'm relaxed. I was just sitting there, right under the beam, looking straight up. Content with the world, holding my spear gun, my cable going up around ten feet then making a half loop around a crossbeam. So, I look over and see this huge grouper right next to me, finning around plain as day. That's kinda funny, I remember thinking. And he's not even fleeing like all the other ones. What's wrong with this stupid fish?"
Clay was about three martinis into that "soft and cozy butterfly net" Hass warned about. "Then I look over and there's another one! Another gigantic Warsaw. And this one's got a spear sticking out from below his eye. Hummm. Weird fish down here today, I'm thinking. So I'm just sitting there digging it." Clay plays guitar for a rock band-he actually talks like that. "I just remember being very calm, very serene. Then shlunk! I see a shaft hit the first one. And he goes crazy. And in the commotion mine goes crazy again. Then I feel something tugging on my vest, I mean yanking me up hard, and I look up to see my dive-buddy Evans Byrd nodding and pointing up like 'Let's go!' With the other hand he's holding his spear gun and fighting the other grouper. So I look over at my computer and see we're at 220 feet. Hrnrn."
"But what's the rush? I remember thinking. Until I look over and the computer's flashing. Hey look at that pretty red light, I'm thinking. But Evans is still tugging away at me and so we worked our way up. Warsaws give a big rush when you first hit them. I guess mine was played out. And Evans got a good crippling shot. We just worked our way up. But you know, to this day I still wonder: if Evans hadn't grabbed me down there? I was ju
st feeling so calm, so content, I mighta stayed down there-and drowned."
Divers and fishermen have encountered huge sharks in great numbers in this area for decades. Recently Marine Biologists have come up with a possible reason. This area of the Louisiana coast, bordered on the north by Mississippi Sound and on the south by the Mississippi river delta, is looking more and more to them like a shark "mating and pupping ground," an area not to be confused with the "shark nursery" that lies on the other side of the river, around the rigs a few miles west of here. This comforting theory was made available by Dr. Bruce Thompson of LSU's Coastal Wetlands Institute.
Mark Grace of the National Marine Fisheries Service confirms from the air what we see in the water. "Yes, when. we fly over that Chandeleur-Breton Sound region," he says, "we look down and they're all over the place. We see literally hundreds down there. And I mean some monsters. "
Wonderful news. "And remember," he continues. "Sharks mature fairly slowly. So it takes a big shark to mate and spawn. So that's what we usually see out there, huge schools of HUGE sharks."
Now to what geological quirk, to what oceanographic feature do we, who dive in this area, owe this blessing? Mark and his ilk suspect that it's because of the sandier bottom on the east side of the Mississippi river. There's abundant food, in the form of finfish and rays, because of the adjoining estuaries. Currents have a lot to do with this. Gulf currents run east-west. So the mud from the river's discharge gets washed west. The areas east of the river stay a little sandier. And so the water's a little clearer. Also, the egg-layers among the sharks--the tiger sharks for instance (the shark described by University of Miami's shark guru, Dr. Samuel Gruber as "the most dangerous shark in the world") like to lay on sand, not on mud, where the egg capsules would be buried. That's why more show up in the Breton Sound area.
The Helldivers' Rodeo: A Deadly, X-Treme, Scuba-Diving, Spearfishing, Adventure Amid the Off Shore Oil Platforms in the Murky Waters of the Gulf of Mexico Page 6