Here’s out the dives work. There are two teams of four divers in the water at the same time. You’re in the cage for an hour, then out for an hour, all day, every day, including lunch. So you have the chance for 4-5 dives per day depending on if you were the first group of the day or the second. If you’re a parent with the accompanying sense of fairness like me, you realize that if you get into the first group the first day, you have two days of five dives and one of four, but if you’re in the second group, obviously, you get the smaller half of the brownie. However, by the third day, most normal people are skipping their turns, so there are plenty of dives to go around and everyone gets all the brownie they can eat. Tune in next week when we learn all about the letter “X.” In fact, only two people on the entire boat made every single dive, see if you can guess who those two were. As a hint, their names rhyme with Mason a Tander.
So here’s our typical day. Wake up around seven, eat breakfast, wander out to the back of the boat where the cages were already in the water, notice how cold it is on deck, realize how much colder it must be in the water, stare at the wet-suit (the first dive of the first day is the only time its dry-so every dive after it should read, “stare at the cold wet wet-suit”), stare at the water, stare back at the wet-suit, sigh, slowly put a hand on the wet wet-suit, sigh again, look around the boat at everyone else getting ready, look at the cold wet wet-suit, sigh, put your first leg in, pause and reflect on how wet and cold it is, sigh, put it on up the your waist. Help Sander get into his gear, which is like trying to bathe a cat. Not that Sander’s not doing his best, its just that there are sharks in the water and there are cages in the water, but he and I are on deck and I’m moving at .0001 mph (here is a perfect analogy for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as it relates to time. Sander sees me moving at .0001 mph while I feel like we’re getting ready at fireman pace. Tune in next week when we learn all about Particle String Theory). As luck (or more accurately Luke) would have it, we were in the first group! I would have preferred to watch the first round so I could get a better lay of the land (sea?), but I think Sander’s head would have exploded if he had to wait that first hour. Life’s all about give and take right? Just to make things even more interesting, on the first day, there were sharks in the water to greet us. Leading to this conversation, both spoken and mental.Luke: Sharks in the water guys!
Sander: DADDADDADLOOKSHARKSHURRYUPGETINTHECAGEICANTGETMYSUITONHELLLLLLLLLLPDADDADLETSGOOOOOOOODAAAAAAAADDADCOMEONNNNNNNNLOOKATTHESHARKWE’REGOINGTOMISSHIMLOOKDADCOMEON!
Me: Yeah, look at it.
Me (In my head): What the… That’s a shark. And a BIG one. There really are sharks here. Whoa, that’s big. Did it just breach the surface. That is ONE BIG SHARK!
Sander: (Looking over the edge and back at me) DAAAAAAAAAAD!
Me (Aloud): OK buddy, come on.
So let’s stop here for a second. First, I honestly did think, “Wow, there really are sharks here.” I don’t know why it didn’t click that there would actually be sharks, on this shark boat, looking for sharks, in a documented shark area, with researchers and tourists who paid a lot of money to see said sharks. I mean, I spent a lot of jack on this trip, did tons of research, saw the pictures, and read the customer reviews, talked to the owner, so there HAD to be sharks here. I guess the idea of actually seeing a great white shark is so foreign a concept that I think I figured that we would probably go out, maybe see one shark in t
he distance, and then go home. I mean, we’re talking about finding a great white shark in a huge ocean. For me fishing is like playing the slot machines in Vegas. I put my line in the water and hope to get lucky, but most of the time I just lose my bait. It’s all a big mystery to me. It’s not like you can sit on top of the boat and scout for them like lions on a safari. Sharks live in the ocean, which as we all know is a desert with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above. So when that first white broke the surface on our first morning, it was just…surreal.Anyway, we get all geared up, Sander in his multi-hued scuba suit, and me in my ill-fitting neoprene armor, and head to the cage. Here’s how it works.
