Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  “If we only had some wind,” Jack said. We had been adrift for a little less than an hour and hadn’t seen any sharks yet. We were chumming for them, sending out little invitations: come to the feeding frenzy. Sitting on the deck, near the shark cage, were several boxes of mackerel: about four hundred pounds of foot-long frozen fish. As soon as Tony cut the engines, Jack and his son John put fifteen pounds of the fish into one of those plastic mesh boxes designed to carry milk cartons. They wired a second such box onto the first—open end to open end—and dropped it over the side on a rope so that the box was half in and half out of the water. The rocking of the boat maserated the defrosting fish, and I could see oil and blood and bits of mackerel floating away from the boat in a snaking line.

  A cruising shark that crossed the chum line would turn and follow it to the boat. To attract the maximum number of sharks, we wanted to spread that line out across a mile or so of sea. With the boat dead in the water, the chum tended to sink to the bottom. We couldn’t motor, though: engine noise and fumes would confuse the sharks. We needed a stiff wind to push the boat along and spread out the chum line.

  I was going through a final check of my dive gear when Tony mentioned, rather cavalierly I thought, that “we got one.” It was a six-foot-long blue shark, and it had rolled over onto its back and was chewing, half-heartedly, on the milk boxes full of chum. It rolled slightly and one flat black eye looked up at the faces peering at it over the side of the boat. The shark rolled again, like a jet fighter doing a barrel roll, and disappeared under the boat.

  In the distance, about a hundred yards off, I could see another fin, gliding along the snaking path of chum toward the boat. Beyond that was still another fin coming in our direction along the same meandering path. It was early in the morning, and the sun was low in the sky, so that the water seemed cobalt blue, but the wake behind the shark fins was an odd emerald color that glittered on the surface of the glassy sea. There was a muffled thump as the first shark hit the chum box a second time.

  Jack McKenney said, “Let’s get the cage in the water and go diving.”

  Canadian-born Jack McKenney, who lives in Los Angeles, is a legend in the diving industry; a filmmaker, photographer, and adventurer. He has filmed whale sharks and ridden manta rays in the Sea of Cortez; he has made more dives on the Andrea Doria than any other person. Hollywood has paid him to learn a lot about different kinds of sharks. He was a stunt double in both The Deep and Shark’s Treasure, two movies in which he also filmed some of the underwater sequences.

  Jack and his twenty-six-year-old son, John, were making their first video production for the home market: it would be a documentary about shark diving, which they hoped to sell in the scuba magazines. The production would show that a shark dive can be “a safe and enjoyable” experience … when done properly.

  On hand to coordinate the dives were Bud Riker and Susan Speck, co-owners of Divers West, a dive shop in Pasadena. For the past two years, Bud and Susan have been sponsoring four or five shark dives a year. The trips are open to advanced open-water divers with “a lot” of open-water experience. Previous shark-diving experience is not necessary.

  The video documentary would concentrate on three novice shark divers: Paul Bahn, a musician; Laine “Buck” Scheliga, a bartender; and Pam McKenney, a flight attendant. These were the people who were going to experience “safe and enjoyable” diving in the midst of a feeding frenzy.

  Also on hand for the experience were Bonnie Cardone, the executive editor for Skin Diver magazine—it would be her second planned shark dive—and Chip Matheson, a stunt man “trainee” whose work you may have seen on Riptide. Chip has been diving with sharks for seven years.

  I have been diving and writing for various scuba magazines for a decade, and in that time have found myself in the water with tiger sharks on the Great Barrier Reef, with hammerheads off Central America, with Caribbean nurse sharks, with black tip and white tip reef sharks, with carpet sharks, sand sharks, and lemon sharks. None of this was intentional. These sharks just appeared, entirely unwanted, like ants at a picnic. The idea of purposely getting into the water with a dozen or so man-eaters seemed silly, suicidal, dumb as rocks. Still, Jack McKenney had asked me to participate, and Jack knows what he’s doing. It was Jack McKenney, doubling for Nick Nolte, who made a free ascent through that shark feeding frenzy in The Deep. No longtime diver would pass up an opportunity to dive with Jack McKenney, just as no pilot would turn down an invitation to fly with Chuck Yeager.

