THE TIME HAD COME FOR ME TO MEET A GREAT WHITE IN person.
Gansbaai is a fishing town and popular tourist destination in the Western Cape of South Africa. It is known for its population of great white sharks and as a whale-watching location. Tourists swarm to the town—which literally means “bay of geese” in Dutch/Afrikaans—for its lucrative cage-diving industry, which was started in 1995. Only Kruger National Park eclipses it as the go-to tourist destination in the country.
From Hermanus to Gansbaai is a short drive east. The road took me off the coast to avoid a nature reserve. Inland, the air is hot, the earth is dry, and vegetation is sparse. As I descended into the town, the ocean came back into view, and the luxuriant greens of the reserve stood out against the rocky gray beach. Waves were breaking far out to sea, rolling in toward the shoreline in rows. White ribbons of foam floated on pockets of royal-blue water. A cool breeze blew in gently from offshore. Along the water, in a bustling marina, nine cage-diving businesses were lined up below several life-size plaster statues of giant white sharks. Each operator was hoping that their oversize signs, like the blinking marquees on the Las Vegas strip, would draw in curious tourists eager to encounter the great whites in the infamous Shark Alley, the shallow channel between two islands: the larger Dyer Island, a nature preserve home to a declining colony of African penguins, and the smaller Geyser Rock, home to 60,000 Cape fur seals, which great whites nab as they traverse the channel.
My goal was to see a great white breaching out of the water in hot pursuit of a seal. I boarded a 35-foot powerboat at the dock and headed out to sea under the direction of Captain Nick, a no-nonsense man with a weather-worn face under his frayed baseball cap. As we motored out, he told me about growing up in the area and how his operation, which he started in 2008, brings in enough money to support his wife and three kids. A quarter mile offshore, we reached a nature preserve, a vista of deserted beaches with ancient 20- to 30-foot-high dunes and, beyond them, the green vegetation of rose hips and vines. The dunes pulsated with life: a dozen different animals burrowed in their white sand, leaving their footprints as a reminder that life can take up residence anywhere. Birds soared overhead and I could hear the seals yelping at each other. Under a blue sky, the water was a cloudy green. The spotter on deck called our attention to a dorsal fin at ten o’clock. We all turned at once, but the fin slowly descended from view like a periscope; most likely the shark was spooked or annoyed by the boat’s engines.
As the boat slowed to a crawl, I spoke with Captain Nick about recent great white activity off Gansbaai. He told me that in mid-May, a few months before my visit, two notorious shark-eating orcas named Port and Starboard were spotted near Dyer Island, which caused the great whites to scatter to avoid their only predator. In 2017, a handful of 16-foot great white shark carcasses had washed up on the beaches in Gansbaai. The sharks’ pectoral fins were still intact, but the middle of their bodies had been ripped open. The orcas had ganged up on the sharks and flipped them over, which put them into tonic immobility, essentially rendering them defenseless. The orcas then almost surgically removed each shark’s oil-rich liver, which they devoured, and left the rest of the great white to rot on the beach.
While Captain Nick couldn’t tell me whether the two orcas had recently killed any great whites—no shark carcasses were discovered in the channel—he admitted that the presence of great whites along the Southern Cape coastline was extremely fragile. This confirmed what Lesley Rochat and Tamzyn Zweig had told me. We stayed out for an hour and, during this time, not a single great white breached the surface. This made me worry even more that the dearth of shark sightings in Shark Alley signified something more troubling about great whites in South Africa.
Disappointed, I hopped in my car and left Gansbaai to continue my journey east along the coast. The drive was breathtaking. White sand beaches stretched for miles, and slow-breaking white waves rolled in on top of a light-blue sea. I had scheduled an interview with Enrico Gennari, PhD, a marine biologist and one of the world’s leading experts on great white sharks. He lives and works in Mossel Bay, a thriving tourist town and headquarters of the Oceans Research, a marine and terrestrial research company. I had a hard time believing that this young man in front of me, with the dark hair and boyish good looks of an Italian movie star, was the company’s director—until, that is, he started talking about great whites, which he’s been studying for most of his life. “I was five years old the first time that I watched a documentary on white sharks,” he told me, “and I remember telling my mom that that was what I wanted to do. And, you know, for an Italian, it’s usually quite strange because people in Italy become either a soccer player or an astronaut. So my mom said, ‘Yeah, okay, whatever.’ And instead of being a soccer player, I designed all of my career with that goal of being a shark scientist.”
