A few miles off the south coast of Australia, I don my 7-millimeter wet suit and slink into a steep reinforced cage just big enough for my body. The cage is lowered into the water, and I immediately start to panic as I discover that my breather tube is being pinched by the cage lid. I am about to drown eight inches below the surface in the cold ocean water. With no air in my lungs, I repeatedly punch up hard on the lid until they finally pull me out, asking what’s wrong. The crew quickly learns of my excellent command of life-threatening expletives! Back in the water, air now flowing freely, I float in a one-person shark cage, waiting for a great white.
There are sharks, and then there is the great white. Sometimes called the white death, the great white has earned much of its ass-kicking reputation from the book Jaws, which was subsequently made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. In more recent times, the shark specials on cable television channels have done much to overdramatize and focus solely on the attacking and killing power of sharks rather than the benign reality. I have come to regret my involvement with some of these programs over the years. Yet the great white also comes by its reputation honestly. Great whites are carnivores, feasting on anything from fish to seals to dolphins. Despite their well-deserved spot at the top of the food chain, they are stealthy beasts, typically ambushing their prey from below.
And from my vantage point inside the cage, beast is the correct description. Two sixteen-footers come in again and again, swimming right past the cage and taking bits of bait the crew has been throwing off the boat.
Then it comes. An eighteen-foot behemoth that swims into the scene with the confidence only an apex predator of its size could exude. The two sixteen-footers take off and are not seen again. The sight of this huge animal coming straight at my tiny cage from the unending depths below is one I will never forget. The trick of its size is actually not its length, which is terrifying enough, but its sheer mass and girth. It could, quite simply, open its jaws fully and take my entire body in one bite, or maybe two! It rises slowly, with barely even a torque of its body, as if it can just think its way through the water. I can’t help but think of the two flimsy ropes that hold the cage to the boat. This shark could rip the whole boat apart, never mind my little cage!
Over in the much larger filming cage, my buddy Mark Rackley, the extreme videographer, is running his camera when the big beast suddenly makes a run straight for me. Were I in the bigger enclosure, I could slink to the bottom, or even back up a couple of feet. In the solo cage, my face is inches from the opening, out of which I dangle bait by hand. There is nowhere to go, no place to hide.
The behemoth rams the cage right in front of my face; I bounce wildly, but the cameraman gets the shot he needs, from his safer vantage point. Thankfully, the metal has turned the shark away and he makes no attempt to fit his massive jaws around my tiny cage.
I am pulled back up, determined to do the rest of my dives in the big cage, where I’m hoping there is a greater margin of safety. But this assessment is soon proven wrong. Mark and I are in the large cage when a great white is mistakenly led to a piece of bait dangling between us and the boat, partially trapping the shark in the narrow space. It thrashes about viciously until it finally cuts through the bait line and smashes its way out, almost ripping the cage off its ropes.
Tiger Beach
I’m breathing hard into my mask and regulator as a dozen nine-foot lemon sharks and a few eleven-foot tiger sharks swim around me. Overhead, several tons of steel boat are about to come crashing down on me after being thrown into the air by a ten-foot ocean swell. Bulky scuba gear weighing me down, I frantically swim a few feet out of the way as the boat again threatens to land on me and my two safety divers, Don Schultz and Jessica Templin.
In the relative safety of the boat, the camera crew is trying hard not to be thrown into the water. “There’s another tiger down there! Hurry up!” one yells at me. All I have to do is utter two short lines from my script—“Just where are the deadliest waters on earth, and more importantly, what makes them so deadly? Let’s find out”—then simply dunk my head beneath the surface and take off on an underwater scooter. Easy stuff in a swimming pool, not in raging seas!
For the third straight year, the Discovery Channel has asked me to host a Shark Week special. Last year, I floated in a life raft above a group of frenzied sharks, only to puncture a hole in the raft myself and have the cameras watch me sink. Talk about setting your bar high! This year they asked, “Hey Les, how do you feel about jumping out of a helicopter into a frenzy of sharks?”
To be honest, this one took some convincing. We all have our demons, and mine is heights. Yet here I am, zipping up my wet suit and getting last-minute jumping instructions from the pilot. In fact, both cameraman Andy Mitchell and I will have to jump out, as he is to film from the chopper and would have no way to get back on the boat without jumping himself. He has no problem with heights—he has even been skydiving. Yet it doesn’t escape my attention that he calls his wife right before takeoff. The seas have been rough all week; today they are at their worst. The winds are high, and swells rise to as much as twelve feet in the waters below. The Dolphin Dream, our former shrimp boat turned dolphin and shark tourism boat, is bobbing like a cork beneath us, in an area known as Tiger Beach. Just last year, a man was attacked and killed by a tiger shark here.
We have been chumming the waters with dead fish for two days to keep the sharks around and ready for my plunge. I make no bones about it, though, and tell the pilot I am scared of heights. This will definitely be a challenge for me. He assures me he can bring me within a foot of the swells if I want. Just when I was hoping we’d cancel due to high winds!
When you push your limits, you sometimes notice that your mouth goes dry. Mine is like sawdust as I climb into the chopper. I have an hour in the air before we reach Tiger Beach to consider my future. I can see the sand at the bottom, only thirty feet below the surface. At least this is slightly reassuring. “Looks pleasant enough,” I tell myself. I can do this. As we fly over the lemon and tiger sharks, the pilot can’t stop saying, “I don’t care what kind of sharks they are, they’re sharks! You guys are f***in’ crazy!”
We circle a few times, trying hard to line up the shot for Andy. Finally, my time has come. Andy gets his shots, looks at me with an apologetic expression, and cries out, “Let’s do this!”
When I used to perform on stage, I always had to deal with nervous bowels. When I first started to paddle class four or five rapids, I always had to pee. Jumping from a helicopter into an ocean filled with sharks for the first time requires an extra boost of adrenaline, though, so for some reason I let out a loud grunt and beat my chest.
Now, even though I’m not jumping from hundreds or even dozens of feet in the air, there’s still a catch. The pilot says, “Oh, by the way, I’ll have to keep the chopper moving while you jump, and you have to make sure you jump straight out, or the skid will flip up and could knock you out cold before you hit the water.” Great.
The bite from a Caribbean reef shark is still healing on my wrist, and I realize that chain mail would be nice to wear. Somehow, though, our chain-mail suits were lost during one of the flights. In any event, the chain mail would do little against a lemon or tiger shark, which could rip right through me as an afterthought. Unfortunately for Andy and me, we know that a few small fish thrown in the water to attract the sharks is one thing, but the sound of something large—say, a human body—will bring the big sharks in fast. Tiger sharks determine what you are by biting. You lose an arm while they realize you aren’t actually a fish. Small mistake for them. Big one for you.
Steady . . . a little slower . . . a little lower. Three slaps of my hand on the pilot’s back, my feet resting gingerly on the skid of the chopper, and it’s time. Out I jump, hoping I can do this without being decapitated by the prop or knocked out by the skid.
In the end, I surprise myself; the height is no issue. Down I go. Huge swells take me as soon as I hit the water, but my safety divers are there quickly to pull me to safety, all the while watching the sharks below.
I’m only underwater for a few seconds, but it feels like eternity. Soon I’m up again, choking and spluttering on the salt water. Success
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