  McKenney had also invited Marty Snyderman to appear in the video. Marty is a well-known underwater photographer from San Diego. About ten years ago, it occurred to him that people weren’t paying proper attention to his photos: all those shots of corals and “scenic” fish, of sponges and nudibranchs in blazing color. It was the time of Jaws, and the public was interested in sharks. “So I became good at shark diving and shark photography,” Marty told me, “and, when people know that, somehow they seem to find my other photos infinitely more interesting and beautiful.”

  Since Snyderman spends so much time in the water with sharks, shooting stills and filming television documentaries, he has also seen fit to spend $5200 on a custom-made Kevlar and chain mail shark suit. In this suit, he told me, he has been “nipped” by sharks “literally hundreds of times.” McKenney hoped to get some good footage of sharks nibbling away on Marty Snyderman.

  The real stars of McKenney’s video promised to be the sharks themselves. There are 250 or more species of sharks—research is still being done on the matter—and not all of them are dangerous to man. In Australia, for instance, I have been diving with a small, sleek, pretty little fish known as an epaulette shark because of the white-rimmed spots it carries above its pectoral fins. It is a timid beast, the epaulette shark, and it flees the approaching diver in what appears to be a frantic subaquatic panic. Like the ostrich, the epaulette shark considers itself hidden if it can’t see you, and the fish can often be found with its head wedged into some small coral cave while the rest of its body is completely and ludicrously visible. This shark, incidentally, has no teeth at all, and Australian divers refer to it as a “gummie.” Dangerous sharks, man-eaters like tigers and great whites, are called “munchies.”

  Some fishermen and boating enthusiasts believe that blues are not munchies, that they are virtually harmless, but there are documented cases of blues attacking human beings. Don Wilkie, Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, says flatly that “blues are potentially dangerous, but it is unusual for them to be involved in an unprovoked attack.” Setting out a chum line, Wilkie said, “is a clear provocation.”

  Blues are common in the deep waters between Los Angeles and Catalina: they are fast, slim-bodied sharks with pointed snouts and saw-edged teeth. They can grow to twelve feet in length—man-eaters become dangerous at three or four feet—and often follow boats, feeding off of discarded garbage. Sometimes called blue whalers, these sharks are noted for the speed with which they materialize around slaughtered whales and for their piranhalike feeding frenzies.

  “If there’s only six or seven down there,” McKenney told me, “it’ll be pretty calm. If we get twenty or more, they can get a little aggressive. I suppose it’s competition: when there’s a lot of them, they have to move fast to get their share. Also, when there’s more than two or three, it’s hard to keep track of them. They can come up behind and nip you.”

  Which, I imagined, would be like getting “nipped” by a Bengal tiger, only underwater.

  We had fifty feet of underwater visibility and everything down and up and all around was blue, including the sharks milling around the cage and chum bucket. Their bodies were brighter than the sea water and their bellies were a contrasting white. The cage was positioned ten feet below the chum bucket. Little white bits of mackerel were dropping down through the bed springs. The divers brushed the stuff off their shoulders, like dandruff. I could see five blue sharks outside the cage. There were swooping lazily
through the water like eagles soaring over the prairie on a blue summer afternoon.

  Just getting into the shark cage had been an adventure. You don’t get to go down with it on the boom. Bed springs won’t hold the weight of several divers. No, you have to swim to the cage.

  “Go now,” Bud Rilker had told me, as I sat with my legs just out of the water. The command meant that there weren’t any sharks in my immediate presence, and I reluctantly slipped into the water beside the chum bucket. In a shark dive, you don’t want to roll or jump off the boat because the bubbles you create obscure the view for ten or fifteen seconds, during which time a guy could get “nipped.” Not incidentally, the bubbles also attract curious sharks.