The two cages are attached to the boat by ropes and chains and what look like little air shocks. It’s the shocks that keep the cages stable and close to the boat, but are also what cause the cage to jump around, not enough to buck you off or anything, but enough that when a wave hits the boat, it moves the cage half-a-beat later which makes for some tricky footing. The good news is that there’s a net between the cages and the boat, and Luke’s there giving a hand, along with three other deckhands. So the footing’s tricky, but not treacherous (tricky’s bad enough when great white’s are involved, but treacherous is a wee bit worse, so it’s a good trade), and with all the hands around you have the feeling that if you did manage to take a plunge, you’d be out of the water really, really fast. My plan in case of a plunge was essentially this. Me: Do my best Yosemite Sam impression and will myself out of the water, legs spinning, arms forward, mouth agape, and shoot to the boat. I think I’d be in and out so fast I wouldn’t even get wet. Sander: Well, he’s only eight, so it wouldn’t take me long to replace him. Sure, I’d have to live in Mexico for the rest of my life, and it would be a fairly awkward call to him mom. But its not like I’d be the first cowboy to flee to Mexico. I’d just lounge on the beach and play Christopher Cross all day. That or I’d beat him into the water and lift him to one of the people on the boat, you know, six of one.
Sander and I were the last ones in our cage. This annoyed him to no end, but I wanted to watch the others get in first so I could get a feel for it, and, I wanted us near the exit and ladder in case, well, in case. I went first, sat on the bench (again and keep in mind, there are two twelve foot plus great white sharks swimming around, breaching the water and eating tuna heads while I’m sitting there like I known what I’m doing on a little bench ABOVE the cage-which means at sea-level), exposed. It was like when you’re high up doing something, rock
climbing, looking over a cliff, or using pixie dust to fly to Never-Never Land, and they tell you “Don’t look down.” Well, it’s the same here as I repeatedly think to myself, “Don’t look at the huge shark that can eat you” even though I’m at eye level with it and have no bars to protect me. So I position myself at the far end of the cage, settle down, get my air-hose which is sprayed with, I think, Scope, realize I can’t maneuver with it in my mouth, spit it out, and get ready to grab Sander. Now, everyone has to wear weights to stay down, and all kid’s are extremely buoyant because they’re all torso at this stage of their lives (math, physics and biology, you should get college credit for reading this), which means, they’re all lungs. So he needs a ton of weights (hey, that almost works), and he’s really feeling it on land, or rather, a rocking boat. Anyway, Luke grabs him, hefts him over to me, where I guide him to a sitting position, put the hose in his mouth and, like a deranged dentist start asking him questions.Only he’s taking the “definitely look at the shark” approach, and is mesmerized. I get him to look at me lon
g enough to decide that he wants me to go in first and guide him down, as opposed to me staying up top and lowering him into the cage (this would be the pattern the entire trip). So in I drop, and it’s COLD. A wetsuit doesn’t keep you warm so much as it traps a thin layer of water against your skin that your body warms up. So the colder the water initially, the colder that shock. Also, keep in mind that none of our suits are exactly custom, so even when you warm up your suit, you have to stay pretty still or you get a nice shot of cold water running down your back. The sensation of having a shiver of cold water shoot down your spine is only heightened by the fact that you also having nervous shivers shoot down your spine because of the sharks. So I lower Sander down and it’s on.I spend most of that first dive hovering over Sander, watching him, and making sure I’m in contact with him, because not only are the sharks big enough to swallow him, it seemed like he could, you may want to avert your eyes here, technically fit through the slits in the cage. OK, it would be nearly impossible, but not, from the looks of it, totally impossible. So I spent three days and 14 dive hour making sure I was the buffer between “nearly” and “totally.” To this day I’m not totally sure because, while I had the urge, I never asked him to test this theory (before the Opraettes start booing, I would have had him test it when the cages were on the boat. I’m not a total Goofus-and yes, Gallant wouldn’t have even been on the boat).
