Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea

1
South Australia, 1974
Swimming with Nightmares

Let's start with a story about sharks: Dangerous Reef, in the Neptunes Islands, 1974.

Blinded by blood, nauseated by the taste of fish guts, whale oil, and putrid horse flesh, I gripped the aluminum bars of the shark cage to steady myself against the violent, erratic jolts as the cage was tossed by the choppy sea. A couple of feet above, the surface was a prism that scattered rays of gray from the overcast sky; below, the bottom was a dim plain of sand sparsely covered with strands of waving grass.

The water was cold, a spill from the chill Southern Ocean that traversed the bottom of the world, and my core body heat was dropping; it could no longer warm the seepage penetrating my neoprene wetsuit. I shivered, and my teeth chattered against the rubber mouthpiece of my regulator.

Happy now I thought to myself. Ten thousand miles you flew, for the privilege of freezing to death in a sea of stinking chum.

I envisioned the people on the boat above, warmed by sunlight and cups of steaming tea, cozy in their woolen sweaters: my wife, Wendy; the film crew from ABC-TV's American Sportsman; the boat crew and their leader, Rodney Fox, the world's most celebrated shark-attack survivor.

I thought of the animal I was there to see: the great white shark, largest of all the carnivorous fish in the sea. Rarely had it been seen under water; rarer still were motion pictures of great whites in the wild.

And I thought of why I was bobbing alone in a flimsy cage in the frigid sea: I had written a novel about that shark, and had called it Jaws, and when it had unexpectedly become a popular success, a television producer had challenged me to go diving with the monster of my imagination. How could I say no

Now, though, I wondered how I could have said yes.