Gennari has tagged hundreds if not thousands of white sharks, and has collected more than a few fascinating stories. Once, he and his research team were conducting a study of the shark population off Seal Island, near Mossel Bay, on the Western Cape coast. Using sardines as bait, the team attracted four great whites, which circled the research vessel. From his port side, Gennari heard a splash. He turned to see a great white leaping out of the water. According to Gennari, the great white reached 10 feet in the air before it crashed down in his boat, right beside the vessel’s fuel containers. Rather than letting the shark die onboard, Gennari and his team put a hosepipe into the shark’s mouth to give it oxygen and worked to get it back in the water. They wrapped a rope around the shark’s tail and tried to tow the shark into the water. But that attempt failed. They decided to head back to port, where the team used a crane to lift the 1,100-pound shark back into the water. Though the shark swam away, it couldn’t navigate out of the harbor and soon beached. Gennari again tried to tow the shark out to sea. After an hour, the shark was able to swim away.
For all of his experiences with great whites, Gennari stressed—just like Greg Skomal—that we still have a lot to learn about the great white’s biology and ecology. “We’re still far from understanding this species, and that’s what my research is moving toward.”
Because Gennari has spent so much time with great whites, I thought that he could give me more insights into the species. Greg Skomal and Chris Fischer have uncovered a lifetime’s worth of information about the great white’s underwater behavior, but I wanted to learn more about what great whites are like in terms of personality. Gennari laughed and said, “White sharks are not clever, from a human point of view, but they’re very inquisitive and curious. One thing I really figured out spending hours and hours with them is they are different. Not different from other species, but different among themselves. There are white sharks that are very curious. Others are more shy. And this is not true just about white sharks; it’s well known in the animal kingdom. Everyone who’s got a dog or a cat knows that two dogs are definitely not the same. So, the same thing applies to white sharks. Some travel much longer distances, while others really concentrate all their life closer to a specific environment. So there’s no stereotype of the white shark.”
While no one great white is like another, great whites do share many of the same characteristics as other shark species. Like any other species, for instance, great white pups are born alive and have to be ready to fend for themselves in an often harsh and unforgiving environment. Even though they are an apex predator, their survival at birth is a challenge, and their first test is getting food. “A young white shark up to three meters in length usually bases the majority of his diet on fish,” Gennari explained. “And then, from three and a half meters, they change their diet to one more based on marine mammals—seals, elephant seals, et cetera. The thing is, to learn to hunt an elephant seal or a seal is quite difficult. And they don’t have a mommy white shark to teach like a lion would do. So, there’s no parental care in sharks. What they have to do is basically learning by making mistakes, and that is most likely the reason why it takes so long to be successful in hunting seals.”
Gennari described the great white’s triangular teeth, which can be as long as 2 to 3 inches. With about 300 teeth in their jaws, a shark’s bite is formidable. Because a great white’s teeth are serrated, they can tear through flesh. Other shark species, like the raggie, have blunt teeth like those of an alligator and can only grab and swallow their prey. All sharks lose their teeth regularly since they are not permanent and move forward gradually. A large shark can go through 30,000 teeth in its lifetime. But while small sharks lose their teeth every seven or eight days, great whites need several months to replace their teeth due to the time needed to develop these larger, serrated teeth.1
Gennari has been recently researching the behavioral ecology and physiology of great whites, specifically how they can raise their body temperature, body part by body part. “Every athlete knows that warmer muscle works better,” he told me. “So white sharks, and the white shark family in particular, have a specific adaptation that allows the . . . red muscle to be warmer than the surrounding water temperature. In addition, the shark’s stomach, the eyes, and the brain, can also be warmed up. Warmer means more effective, which is a huge advantage for a top predator like a white shark.”