And now a word on the sharks. Over the three days of diving with these absolutely amazing fish (they are fish, but the word “fish” is almost demeaning. The really need their own category), I came away with one thought. They are the planets absolute alpha predator. Nothing comes close, granted my experience with predators is three movies and a house cat, but I have to tell you, they cannot be topped. Here’s why. One, they are completely silent. In one of my many “duh” moments, I realized that whenever you see a great white shark on TV (or, more famously in a movie) there’s always noise. Either music designed to amp you up about what’s about to happen, or some sort of voice over designed to amp you up about what’s about to happen. But in the ocean? Nothing. No music, no narration, no rustling of leaves, no birds alerting you, or going silent, no noise at all. Just silence, then a 14’ great white swims by. And sound isn’t the only sense that fails you in the ocean. Clearly you can’t smell them, so that’s out. Touch? Let me explain my observations. GWS’ are so hydrodynamic that they don’t really move the water. I saw this first from the surface, they can get most of their body out of the water before the surface tension breaks over them. It’s odd to see at first, its like the ocean has a zit that forms, and then suddenly bursts. In the water, it’s even eerier. Without getting too far ahead of the story, watching the sharks approach a tuna head (that’s what we used to get them close) a shark will accelerate right up to it then suddenly, within 24” turn away, and here’s the thing, the tuna head barely bobs. I mean it bobs so imperceptivity that it may have been just the tossing of the waves. A 14’, 4000 lb animal rushed within two feet of a tuna head, and, if all you were looking at was the tuna head from the surface, you would never know the shark was there. It’s the same exact thing when they swim by. They came within those same two feet of us (once a fin even entered the cage) and you could…not…feel…a…thing. I promise you, if a bear rushed within two feet of you, you would smell it, hear it and feel it. Yes, all of that may do you no good, but you would know what hit you. A great white shark? Nope, all over but the shout. They’re like ghosts. It’s so very hard to accurately describe it, but they just show up. You would be watching one massive GWS swim around, and all of the sudden, out of the corner of your eye, less than two feet away, another would swim by, almost taunting you. I can’t tell you the number of times I watched the people in the other cage completely miss a GWS swimming right behind them (four people and eight eyes) because they were looking the wrong way. It was completely unnerving.
All you had was sight, and they’re very well camouflaged too. The pros on the boat think that the shark has a sense of how murky the water is, and hunts just outside this visual range, and then makes its move. After watching enough sharks in enough varied visibility, they noticed that on high visibility days the sharks stay much farther away from the bait, and on low visibility days they come much closer. Also, watching the sharks “hunt” it was amazing to see them use whatever cover they could when they decide to make their move. Here’s how it worked on our trip. The shark would take many passes at the tuna, circling wide, circling near, drop way down out of sight, slowly come back up, drop way down again, circle low, then point up and accelerate (and by “accelerate” I mean move from 0-60 in two flashes of its tail), here it would charge up exposed, or more often, use the boat and then the underside of the cages as cover and either nail the tuna or turn away at the last second. But to watch that huge mouth push forward, and see all the little nibbly fish blink it the weird game of chicken they play with the shark, and see it gulp, gulp and then head low into the unseen depths was extremely impressive. But here’s what really got to me. There is no way anyone at the surface, I’m looking at you surfers, would ever feel any of the 5-10 approaches the shark took before it made its move. My personal bet is that for every attack, there were several feints and inquiries made by the shark that were completely unnoticed. Again, imagine if the possibility existed that you could go camping, be sitting by the fire, roasting marshmallows, and a grizzly bear could come within a few feet of you, repeatedly, and you wouldn’t notice it…at all. Well, that’s what its like when there’s a great white shark in the waters. Awesome.One more thing on the ghostly nature of the sharks. We would be watching the shark swim right towards us, go under the cage (which was solid) and move to the other side expecting to see it emerge from under the cage, but it would be…gone. The cage was maybe 5’ wide, the shark was about 14’, but it was like a magic trick where the magician puts a long cane in his magic top-hat. They just didn’t show up on the other side. Weird.
Watching them patrol the waters Sander and I made a few observations of our own. We think the sharks communicate. When they’re in the water, its just too choreographed. One shark circles just below the bait, moves off, then the other makes it move. It’s like the first is a decoy. We saw this in the cage. One shark would swim in a wide arc off to the side of the cage, and then, from behind, the other would swim by from behind. Also, never, ever, did the two sharks make a move at the bait at the same time. Granted we only had three days of observations, but we found it interesting. So the question was, “What were you doing taking an eight year old shark diving?” No, not that one, the question was “How were they communicating?” No one has ever shown that sharks communicate beyond rudimentary body language, so what gives? A little anatomy first. Sharks have something called the “Ampullae of Lorenzini” which allows them to detect extremely small electrical impulses (according to Wikipedia, “Sharks may be more sensitive to electric fields than any other animal, with a threshold of sensitivity as low as 5 nV/cm” I won’t demean your intelligence by telling you what that means). To us it really looks like the sharks are communicating, and just because we may not be able to understand what form of communication they’re using it doesn’t meant they’re not communicating. I mean, who can understand women? I know when one is trying to say something important, what with all the hand movements, big words and pacing, but, honestly, I have no idea what they’re saying most of the time-sooooo ipso facto, women are like sharks. Glad that’s been settled. Where was I? Oh, right, Ampullae of Lorenzini and communication. We believe that the sharks are using some form of low-level electrical pulses to interact. They have this amazing receptive sense; it makes sense to us that they’re using it not only to find prey, but also to interact. It would be like a species having a great sense of hearing, but no means of vocalization. Seems like the best way to maximize this extra sense, and surely over the millions of years they’ve been alive they’ve figured it out.
