Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [78]
It was obvious that these three men were a close team. The elite diving team had been established to search for and recover human bodies and evidence. These bodies were victims who had drowned in the sea, lakes, and rivers around Cape Town, by accident or by foul play. The most difficult places to find people were in the black pools that dotted the rolling veldt. It could be dangerous and frightening work. There was no visibility in the black ponds, so after two members of the team roped themselves together, a third member would stand onshore and slowly lower them into the blackness. Sometimes the divers got tangled or pinned under tree stumps, or were sucked into thick muck, or lost their sense of direction, and were unable to figure out which way was up. Panic was not an option. If a diver moved the wrong way, he could inadvertently cut his own oxygen line. Despite the danger, he’d have to maintain his presence of mind and calmly wait for his team members to free him. This calmness under pressure was exactly what I needed for my attempted swim around the Cape of Good Hope. But they also had additional qualifications.
For fun, Alex, Doug, and Mario went spearfishing around Cape Point. The fish populations in that area were very high, due to an incredible amount of upwelling, which created an abundance of plankton, which the fish fed on. With many fish came seal herds, as well as large predatory sharks, including great whites. The great whites were eighteen to twenty-five feet long, and they could swallow a seal whole.
The white fishermen at Haut Bay, a suburb of Cape Town, told Sonnichsen and me that these great whites were common around the Cape. The fishermen even had names for them; one they called Big Ben, another the Torpedo. At first I thought they were telling us fish stories, but at Kalk Bay, another harbor near Cape Town, we found three black fishermen off-loading their morning’s catch. The oldest man in the group asked if he could help us. We were out of place, but neither Sonnichsen nor I knew that in South Africa at that time there were separate harbors, ones for blacks and ones for whites.
The old fisherman walked cautiously over to us. His eyes were clouded with cataracts; his hands were dry and crisscrossed by cuts. When we asked him if he could give us some information about currents around the Cape, he said he would try and he smiled. But when he discovered what I wanted to do there, his smile disappeared.
In addition to the great whites there were other aggressive sharks, such as tigers and bronze whalers. The tigers were always in the area, while the bronze whalers were migratory and only swim to Cape Point in the summer. These sharks are so aggressive that one had recently jumped into a local fisherman’s boat to get at him.
He gave us another tidbit of information: usually sharks bump their victims before they bite them, to make sure they’re food.
The old fisherman asked me if I was sure I wanted to swim around the Cape. I nodded, but in truth, I had some real doubts; I’d never swum with so many sharks before. We had a solid plan, I told him. Alex’s diving team would be in the water with me, watching for sharks. Another diver would be towed behind a ski boat, hanging on to a rope with one hand and carrying a shark gun in the other. If the diver sighted a shark and it looked threatening, I’d get out of the water; if there wasn’t time for me to clear the water, he’d have to shoot it.
Shaking his head, the fisherman asked me if I was frightened. I nodded. He looked directly into my eyes, as if to make sure it was okay and as if to say, Don’t worry. First he closed his eyes and nodded slowly, then opened his eyes, put his hand on my shoulder, and chanted something in Zulu. When he finished, a younger man said that his grandfather had just given me a Zulu blessing. He had asked the Great Spirit to keep the sharks away so I would return safely to shore.
Despite