If a shark's around, we like to see him. Make sure he's keeping his distance. Make sure he's not acting jerky, erratic, hungry, menacing ... or worse: horny. This explains a lot of their behavior out here.
They call Breton Sound and Main Pass "Sharktown," and quite appropriately in our view. Us, we try to steer clear of sharks. But that's really more up to them than to us. We've seen them often enough, on practically every dive east of the river. You generally spot them early in the dive. They lumber around, scowling, swaggering around like Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in Stir Craw: "Yeah!-We Bad!"
Sharks don't flee for the depths like red snapper and grouper. They're not skittish like the jacks. They don't panic and scatter like the schools of bluefish. No sir. They wait for everything to clear a path for them. "Nothing in the water would dare mess with me."
Then they meet a Helldiver. "Not only will this clumsy, bubblespewing peckerhead not move away, he's actually approaching! The nerve! And what's he holding? And pointing at me? Probably one a dem sticks to jab me away if I get too close ... or one a dem cameras ... yeah, dat's it ... like that Eugenie Clark broad ... but dis guy's dressed a little different from divers who use dem things ... ain't never seen bell-bottom on a diver before ... and a flowery shirt? He's getting closer . . . he's-OUCH, hey! What the? That's your ASS, pal! You done stuck THE KID! You're in a world-a-trouble now, PUNK!"
Time for evasive action. "All I saw was teeth," says Baton Rouge's Bobby Geanelloni about events right after he sent a six-foot stainless steel shaft into a 350-pound shark from twenty feet. "I ducked behind a beam. And just in time ... I was down about one hundred and fifty feet and saw him below me, swimming away. He was about a three-hundred-pounder I estimated, about twelve feet long. I hit him in the back from above, missed the spine, no kill shot. He flinched a little when the shaft hit him but no big deal. He kept swimming. And I said, man this is a breeze! What's all this stuff I been hearing about badass sharks? I was ready for a ride, to swim with him. Thought he'd take off and start towing me around like a big grouper or amberjack. Man, I was set, had a good grip on the gun, plenty of air, wasn't too deep-I was set.
"Well, a second later he hits the end of the cable-and stops. Whoops, I thought. AJ's and cobia don't do this! What now? Do I just haul him up?
"Then he turned around. Whoops, again. Ain't never seen a fish do this before. Then he saw me. And he musta sensed, right away, that I was the cause of his troubles . . . 'cause man, then all I saw was teeth! Comin' straight at me. I said 'shit!' and ducked behind a beam. CRUUNCH! he ripped into it right below me. Man, I wrapped the cable around the beam a couple of times and went up-got the hell outta there. Got another gun, came back down and finished him off."
And that's a sand tiger, or ragged-tooth shark, normally harmless. Try it on a bona-fide tiger shark and things get even dicier. Just ask another Baton Rougeite, Terry Brousseau: "Anything got in his way, and WHOOMMP! He crunched down on it and mangled it-or tried to."
Terry had a 14-foot tiger shark on the end of his shaft. "I saw him under me when I was down around one hundred and thirty feet. He was inside the rig. I was younger then, crazier. I wanted him. Well, I ease down to good range, aim-schlunk! And he's off. Man, I'm tied up with a submarine, I says to myself. But I went with him. Then he went crazy. He was chomping the very rig, man, grabbing the beams and trying to twist them ... putting up a cloud of barnacles, coral and teeth ... I'm trying to stay outta his way. Trying to stay above him. So I look over and there's another one! He was all excited too, all jerky, following the speared one around. Man I said this is it-but I didn't wanna let go of the gun. Then I look over and there's my dive buddy-aiming at the other one! SCHLUNK! And he sticks him!
"But no kill shot. Nothing like a kill shot. So now we got two of the suckers going crazy, pulling us around, twisting our cables up-And every time one came near a beam-CHOMMMPP!!- teeth and barnacles flying every which way. You better believe I kept a tight cable and stayed above that sucker, and hugging a beam, ready to duck behind it. Well, I finally had to grab a beam to get some leverage on him. So I've got my bare arm-had a short sleeve shirt on-wrapped around the beam, with the other gripping my spear gun, hanging on as he's trying to bite a steel beam in half....