So the rest of the trip was diving, diving and more diving. Every trip down was an adventure. It never got old. Sure, pulling on the cold wet suit was a drag, and yes, the motivation to just lay down on the upper deck and enjoy the cool sunny days was there, especially given that the constant rocking of the boat put Sander and I in a permanent state of low-grade sea-sickness, and the shock of the cold water became more intimidating than the sharks, but once you entered the water and started looking for the sharks, that became everything. And each time you saw the sharks, it was just as amazing as the first time. 14 dives, and never once did we think, “Oh hum, another day, another shark.”
Then, just to show me what’s what, at one point the seal swam away. Five minutes later a GWS swam by, and six feet later was our friendly neighborhood seal swimming directly behind it. Just cruising along behind a 14’ GWS like a baby duck follows its mommy. I’m 90% certain the shark was thinking, “Really, now? You have to swim behind me now? I’m working here, trying to look all ferocious for the humans, and you have to do this. I hate you.” But, if you think about it, the safest place to be when there are GWS’ around (if you don’t have a cage handy) is behind the teeth.
Second, the scariest moment for me was when I first saw the pictures of the sharks that I took underwater. Let me explain. Sharks have really dark eyes, so dark that it looks like one giant pupil, kind of like hamsters. The whole time we were in the cages looking at the GWS’, I had the feeling that the tuna was not the real reason they were there. The way they circled the cages, swam at
the cages, bit the cages (yup, I have the pictures), I had the feeling that they wanted in. Like they were swimming in circles using every bit of their brains trying to figure out how to get to the good stuff. I had this recurring thought; if you recall from our trip to Belize, we went swimming with nurse sharks in Shark Ray Alley (I’ll wait while you go get that entry). The way the guide enticed the sharks was to put squid in a pvc pipe with holes in it so that the sharks would scamper around and eventually one would just suck real hard and get all the squid. Well it hit me maybe we were the squid in the pipe! Well that completely weirded me out, but I told myself that I was way off base and that the sharks weren’t anymore interested in us than the bottom of the boat. But when I looked at the pictures? It was like a horror movie. The flash from camera illuminated the eye so you could the actual pupil. And here’s the thing. It was looking right…at…me! I’m telling you this right now; it wasn’t looking at me saying “Cheese!” It was trying to figure out how to eat the big moving creature with the bright flashy thing. I’m not the most macho of men, but that completely creeped me out. That and when I was lying in bed each night, I knew that there were great white sharks swimming around below me (they don’t sleep, and because of that, I barely did).Yes the water was awesome. The time between the dives? Not so much. You’re just always moving. Up and down, up and down, up and down. When you ate, you didn’t really have to swallow, you could just wait for an up pitch to move your stomach to where your mouth was three seconds earlier, and if it weren’t for the magic ear patches, in three more seconds, what was in my stomach would be where my mouth was. It just beat us up. Walking was and adventure, and watching poor Sander try to navigate the pitching boat was both funny and sad. Little hands out stretched looking for purchase, having to stop every few steps and brace himself and find his balance. Just brutal. But he never complained, never said he didn’t want to walk somewhere, he just seemed to get that that’s the way it was. Later, back in San Diego he let me know that he wasn’t a huge fan of the rocking boat, but asea, you would have thought he was Popeye (except his slogan would be, “I’m strong to the tips because I eats me chicken strips, I’m Sander the Saaaaaailormaaaaan). We also learned that peeing on a rocking boat is a special talent, and, (here’s where I cross a definite line) he didn’t “drop any ballast” during the entire five day trip, but when we got back to our hotel in San Diego, it was “laaaaaand ho!” And, I’ll tell you this for nothing, the sharks became the second scariest things I encountered on the trip.
So we spent our days diving and stumbling, and our nights laying in our little cabins laughing and talking about that day, and what the next day held. OK, that’s the romanticized version. We also spent ou
t time laying in bed going, “Ooooooooh, when’s the boat going to be still.” We played games for a little bit in bed, but mostly we were too sick to do anything and we racked out early. But it was amazing.
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