  So I sat on the swim step, edged into the sea, broom handle in hand, and rocketed through the blue water and blue sharks to the open cage door in ten seconds flat. Paul was already in there, along with Buck. Bonnie hovered just above the door, taking photos. Above, the boat was rocking in some gentle swells that had just come up, and the cage, which hung from the boom by a ten-foot line, echoed that rocking. I kept banging my head or knees on the wire and the temptation was very great to hold on to the side of the cage, but that meant that part of my hand would be outside, in the open sea, where the sharks were, and Jack had warned us that holding on to the cage in this manner was “a good way to get nipped.”

  The five sharks were milling around, aimlessly cutting sine curves in the sea. Occasionally, one would swim up to the chum bucket and nudge it with its snout. Then, with a figurative shrug of the shoulders, it would drop down to join the other sharks. They seemed curious and a little confused, these milling blues.

  Above, along the chum line, I could see another shark accepting our invitation. The new guy was big, ten feet long at a guess, and he was moving purposefully toward the chum bucket, which he hit without hesitation. Nothing for him there but a mouthful of mackerel-flavored plastic. He dropped down to join the other sharks and they all made several passes by one another just outside the cage door.

  If sharks can be thought of as having a conversation—which of course they can’t but never mind—the newcomer looked as if he were saying: “What’s going on here?”

  “Dunno,” another replies. “It’s weird.”

  “What are those funny-looking things there?” The big blue was twenty feet off, looking at us.

  “Potential breakfast.”

  He came at us then, this new shark just off the chum line, but he was swimming slower now, and moving toward the cage at an oblique angle. I revised my estimate: up close this shark was a good twelve feet long. It coasted slowly by the cage, apparently staring off into the distance and not interested in us at all, but it passed within inches of the wire and I could see its near eye—perfectly round and flat black with a small circle of white all around the pupil—and that eye swiveled back as the shark passed.

  I’ve done pretty much the same thing: you’re walking along a city street and see a cop handcuffing some guy who’s shouting obscenities. A crowd of street folk has gathered, and you walk right on by, staring straight ahead but glancing surreptitiously at the scene out of the corner of your eye. You’re curious but you sure don’t want to get involved in any trouble.

  That was something of the message I got from the sharks cruising by the cage: If you’re weak and bleeding and helpless, they seemed to be saying, we’d be happy to rip you to shreds. But, hey, we just came here for breakfast. We don’t want no trouble.

  In two days I logged over seven hours in the water with sharks. We took goodie bags full of mackerel down with us and hand-fed the sharks as they cruised by little gunsight windows in the cage. (Hold the fish by the tail and shake it outside the cage. Keep your hand inside, of course.) The sharks do not roll over onto their backs when feeding, as one myth has it. They’ll eat in any attitude at all.

  As the shark’s mouth opens, a kind of lower eyelid—a white, nictitating membrane—covers the eye so that, at the moment of munch, the animal is effectively blind. This protects the shark’s eyes from its prey. Several times, out of curiosity, I offered the fish, then yanked it away while the fish was blind. Ha-ha, shark. Neener neener neener. The phrase “open your mouth and close your eyes” kept running through my head. Presently, I began feeling a little guilty about teasing the man-eaters. They had these large, sadly surprised-looking eyes that never blinked … except at the moment of the kill.

  On my second dive, I began to find the cage confining, and decided to go outside where Jack and John and Marty were filming. I had had, in my mind’s eye, a vision of sharks as swift predators, torpedoes rocketing in for the kill, and that is the way they came up the chum line. But once they hit the chum box and began milling around as if confused, you could track them as they came toward you, as they made their studied, nonchalant passes.

  Off forty yards in the distance, Jack McKenney was shooting a sequence in which his son John swam alongside a shark and pushed it around with a broom handle. The shark, a six-foot-long male, seemed mildly annoyed. It put on a slight burst of speed and came gliding in my direction. I had a full ten seconds to get my own broom handle in position, and when the shark was within a foot of me, I whapped it a good one on the snout. Its body twisted away from me—a snakelike gesture of avoidance—and the shark dived at a gentle angle, disappearing into a cobalt blue that purpled down into the blackness of abysmal depths.