When we discussed the daily life of great whites, Gennari told me they are tremendous nomads. Like camels traveling in caravans across the desert, great whites traverse great distances through the sea. In fact, the travels of the great white make the peregrinations of other creatures pale in comparison. One female great white named Nicole traveled from South Africa to Australia in a straight line. Tagged near Gansbaai on November 7, 2003, she was detected about three months later when her tag—preprogrammed to release—floated back to the surface. Scientists retrieved it and, after reviewing the data, were convinced that the tag had malfunctioned or that a mistake had occurred. In less than a hundred days, Nicole had traveled approximately 6,800 miles, arriving in the Western Australian town of Exmouth, the longest known trip of any fish in the world. Though Nicole’s trip was equal to the annual miles clocked by humpback whales during their migration, Nicole covered this distance in one-third of the time, averaging 70 miles per day. At the same time, Nicole traveled in a virtually straight line across the Indian Ocean along the 32nd parallel south, matching the migratory accuracy of other animal species, including whales, arctic terns, and seals. As Culum Brown and the group of scientists affiliated with the Charles Darwin Foundation established through their respective tagging programs, Port Jackson sharks and hammerheads can travel similar distances, returning to the same areas, often to the same reef, on return.
While scientists are only now beginning to understand how these animals make their journeys, Gennari and others point to the earth’s magnetic field as a possible explanation for how these animals navigate. “Great whites maybe use the stars, maybe a magnetic field, maybe the current, maybe a mix of all those, but they are able to go in a straight line from South Africa to Australia and back, which is amazing,” he said. “Me, without a compass—most likely even with a compass—I would never be able to reach Australia and back. I would get lost!”
A professor at UC Davis, Peter Klimley, told me that sharks use the earth’s magnetic field to travel. Lava erupts on the seamounts just below the surface, and as the basalt oozes out, the magnetic particles line up along the north-south magnetic lines of the earth. With the lava creating valleys and ridges, the terrain features bicycle-like spokes that radiate out the magnetic information, which sharks use to gauge north-south direction during their sojourns of thousands of miles.
As we’ve seen, such migratory patterns leave sharks vulnerable to international fisheries. I wondered if, like the vulnerable hammerhead, the white shark’s underwater travels have inadvertently put its population around the world in danger. “While it seems that the population is not in great shape,” Gennari told me, “it’s not in bad, bad shape. There are many more species that are really in trouble. White sharks? Let’s say not in danger, but they’re vulnerable.” The International Union for Conservation of Nature does, in fact, classify great whites as vulnerable, one step above the “endangered” category. But Gennari pointed to a few encouraging signs about the resilience of white sharks around the world. “One of the smallest white sharks ever recorded was caught in Turkey. There are still white sharks in the Mediterranean Sea, which is heartwarming for me, because I grew up in the Mediterranean. They are mostly unseen and are likely to be very low in numbers.”
Still, vulnerable isn’t safe or robust, and while people suggest different approaches to protecting South Africa’s great whites, no one I spoke with denied that the great white population was in serious decline there. I thought back to Captain Nick, who relies on great whites to support his family. The next time I visit South Africa, I want to visit Nick again, and I hope his business will still be flourishing.
DURING THE WINTER MONTHS, LARGE SHOALS OF SARDINES migrate into KwaZulu-Natal, a coastal province on the southeastern part of South Africa. To witness this sardine run, my plan was to travel to Durban, the province’s largest city, an area known for its beaches, mountains, and savannahs populated by big game.