"I'm scared, man. All this commotion going on right under us with two tiger sharks going nuts-but I'm excited too. You know the feeling. I didn't want to let go of the thing and lose my gun. I wanted that shark. So, I'm sitting there kinda catching my breath and I feel something, biting my arm. 'OUWW!' I look over and there's nothing there. No shark or barracuda or anything. Then it starts stinging. And stinging like HELL! Terrible pain like a hundred hornets stinging at once. Man, I'm freakin' out now.
"I let go of the rig and look at my arm. There's this thing wrapped around my arm like a big bracelet. It's an ugly thing, red and white, like some kinda huge caterpillar or centipede. And I mean huge, over a foot long. Christ! I'm thinking What now? Like I ain't got enough problems with two tiger sharks in a chomping frenzy twenty feet below me! And man, I'm hurtin' by now. The sharks are still going crazy, now I got something outta some horror movie injecting some kinda poison in my arm. Feels like somebody's holding a welding torch on it!"
Terry had tangled with a bristleworm, or fireworm. Just to look at a picture of one is to shudder. To find one wrapped around your arras-I can't imagine. A hideous and terrifying creature. When she designed this thing, Mother Nature was on the rag. I mean she was seriously pissed. Stephen King on acid couldn't come up with this thing. The white that Terry mentioned consists of thousands upon thousands of bristles that cover the length of this disgusting marine slug. Each is a hollow spine tipped with a barb like a fishhook. And each injects venom like the fang of a cobra, then breaks off, leaving the poison, the barb and half the spine inside the flesh of the poor sucker who touches one.
I've read that some divers have had fingers amputated as a result of touching small ones. I guess to some people a small one looks harmless, almost complementing the other colorful creatures on the coral reef; "here nice little coral creature, let me- OOODUWWW!"
But back to Terry. "So man, I grab that thing to rip it off and OOOOW! Now my hand's burning like I stuck it in a wasp nest! And my arm-shoot, my whole side, half my body's throbbing. So I grab the gun back with my good hand. I'm getting numb all over by now. I guess the adrenaline was keeping me going ... I still wanted that damn shark. To make a long story short, the sharks finally quiet down a little, actually started swimming towards the surface, so we just kinda went with them. We winched them aboard and, man, my arm was swollen up like an inner tube. Then the whole side of my body started swelling up. I was in the hospital the next day, getting antivenin shots like if I'd been bit by a rattlesnake. Swelling finally went down after a couple days. But I'll tell you, I was hurtin' there for a while. One shark was fourteen feet the other was twelve. We had our thrill, and we got some dynamite steaks."
Like I was saving, Florida lists more shark attacks-by far-than anyplace else. But that makes sense. Florida, obviously, has more people in the water for more time than any other area in the United States. And this being the U.S., more attacks are reported. But you'll never convince me that a place like, say, the Philippines, with its thousands of miles of tropical coastline and millions of people, doesn't have hundreds of shark attacks a year.
And we could probably quintuple the ones from Florida if we include the Florida Straits. It's estimated that for every Elian Gonzalez that makes it safely to shore, four of his desperate compatriots perish at sea like his mother. Roughly forty thousand have made the crossing in the past thirty years. (I'm talking rafters here. Not the Mariel boat-lift.) It's an ugly thing to contemplate-especially for me, a harrowing thing to put my calculator to. I've known some of these people, and believe me, the last thing on their mind when they hit the shore is calling some newspaper to report a shark attack. In fact, I know of a very special two who never made it at all. Almost every account of "balseros"
(rafters) I've read mentions sharks harassing them along the way.
Frank "The Knife" Olah lives on Grand Isle and makes his living running a charter fishing service and cleaning fish, hence the name. "More like choice sirloin than fish," he tells me about shark. "Me, I cut 'em into steaks, but across the grain of the meat. Then I marinade them in fajita marinate and Italian salad dressing for a couple hours. Then I throw them on a hot grill-and I mean hot-to sear them just like a steak. I tell ya, I've had people from all over the country eat my grilled shark and rave."
I met Frank as the mate on an offshore fishing trip. He was a pleasant surprise. In Louisiana a mate does more blabbing than any "mating." That's his job, of course: entertaining the clients. And Frank had us in stitches the whole trip long. Too many offshore fishing trips nowadays come off like a commando operation, with hair-raising penalties for any breach of schedule or ordersa vicious, hard-bitten captain (usually a retired combat-Marine if male, housewife if female ) barking orders from the bridge. Everyone else scrambling around in stark terror. Remember the movie Patton? Remember the poor soldier with battle fatigue in the hospital in Sicily? He got off easy compared to a first mate I met on a trip some years back. "I just can't take it anymore!" he blubbered after some lines fouled.