  I turned and saw another shark approaching from the rear and I beaned him as he made his pass. It seemed clear that the mildest show of aggression put these fellows off their feed. The broom handle was handy when a shark was coming at you with its mouth open and eyes closed, but, in general, you could send them skittering off into the distance with a casual backhanded gesture, the sort of motion you’d use to shoo a pigeon off some picnic table in the park.

  Conversely, the sharks hit anything that didn’t move. Marty Snyderman, in his chain mail shark suit, was shooting stills of the divers in the cage watching half a dozen sharks swooping by. He was kicking slightly, but his upper body was motionless and the camera was steady. A shark came up behind him: the mouth opened, revealing saw-edged teeth, and the eyes closed. The shark hit Marty in the upper left arm. He elbowed it in the snout, the shark swam away, and Marty never even looked at it. He was busy shooting pictures and getting nipped was an annoyance. Marty’s shark suit cost more than my car and I wanted one.

  Jack McKenney didn’t have a shark suit, and either Chip or John swam above him: safety divers who swung their shark clubs over the filmmaker’s motionless upper body. Jack wanted to get lots of sharks in the same frame, and he tended to hang around the chum line, where they were the most dangerous. On the second day, late in the afternoon when the night-feeding blues were getting aggressive, one came up from below and hit Jack in the finger. He was not wearing gloves, not when he had to constantly adjust focus. The bite, truth to tell, had been really just an experimental “nip,” and the wound was a small jagged tear, less than an inch long: the sort of thing that might happen to you if you brushed your hand over some barbed wire. A small bit of blood rose from the cut and floated toward the surface. The blood, in this blue water, looked green. (I know. Blue and red don’t make green, but that’s the way it looked.)

  The sharks did not go into a feeding frenzy. Everything was as it was before, and Jack kept on filming.

  These little nipping incidents I saw tended to make me extremely alert when I chose to be out of the cage. It wasn’t that you had to watch just your backside: the sharks could come at you from every point of the sphere. You lost them at about fifty feet and they would circle around and come at you from another angle. When there were more than three around, you could never keep track of them all. Bonnie told me that she got a picture of me concentrating on a shark that was coming at my chest. “Did you know there was another one just behind your head?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I lied.

  After that, whenever I was out of the cage, and there were no sh
arks in sight, I swung the broom handle over my head, just in case. In general, a diver’s arms and legs are moving, but he tends to be motionless from the shoulders up and that is where he is likely to be hit: right in the back of the head.

  It took a tremendous amount of concentration to swim around outside the cage, and I found that fifteen minutes was about all I could take before a kind of numbing fatigue sent me shooting back to the safety of the bed springs. Jack, John, Marty, and Chip never got in the cage. They were pros and their discipline amazed me.

  Marty Snyderman and I were sitting in the galley, drinking coffee and discussing what is likely to be the most talked-about sequence in McKenney’s video. Jack had been shooting Marty hand-feeding several large sharks. One six-footer rose to the bait, and when it closed its eyes, Marty thrust his whole forearm in the animal’s mouth. The shark ragged at his arm for a full sixty seconds. Marty was jerking the man-eater around in the way that you’d play with a dog.

  “What about the jaw pressure?” I asked. “Doesn’t it bruise you?”

  Marty showed me his arm. There was no bruise: only a slight redness there. “They calculate jaw pressure from the point of one tooth,” Marty said, “but I had my whole arm in the mouth and that spread the pressure out. And then the chain mail tends to distribute the pressure over a larger area.”

  The Neptunic Shark Suit is custom-made for each diver by Neptunic, Inc., a San Diego company headed up by the inventor of the suit, Jeremiah Sullivan. The underlayer is a Velcro-covered wet suit. Twenty-three Kevlar pads—they look like shoulder-pad material—fasten onto the Velcro. The chain mail forms the outer layer. It is made of 400,000 stainless steel links and weighs twenty pounds.

  “I put my arm in a shark’s mouth the first day I had the suit,” Marty told me. “I needed to know if it would work.”

  “You’re right-handed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You put your left arm in the shark’s mouth, then?”