The sardine migration is one of the largest biomass trips in the world, possibly even larger than the migration of the wildebeests.2 The run is so vast that the shoal is visible from outer space. Sardines spawn in the cool waters of the Agulhas Bank and move northward along the east coast of South Africa. They come close to shore in the Durban area. The fish then turn northeast and eventually hit Mozambique, where they leave the coastline and, continuing farther east, eventually disappear into the vast blue of the Indian Ocean. The fish converge close to the shoreline because the cold currents along the coastline attract an abundance of plankton, which pull in the hungry sardines. And as we’ve seen before, where prey gather in great numbers, larger predators are sure to congregate. Dolphins, sharks, seabirds, and other species arrive in anticipation of the run, as if an internal alarm clock has gone off. These apex predators feast on the shoals of sardines. Divers can see the sardines and all the predators that take part in the feeding frenzy. Picture tens of thousands of birds soaring in the sky. The gannets patrolling the air look for dark spots in the water and hurl themselves downward. Tucking in their wings and turning themselves into missiles, they plunge deep into the clear blue waters for their prey. They zip through the water like arrows. And their beaks spear the sardines, which they snatch like prizes back to the surface. Bottlenose and common dolphins join in the frenzy, gorging on the tiny fish. The dolphins hunt as a group and surround the sardines, sending up bubbles to scare the little fish, who instinctively group tighter together into “bait balls.” After a time, the sardines are so tightly packed that the dolphins can surge wildly into the ball and easily grab the sardines. Sharks patrol the area and lunge, snapping their jaws at the sardines. The numbers and variety of sharks at the sardine run are astounding: bronze whaler, Zambezies, hammerheads, coppers, and great whites by the hundreds. I had planned to hire a boat to witness the sardine run in person, but then I received some disturbing information.
When I was discussing my plans with Charles Maxwell, an Emmy Award–winning underwater cinematographer based in South Africa, he told me that I shouldn’t bother, since there was nothing to see anymore. “It hasn’t occurred for years,” Maxwell said, to my dismay. “Two thousand and ten was the last very good year when I filmed whales feeding on sardines. Don’t believe what you read on the internet or from boat operators about the sardine run. It’s mostly commercial hype.”
The principal cause of the end of the sardine run could be that the water temperature is rising in this area, just as water temperatures are rising in every other part of the world. As part of its fourth national climate assessment on global warming, the US government published the Climate Science Special Report,3 which concluded that in addition to getting warmer, the oceans are rising and becoming more acidic because they have absorbed approximately 93 percent of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gas warming since the mid-twentieth century. “Ocean heat content has increased at all depths since the 1960s,” the report noted, “and service waters have warmed by about 1.3°F since 1900 to 2016.”4
The increase in water temperatures inevitably affects the sharks and the marine ecosystem. The annual sardine run is instructive. This event historically takes place when an offshore movement of the warm Agulhas Current is replaced by a cool, narrow band of inshore surface water, which provides the cold-water-loving sardine a nice cool corridor in which to migrate in large shoals. For the migration to take place, many believe the water temperature must stay below 69°F degrees. Since the water temperature is now higher, the sardine run has changed its normal course. In previous years, Maxwell tried filming the sardine run in Port St. Johns, where the water was colder. When the sardines failed to arrive there, he had to move again, this time farther south and west to East London, approximately 500 miles southwest of Durban, South Africa. Because East London is so far away from the sardines’ traditional spawning grounds, the fish were less numerous. When the huge sardine shoals stopped migrating north, Maxwell told me, blacktip sharks migrated south to places like Aliwal Shoal in Natal, about 100 miles south of Durban. “When I started filming tiger sharks there, we hardly saw any blacktips. Now there are so many blacktips that they have had a negative impact on the tigers.”
Blacktips and local dusky sharks would feast off the sardine run, but without the run, these sharks had a problem finding food. Whenever there is a catastrophic change to the environment, the rule of evolution is simple. A species has three choices: move, adapt, or die. Maxwell believes that it is no coincidence that blacktips are moving south to the Aliwal Shoal, where there are more fish, because it’s the only real option they have. And their numbers are starting to overwhelm the water’s resident tiger shark population, which is suddenly being outcompeted. So due to the web of connections, tiger sharks are suffering from the decline in sardines resulting from humans’ effect on the climate.