"Why you lily-livered, yellow skunk!" The captain snarled on his way down from the bridge "I oughta use you for chum! In fact I oughta!" And he reached for the fish billy.
"No! No! Please ... Please, it was an accident! AHHHHHH!"
Pelayo and I cowered behind the fish box, convinced we were next. I held a bait bucket for a shield and had a good grip on the gaff. Pelayo grasped a fire extinguisher. He'd spray the captain in the face with a blast and I'd trip him as we made our dash to the bridge and radio. We'd capture the high ground, then I'd summon the Coast Guard on the radio, while Pelayo poured down a withering fusillade from the extinguisher and flare guns, pinning down the crazed captain until the Coast Guard arrived with the water cannon, net, and straight-jacket ... or so we imagined.
None of that with Frank-the-Knife and Captain Rice though. This crew persisted in the crazy notion that we were out for a day of fun and relaxation. Should have guessed Frank was a serious rig-diver. He was typical of the breed. Nothing bland or standardized about him. No cubicle worker here. Frank's been diving for almost thirty years himself. For a while he was more of a meat diver than a competition diver. He even did it commercially, selling the fish. As such he needed to be efficient. A machinist by trade, he's always tinkering, and this ingenuity led to him to design power heads.
"Man, I got tired of losing guns," he says. "I'd done let go of at least three already. . . . Some huge grouper starts dragging me off-I'm looking at my air, my depth, finally-bye-bye! There goes fish, gun, every damn thing-another two hundred bucks. Had to be a better way, especially if I'm looking to turn a profit at this thing. I had to come up with something better for stoppin' these big suckers."
And Frank's skills were perfectly suited for this type of innovation. He went into his workshop and applied himself diligently, like the Nutty Professor. But a few adjustments proved necessary.
"Almost blasted a rig down," he says, shaking his head. "Man, I thought that thing was gonna topple over."
As Frank says, "Hey, you're always looking for maximum power, right? I mean, if a thirty two-caliber is better than a twenty twocaliber, then how about a twelve-gauge, in three-inch magnum? Ain't that better than a twenty-gauge? Sounded sensible to me.
"Turns out I missed the fish and hit the beam-Ba-LO00OM- MM!!!" Man, that shaft ricocheted back- peewwrrnn! All I saw was a little line of bubbles come whizzing past my head-didn't know what the hell it was at first. 'Man that's some fast fish,' I said.
"No fish-it was the shaft, man, ricocheting back like some kinda missile. Five inches lower and it woulda taken my head off. A foot to the left and it woulda run my dive buddy through the belly-spread his intestines all over the water for a real nice triggerfish feeding frenzy. A foot higher, it woulda castrated another guy. Over a bit and it woulda wacked another one's leg off.
"I'm just sitting there in a daze-still in shock, can't hear or nothing after that blast-terrible concussion underwater, you can imagine. It was like a bomb going off in your bedroom. I mean, that was some BLAST! Finally my head cleared a little and I remembered my dive buddies, and I looked around.
"Well, they didn't look much like 'buddies' right then. Good thing you can't hear down there-can't hear good that is, 'cause even with being one hundred feet underwater, even with my ears ringing like crazy from that blast-even with all that, I could still hear these suckers. BRUULL! BRROOOLL! BRAAALL! You never seen such a scene. Bubbles billowing from their regulators in huge clouds, heads jerking up and down, all shaking their guns at me, shaking their fists in fronta my face, heads bobbing and jerking, pointing at their heads and ears-it was a sight.
"Then I looked over and there's a big silver circle, about the size of a hub-cap, on the rig's leg. That magnum blasted off the barnacles, paint, rust, every damn thing. We decided to go back to the thirty two-caliber after that. That was fun enough. With power heads you don't have to worry about aiming all that much. I mean, you hit 'em in the freakin tail or the nose-hlam! and they keel over. But after a while that got old and we went back to competitive diving with regular points."
