Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [10]
On the third day, it started to get crowded.
By the end of the fourth day, there were six great white sharks circling the Nenad, feeding and snapping, biting at the cages, at the divers within, at the boat and the bait. The inch-thick ropes that tethered the cages to the boat were repeatedly bitten through, severed as cleanly as if by a headsman’s ax. The sharks nudged the cages. They gnawed at them. They slammed into them, all in vain attempts to get at the possibly tasty bipedal morsels they could see hovering within. Rodney avowed these were the most aggressive great whites he’d ever seen. We were too euphoric to be apprehensive.
Sebastian, our novice, stayed in the center of the cage and clung like a determined spider to the upper bars, as far away from the sharks as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of us obtained some of the most incredible still and video footage of sharks feeding and attacking.
The sharks were uncannily silent in their approach. One time, I sat down on the floor of the cage to check my camera, only to be told later by Klaus Reith that as I was doing so, a 2,000-pound, fourteen-foot female great white was nibbling intently at the bars not an arm’s length directly behind my just-out-of-reach head.
I never heard it, and I never saw it. Great white: the stealth shark. Did Tyrannosaurus rex similarly lie in wait to ambush its prey?
Having singled out a victim, the great white charges, bites, and then retreats and circles. Seals and sea lions have sharp teeth and claws, so the shark waits for its flailing prey to bleed to death or expire from shock. Only then does it move in and feed. It was this precise behavior that likely saved Rodney Fox’s life on that dreadful December day in 1963. The shark bit him and backed off, waiting for his life to seep away. Only his wet suit, acting like a giant Ace bandage, held him and his insides together long enough for him to reach the hospital.
You think of these things when you’re in the water with half a dozen great whites, the largest of which Rodney estimated to be more than fifteen feet and 2,500 pounds. The biggest he’s ever seen in nearly thirty years of diving with them was more than eighteen feet long—when he was assisting on the filming of the live-action shark sequence for the movie Jaws.
A fifteen-foot great white is much, much bigger than the cage. When its jaws are open to their greatest gape while taking some bait, its mouth becomes a small reddish cavern about a yard in diameter. If it’s coming toward you, you can see right down its throat, past the gills. It looks like a small railroad tunnel, black and bottomless at the far end.
One day, the instant Carl jumped in to join me, a great white slammed into the cage in hopes of intercepting him, and by sheer coincidence, jammed its snout right through the unbarred camera port. With astonishing presence of mind born of a lifetime spent in the sea, Carl whirled around at this most disorienting moment of entry and gave the shark a couple of friendly pats on the nose with his gloved hands. At once fascinated and aghast, I observed this performance from the far side of the cage. Fortunately, the camera portal was large enough for the shark to partially enter but too small for it to open its mouth once it had its head partly inside. Tail churning the water to foam, it furiously backed out. Carl’s mouth smiled around the edges of his regulator, his eyes twinkling with delight. Once again, I had to remind myself to breathe properly.
Days and sharks slid past. Having taken a dive interval, I was ready to return to the cage. Old stuff now to a veteran like myself. Routine. But there were three divers in the cage, and it was difficult for all of them to crowd far enough to one side to allow me ingress. I waited