Some argue that natural oceanographic cycles occur over time. Fossil evidence, for instance, suggests that the Pacific sardines have experienced, independent of fishing, regular boom-and-bust cycles. Over the last 1,700 years, sardine numbers have reached a low point every sixty years. However, others point to global warming, which is making it harder for the fish to reproduce. Either way, the changes to the ecosystem are dramatic. Moreover, the Climate Science Special Report maintains that “there is no convincing evidence for natural cycles in the observation record that could explain the observed changes in climate.”5 Therefore, it would be extremely difficult to say that the water temperature change affecting the sardine run is caused by anything other than human-generated global warming.
DURING MY JOURNEY INTO THE WORLD OF THE HAMMERHEADS in Florida, I witnessed the impact of global warming on the species firsthand. I learned that hammerheads ate the schooling blacktip sharks that migrate during the winter from North Carolina into South Florida’s waters. The blacktips, in turn, feed on the massive schools of mullet, anchovies, and sardines traveling along the Florida beaches. Stephen Kajiura of Florida Atlantic University has been studying this migration since 2011. After earning his master’s degree in marine biology and later a doctoral degree at the University of Hawaii, he started conducting research at Florida Atlantic. Surveying the area overhead in a plane, he counted the blacktip shark migration, and he sometimes spotted a single group of 15,000. Kajiura simultaneously tracked the shark’s migration, concluding that the sharks are sensitive to water temperature. The sharks prefer a water temperature in the range of 70° to 75°F. Due to global warming, however, the temperature of Florida’s water increased by 3.6°F, which has changed the blacktip migration. The blacktips literally turn around when the water temperature isn’t in their ideal temperature range. Kajiura calculates that the number of sharks migrating into South Florida has dropped by a third as a result.
Global warming is causing changes in animal behavior on land and at sea, and the ensuing trophic cascade is unpredictable. Logically, the sudden presence of a large number of sharks in Central Florida will probably upset the ecological balance there. Similarly, the sudden absence of an apex predator in South Florida could have a precipitous impact on the marine ecosystem there. “Blacktips sweep through the coastal waters and spring clean by weeding out the weak and sick fish,” Kajiura explained. Without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the Climate Science Special Report predicts, the increase in average sea temperature could reach 5°F or higher by 2100. If that happens, the damage to sharks and the marine ecosystem may be intolerable. One final observation that Kajiura made is that the change of the blacktip migration can also have an impact on shark bites: if more sharks stay in the cloudier waters of Central Florida, incidental bites may increase in that area.
EVEN THOUGH THE SARDINE RUN WAS NO LONGER A POSSIBILITY, I still wanted to go to Durban to dive with a tiger shark, a longtime dream of mine. Unfortunately, civil unrest resulting in the murder of immigrants there caused me to cancel my trip to Durban. Instead, I returned to Cape Town, where there was one thing left to cross off my Shark Route itinerary: seeing a great white in person.
I headed back down to False Bay to schedule a dive with one of the town’s many cage-diving operators. Before I completed my dive with a great white, however, I wanted to visit Muizenberg Beach, widely considered the birthplace of surfing in South Africa. The wide sandy beach curves round the eastern coast of False Bay and helps produce the long gentle breaks that surfers love.
Surfers still congregate at this beach in large numbers, including Joseph Krone, who survived a shark attack. A young man in his twenties with dark hair and a friendly, open face, Krone told me about his attack. We spoke over coffee one afternoon at an outdoor café in the harbor town of Mossel Bay. From our table, I could see the tranquil ocean glistening under a clear blue sky. Krone was wearing a simple striped T-shirt and spoke calmly about his experience. “I think it was about seven in the morning before the competition started. It was at the point in Jeffreys Bay, and there were quite a few people surfing.”
Krone recalled that the sky was overcast that day, and the water was brown, which lent the atmosphere, in his words, a kind of eerie overcast. “But even then,” he said, “it never crossed my mind about a shark or anything.” After catching a few waves, he was paddling back out, taking a wide angle to avoid the break, which put him in deep water. About halfway, he decided to rest. “I put both my arms up on the board and was just sort of lying flat. That’s when it happened. I just thought someone was tackling me or I did something wrong and so someone was trying to beat me up or something or playing a joke on me.”