A power head is what's on the end of 'a bang stick: a little cylinder with a firing pin holding a bullet or shotgun shell. Bash it into a fish and it goes off. You see this a lot on those sanctimonious shark TV shows. You know the ones. They revel in slowmotion close-ups: the cruel hooded eyes, below them, rows of four-inch teeth that chomp, twist, and rip child-sized chunks off some ox carcass. Then they dump fifty gallons of ox blood in the water, jump in, and start waving dead fish around:
Yes, Jacques, as we can see, sharks are not in the least bit aggressive. They've been miscast as ravenous nran-eaters when in fact they're harmless scavengers. Primarily they-oops, this one's getting a little close-there, just shove them away. See how docile and harmless? Yes as we were saving, they're more afraid of rnan thanoops, this ones getting a little frisky here, Yes, a little close, a little, Hey tt'atchit!-WATCHIT!
BLAAAM! and they whack him. The mangled shark twists around crazily, then sinks.
Yes, as we were saving, sharks are perfectly harmless. In fact, they're a vital link in the ocean food-chairs. It's sad and tragic how so many unenlightened and sensationalized accounts depict them as brutal or-
Anyway, put one of these power heads on the end of your spear gun shaft and you're talking one hell of a weapon. Your chest puffs up involuntarily. A power head makes you feel like you're strutting around with a .44 magnum on your hip a la Dirty Harry. A hammerhead swaggers by, eyeing your stringer of fish ... he swings close and your eyes meet in a steely stand-off... "I know what you're thinking, punk." You growl. "Does this guy have a power head on the end of the shaft? Or just a regular point? Well ya know, in all the excitement I kinda forgot myself. But being as this might be a twelve-gauge magnum and it can blow that flat ugly head right off . . . you might ask yourself: Do I feel lucky today? Well, do ya, PUNK?"
There's no denying the rush of strutting around with serious firepower at your fingertips. Anybody offended by this banality can't possibly be reading this book by now. With a power head, you can blast a hundred-pound fish into a huge fish-stick from twenty feet. As such, these weapons are anathema to competition divers. And rightly so. Hell, they don't give the fish a chance. There's nothing to it. Gone is the brawl mano a mano. Gone is the "harsh confrontation with the animal's fierceness, the struggle with it's energetic defense," as Ortega y Gasset calls it. The bastard keels over dead the instant you hit him. No drama. No gallantry. No sport.
But you talk about a kick in the ass. You see a huge cobia or amberjack lumbering by-schlink-Ba-LOOOOM!! and the big sucker stops in his tracks. Must be the same rush as shooting an elephant between the eyes from close range-POW!-and watching him collaps
e like a dynamited building. I used to love to watch that on the old American Sportsman shows, that splendid program from the late sixties. I believe it was Rick Jason, of the TV series Combat, who was the featured hunter that whacked an elephant. Then there was William Shatner, arrowing a grizzly, Bing Crosby and Kurt Gowdy massacring doves by the dump truck-full. Ah, those were the days. Incredible that Hollywood used to allow such things.
Coast Guard records show no shark attacks on divers off Louisiana. But what do they know? Unprovoked attacks, sure. None of those. But the key word here is "unprovoked." Stick a six-foot steel spear in their flank and they feel plenty provoked, believe me. And some rig-divers just love provoking the hell out of sharks. Ted Nugent could tell you why: "You can't grill 'em til ya kill 'em," is a favorite quip of his. Crunching the trigger and sending that stainless steel shaft into their flank starts the process that ends up with this flesh, cubed, drenched in lemon butter, and skewered on a shish-k-bob between chunks of green pepper and pineapple, or on Frank-the-Knife's grill.
In fact, according to the official records, the shark responsible for the most attacks globally is the innocuous nurse shark.
Yes, that placid reef-dweller that looks like a big goofy catfish. It makes sense, actually. The voyeurs on their chaperoned reef dives are always pestering nurse sharks. They're always grabbing them by the tail and stuff for a cutesy picture. Then, CHOMP! and they go crying and whining to the dive master. "That mean ole shark bit me!"
"Don't grab him then, you twit! Leave him alone! He's trying to sleep. Been a long night!"
Point is, all sharks have teeth and they're easily provoked.
"Sharks are ambushers," according to Peter Benchley in National Geographic. "Once he knows he can't surprise you he won't expend a lot of energy to get you." That's a hungry shark now. One looking for food. A pissed-off shark is quite a different matter. And sharks definitely get pissed when you poke a spear into them. That's the first step involved in converting them into shark kebobs. No way around it.
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 7