Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [5]
Carl Roessler appeared. One of the world’s great underwater photographers, he was a peripatetic, athletic fifty-seven-year-old brimming with the energy and enthusiasm of a man doing exactly what he wanted to do in life. He had the demeanor and face of a mischievous imp and the skin tone of a cosseted Irishman. Out on the open water the unforgiving Aussie sun would tend to fry him, and he knew it. Despite the very real risk of skin cancer, he regularly visited equatorial climes in search of new dive sites and better pictures. Such was the dedication of the devoted diver and wizened photographer.
Greg Sindmack was an obstetrician from Riverside, California. If he cared for the newborns he delivered with the same intensity he did his camera gear, then expectant mothers under his supervision had nothing to worry about. He also cussed more than any physician I’d ever met.
While during the short but bouncy flight from Sydney to Adelaide, Greg and I sweated over the state of our camera gear; Carl, Mike, and Brent experienced no such concerns because they sensibly traveled with specialized photo-equipment travel luggage strong enough to stop an antitank missile.
Arriving in Adelaide, we met up with Sebastian Horseley, the last paying member of our expedition. Sebastian was an English artist of unfamiliar reputation and intense iconoclasm. He promptly began hurling questions at everyone with the speed and facility of a ninja flinging throwing stars. Of himself, he said little. In dress, he inclined to black accented by the occasional outrageous T-shirt. Gradually, we winkled out of him the information that he had only just learned to dive during a recent visit to Thailand. This, therefore, was to be only his second experience with scuba. We eyed one another and shrugged. It’s his life.
The charming fishing town of Port Lincoln likes to be known as Tunarama City, after the annual tuna celebration that’s held there every year: a sort of rural piscine Mardi Gras. The bucolic little town of some 12,000 souls is located an hour’s flight west of Adelaide on the opposite side of the vast Spencer Gulf. Beyond Port Lincoln lie only towns barely large enough to rate a mention on a map, and the vast Nullarbor Plain—a perfectly flat, virtually featureless section of the globe that makes the American Great Plains look like Switzerland. The Nullarbor runs all the way across the continent nearly to the shores of the Indian Ocean. We were met at Port Lincoln’s minimalist airport by our host and guide, Rodney Fox, and his strapping son, Andrew.
On December 8, 1963, while competing for his third consecutive title in the Australian National Spearfishing Championships, Rodney Fox was nearly bitten in half by a great white shark. Every rib on the left side of his body was crushed, one tooth pierced his clavicle clean through, and it took 452 stitches to close up the great wound in his side. When he finally arrived at the local hospital, there was so little blood left in his body that his veins would have collapsed, had five more minutes elapsed before transfusions commenced.
Since that near-death encounter, Fox has made the study of the great white his lifework. In the years since the attack, he has guided scientists and researchers, game specialists and professional photographers on regular expeditions to study the most elusive and mesmerizing carnivore in the sea. He’ll even take along the odd, compulsively curious writer.
Rodney turned out to be a tall, soft-spoken chap with a quick smile, thinning hair,