Just to scare myself, I have started reading The Devil’s Teeth, a book about the great white sharks that feed at the Farallon Islands, just 30 miles or so from my favorite surf spots.
The first sentence, about a seal execution, raises the hackles of a surfer and keeps him reading: “The killing took place at dawn and as usual it was a decapitation, accomplished by a single vicious swipe.”
Photo credit: www.have-a-great-time-in-south-australia.com
The book follows the single-minded quest of journalist Susan Casey to get chummy with the world’s most dangerous sharks. First she must wrangle a stay at the Farallon Islands, one of the world’s most fiercely protected nature preserves, home to seals, seagulls, sharks, four or so biologists, and absolutely zero guests.
Needless to say, she succeeds. Then Casey goes on to describe her forays into the waters around Southeast Farallon Island with the biologists, where sharks seventeen feet long bump against the boat. They lunge up and nibble on the gunwales with their two-inch-long teeth.
When I am belly-to-board this week I am looking anxiously seaward, scanning the swells for fins. Wondering what’s gliding around my feet as they dangle carelessly off the board. And I’m only on page 41.
I have learned that great whites can attack from two directions. One is that of Jaws fame; a dark triangle, the dorsal fin, speeding from the deep, “tunneling toward you like a German U-boat, creating a sizable wake,” Casey writes.
(Cue the music: Dum-dum. Dum dum dum-dum.)
The other – the more likely scenario – is from below. Sensing the electric tick of a heartbeat, and recognizing the shape of something seal-shaped near the surface, the shark jets upward at 40 miles an hour, enclosing prey in its two-foot-wide jaws.
As a surfer, thumbing through The Devil’s Teeth is a deliberate exercise in terror. I might as well pull Edgar Allen Poe from the bookshelf while home alone on a stormy night, or, halfway through a trans-Atlantic cruise, pop Titanic in the video player.
But then, if I didn’t want to be scared, I wouldn’t have started surfing in the first place.
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