The shark first struck Krone with its nose, a simple investigative tap, but the strength of it sent Krone flying. “That was actually probably what saved me. If it had bitten straight away, it would have taken a piece straight out of my middle.” Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, Krone told me, as he was tossed in the air. When he splashed back into the water, his surfboard crashed on top of him, shielding him from the great white, at least enough to absorb the shark’s initial bite, which snatched a huge chunk of fiberglass from the board. The next thing Krone remembered was his leash getting pulled. “Luckily,” he said, “it was a thin leash, and quite quickly it just snapped. If it was a thick leash, it could have dragged me along with the board.”
Once free from the board, Krone finally saw the shark. “That was probably the most hectic part for me, just to see the intensity of the animal,” he said, “the muscles just flexing. It was just whipping from side to side.” Krone could see the board, probably broken, sticking out on either side of the shark’s mouth.
Another surfer, Shannon Ainslie, paddled out to help Krone. Ainslie knew what he was doing. A few years earlier, he had survived his own attack by two great whites in East London. “He was the only guy that paddled to me. He offered me his board, which was quite a gesture because obviously for him to be in the water, it would be quite hectic. And he was very reassuring,” Krone said. “If he wasn’t there, I think I probably would have panicked. I probably would have really got terrified.”
Krone and Ainslie made it to the rocks, where a crowd had gathered. Two people, who had watched the entire attack from start to finish, told Krone how lucky he was, something that was becoming more and more clear to him as details of the attack began to sink in.
“I wasn’t scared at the time because my body just went into automatic survival mode. I was just observing and not really feeling too much or thinking too much. For me, the most special part was just to watch the shark. To witness the power of it—I think that’s where I gained the most respect for sharks and great whites.”
The next day, Krone competed in the tournament. He wasn’t scared, he told me, but he was aware like never before about a shark’s power and presence. “For a surfer, the main danger that we all think about is the possibility of running into a shark. It’s very much a battle of the mind, where you try not think about it. And that’s where most of the fear is, just in your mind. I see sharks as beautiful animals. They’re very graceful and mostly peaceful. I just think they’re amazing animals. I’ve only got more respect for them because of the attack. I never thought of them in a worse way after the attack.”
AFTER TALKING TO KRONE, I COULDN’T WAIT TO EXPERIENCE a great white shark in person. I hired a veteran of diving with great whites, a man named Rob Lawrence. How he became a shark-cage operator is quite a story. Born and raised in Cape Town, where his family has been fishing the waters since the late 1800s, Lawrence spent his childhood playing on the beach and catching fish. Volunteering with the white shark research project in nearby Gansbaai was the natural next step. As a junior research assistant, he helped tag smaller sharks around South Africa. Preternaturally curious, he later went looking for sharks in False Bay. He and a friend commandeered a 12-foot skiff to see what they could find near the shores of Cape Hangklip at the eastern end of the bay. To attract attention, Lawrence and his friend towed a life jacket behind the boat, unaware of or unconcerned with the number of great whites that were almost twice the size of their boat in the bay hunting for seals. By dragging the life jacket, Lawrence had unwittingly created a seal decoy, baiting some of the largest great white sharks in the world. After a while, they saw a small island. The aptly named Seal Island is home to an estimated 64,000 Cape fur seals—and nothing else. Rising no more than 20 feet above the high-tide mark, the 5-acre island is essentially a narrow granite outcrop with no soil or vegetation.
Great whites visit the island seasonally to prey on the seals. Traversing the island’s waters for fish is dangerous for the seals, which is why the area is referred to as the Ring of Death. During the winter months, white sharks at Seal Island can feed easily on the newborn seal pups learning to swim in the treacherous waters. The “predator naive” pups don’t know how to avoid sharks—or even that they should. Of course, the great whites also feed on the adults, but pups comprise 90 percent of their kill. Every creature born on this planet must learn how to survive in an often-inhospitable world. Young seals need time to learn survival skills, which makes them vulnerable to the experienced hunters that stalk them. Seals learn to improve their odds of survival by traveling in groups. The success rate of the sharks when hunting a group of seals is only 20 percent, but it rises to just over 50 percent when hunting seals that are swimming alone.
When hunting, a shark will patrol along the seafloor, peering up at the surface in search of the silhouette of a seal. Once it sees a target, the 2,000-pound shark will switch from a horizontal position to a vertical position and launch an attack from the depths like a cruise missile launched from a submarine, propelling itself toward the surface at 20 miles per hour. The safest place for the seal is near the shark’s tail, because the shark cannot reach around fast enough to grab the seal. If the seal strays from the tail, however, the shark will be able to twist and snatch one of the seal’s flippers.
The sharks’ feeding ends when the seal mating season starts in summer. The great whites leave the island to hunt fish out at sea when the increase in water temperature brings in large migratory fish like yellowtail and skipjack tuna.
As Lawrence and his friend were towing the life jacket behind their boat, they finally caught the attention of a hungry great white, which immediately took off after the life preserver, skipping behind in the boat’s wake. The shark soared out of the ocean, exposing the contrast of its ghostly white underbelly and the dark marine blue of its towering dorsal fin. The shark’s reentry caused a white water explosion, which sounded to Lawrence like a cannon shot. They had witnessed what few people have ever seen: the breaching of a great white shark. Lawrence turned and looked at his buddy, whose eyes were bulging out of his sockets, just as Lawrence’s were.
“I was totally blown away by what I saw,” he told me later. “It was then that I knew I wanted to spend as much time as possible at Seal Island.”
He started working two jobs to save enough money to buy his own boat. About that time, he met a young woman named Karen. Like Lawrence, she used to spend a lot of time outdoors as a child, camping in the African bush and hiking. Their courtship was a bit unusual; together they explored the bush in South Africa and Botswana.
Around the same time that he could afford his boat, he and Karen got married, and the newlyweds—along with Lawrence’s buddy from the skiff—started a company called African Shark Eco-Charters. With Karen handling the administrative affairs, Lawrence started escorting tourists to see breaching great whites.
I drove to Lawrence’s boat, which was docked in Simon’s Town, about an hour’s drive due south of Cape Town, at the northern end of False Bay. The boat was 35 feet long, with enough room to accommodate a small crew and—more important for the purpose of my trip—a shark cage in the stern. The cage had thick bars and one small aperture for the camera to peer out into the water. It was a beautiful, sunny day, but as we headed out to Seal Island, we encountered a fog bank, which made the journey surreal. Lawrence pulled back on the throttle to reduce the danger of collision. As I peered into the mist, I could make out a dolphin pod playing in the bow wave just off our boat. I also saw underwater disturbances, swirls and eddies of white water against the canvas of marine-blue water, though I couldn’t tell if it was a seal, a dolphin, or a shark.
Just then the sun broke through the fog, revealing Seal Island’s outcropping of dark granite rocks. The cacophony of 65,000 seals barking, calling out to one another, filled the air. The wind blew the pungent smell of seal droppings to our boat. Lawrence dropped anchor into the dark-green depths of the island’s Ring of Death. He and his crew tossed chum over the side of the boat, the red swath of fish chunks scattered in contrast to the blue water. A crew member struck a two-by-four block of wood against the floor of the hull, hoping that the rhythmic thudding would attract the attention of a curious shark. Lawrence threaded a rope with decapitated tuna heads, still oozing with blood, and tossed it into the water as a final enticement. I knew full well that a great white shark was swimming, unseen, somewhere in my vicinity.
Then Lawrence lowered the cage into the water. It was now or never, my moment of truth. It was easy to think about swimming with a great white back in my apartment in New York City, but not so much with my knees bent over the boat’s bow.
A litany of things that could go wrong started to cross my mind. I considered what would happen if the line connecting the shark cage to the boat broke, dropping the cage down into the depths. I would have to get out of the cage and swim to the surface, likely coming face-to-face with a great white. But then I realized that my imagination could come up with all kinds of fantasies. Now was the time to apply everything I learned along my journey and, despite my increasing fear, grab hold of my emotions and think rationally. I remembered the scientists and marine biologists I had interviewed. Their faces and voices were clear in my mind like a video montage: George Burgess at the International Shark Attack File telling me that sharks are not man-eaters and have no interest in hunting humans; Enrico Gennari reminding me that the great whites migrate away from the tourist-filled beaches in South Africa in search of fish; Greg Skomal, back in Cape Cod, assuring me that even on the beaches where Jaws was filmed, great whites are only after seals.
It is a mistake to ignore fear; survival in nature is dependent on it, and in a broader sense, fear is what keeps all ecosystems chugging along. I came to understand that the fear created by the wolves in Yellowstone and the tiger sharks in the seagrass beds of Australia were crucial to maintaining the ecosystem. Mike Heithaus told me that it was not the tiger sharks’ killing huge numbers of sea turtles and dugongs that saved the ecosystem but the change they effected in the behavior of their prey. Fear allowed the sea turtles and dugongs to stay alive without decimating the seagrass and, in the end, preserved the entire marine ecosystem. Controlling fear is a sign of intelligence, a necessary step in our evolution. I zipped up my wetsuit and entered the cage.
A few minutes later, fully immersed in 50°F water, I peered through the too-thin bars of the cage into the green miasma. I could hear my own breathing and the dull sound of my heart beating under the wetsuit’s skimpy layer of foamed neoprene. Finally, a great white emerged out of the void, grabbing at the decapitated tuna heads. Above me, on board, Lawrence and his crew pulled in the rope, jerking the line out of reach. The shark hurtled out of the sea with its mouth agape. It came crashing back down in the water near my temporary home, its weight causing a plume of white water to erupt, before it disappeared again into the green depths.
Another white shark, about 10 feet long, hovered into view. In no hurry, it meandered through the water with a gentle swish of its tail. As it circled the boat, the shark looked at me. I locked onto its eyes, which were coal black and seemed indifferent. I spotted no traces of aggression whatsoever, but I was moved by the stealth with which the shark surveyed the area around it, seemingly taking it all in at once. Because it didn’t spot anything of interest—not me, a floating bipod in a submerged cage, nor the floating buffet of tuna heads—the shark swam away, entirely unimpressed.
Eventually, the tuna heads Lawrence and his crew continued to add to the line attracted a 20-foot great white. The massive shark circled in front of me and, with each turn, got nearer and nearer to my cage. Its presence was commanding, overwhelming, and inspiring, all at the same time, like witnessing a battleship go sliding by. I marveled at the shark’s towering signature dorsal and pectoral fins, the battleship’s forward and aft turrets. It was magnificent.
As the shark’s pointed nose carved through the water, its black eyes exhibited a cautious curiosity. Suddenly visible, its arsenal of teeth, which have graced so many magazine and book covers, caught my attention. Instead of generating dread, its teeth inspired respect and awe.
My trepidation immediately gave way to excitement. I stood silently near the bars of the cage, in awe of the shark’s strength and gracefulness. One of the ocean’s fiercest predators was inches from me, a true emperor of the deep. An admiration and a sense of connectedness with sharks and all other ocean apex predators started to spring within me, a feeling of awe I can only describe as spiritual and pure. Absent old prejudices and unfounded fears, I recognized sea life as part of an integrated whole. As if wearing new lenses, I witnessed the true magnificence of the oceans and its inhabitants. My two-year journey was complete. I had experienced the full majesty of the shark. But even then, hundreds of feet below the surface, I realized there was still more to see, still more to experience, still more to learn, and still more I would never see. However briefly, I had traveled beyond the world of form into the mysterious and the eternal, stealing a glimpse of the species that has ruled the seas for 450 million years, a steadfast guardian of the world’s oceans.
And just like that, the shark disappeared into the darkness.