7 minute read
Swimming With Sharks
Proper knowledge can protect you from fretting
BY PAUL MARINO
Last summer, I got a text message from my fishing buddy, Dan Madigan, 40, who happens to be a shark biologist. “Tagged white shark,” it read. Attached was a map of the New Hampshire Seacoast with a zigzag, yellow line across it. When I read the message, I laughed equal parts relief and terror. The shark was a stone’s throw from my favorite diving spot. I had shot a 30-inch striped bass there just two days prior. I feared sharks so much and knew so little about them, that I worried I might have to give up my favorite Seacoast sport — spearfishing.
This particular shark was named Anne Bonny. She had been tagged by an OCEARCH team off the coast of Carolina and named after a 18th-century pirate who cached her loot thereabouts. The 9-foot juvenile was tracked that summer as she swam some thousand miles north to the Bay of Fundy, turned south again and veered at last into the shallow waters of Rye.
Before Anne Bonny rolled into town, my only shark safety plan was to pretend they didn’t exist. White sharks have patrolled our coast for something like 70 million years, but when I was growing up, it was easy to think of them as fictional. By the late 20th century, shark populations worldwide had been decimated by fishing pressure and loss of food sources. Any white sharks left in the Western North Atlantic didn’t frequent our shores because seals — their preferred food — had been eradicated from New England. Seals bounced back since the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, and federal laws have reduced fishing and bycatch pressure on white sharks. While most shark populations in the world are historically
low, the Western North Atlantic white shark population, according to estimates by a 2014 study, has rebounded.
In 2018, Cape Cod had its first recorded fatal shark attack in almost a century, and in 2020, Maine had its first ever. Each of those places attracts nearly 5 million people to its beaches annually. By comparison, that same year in Maine, 43 people drowned. Abundant or not, the odds of a shark attack remain negligible. Still, local shark phobia is having its own resurgence.
I was, however, out there stalking prey like any marine mammal. In my black wetsuit and fins, I may as well have worn a seal costume. Sharks within a half-mile could feel my movements with their specialized electrical-field sensors. Studies have dispelled the myth that sharks can home in on human blood, but there’s no doubt they home in on striped bass blood. Maybe I was asking for it.
According to the Global Shark Attack File, 7 percent of all shark attacks happen while spearfishing. In recent years, a fifth of those attacks are listed as “provoked.” Provocations, as you might expect, include meddling with sharks or even spearing them. But even a speared fish, thrashing around, can trigger a shark to confiscate the prey or defend its territory. Such attacks are also considered provoked.
I tried spearfishing again a few days later. It didn’t help that beachgoers excited by the news were dropping the s-word left and right. Before I could zip up my seal costume, one walker, a man around 60, stopped to share quick story.
“My sister found a big shark tooth on this beach when we were kids,” he said.
“She took it to a biologist at UNH years later. He said it was from a great white, 15 foot-long.”
I figured my best defense would be to mimic an apex predator and practiced sneering like a spaghetti Western actor. Worst case, if a shark did ambush me with jaws agape, I should have some last words ready. “Bon appetit, (expletive),” I decided I would say fearlessly.
But when my feet left the bottom that day, and I entered the sharks’ world again, I found myself as trepidatious as a monster movie victim. In the turbid, choppy water, every object in my periphery unnerved me: a piece of kelp, a smudge on my mask, the tip of my own fin. Hubris alone drove me onward away from shore, anxious and distracted. Instead of circumnavigating the surfers as usual, I veered in front and caught a board fin across the scalp. Bleeding, I bee-lined it for shore, where I proclaimed the “viz” no good as the reason for my very short dive.
I was afraid that I’d have to give up spearfishing, which I loved. Nothing tastes like fresh fish, and procuring it with your own wits and stamina does, of course, flood the brain with dopamine. But, on the majority of dives, I don’t even pull the trigger. Even if I see a legal fish, it has to be swimming within 10 or 12 feet of me to spear it. Nonetheless, when it’s clear and calm, I’ll find myself mesmerized by an undulating tower of kelp, a technicolor jellyfish, or cryptic baby flounder, and forget the troubles of life on land. The physical exercise is unsurpassed. Riding home after each dive, my windows down, a feeling of zen befalls me like an empty temple. If there’s a striped bass or tautog in the cooler to share with my friends and family — even better.
Then Anne Bonny rolled into town.
Though I feared sharks, I noticed that a lot of people didn’t. I could learn from them. Take Larkin Kjellberg, 18, an avid surfer and aspiring biologist from Sandwich.
“I know some of the big ones could eat me alive, and I love that,” she told me. “I love how small we are compared to nature.”
At surf camp in North Carolina, when Larkin was only 12 years old, a fin the shape of a shark’s dorsal broke the surface near her. It turned out to be a mola mola, or ocean sunfish — a common mistake. Thought startled, she was back in the water that same day.
I didn’t let Lyme disease, thin ice or black bears keep me indoors. The trick was simple: She was knowledgeable about sharks. We don’t fret the familiar.
Larkin, I found out, never surfs alone. There’s always someone in the water with her or on the beach. She wears bright colors so she doesn’t look like a seal, and she doesn’t surf if it’s choppy or overcast. When paranoia strikes, she remembers the same breathing techniques that her mom taught her as a young child to help with anxiety: breathe in 8 counts, hold 7, breathe out 6.
If a shark approached her, she said, she would try be calm, composed, and look straight at it. “I’d tell myself, ‘I am big. I am strong. I am not afraid of you.’ ” If hurt, she knows how to use her surf leash as a tourniquet.
Marathon swimmer, Alyssa Langlais, 44, was the first recorded person to swim, without a wetsuit, from mainland New Hampshire to the Isle of Shoals and back, a distance of over 13 miles. The Shoals in summer are home to some 400 seals and visited, presumably, by many white sharks.
“Hypothermia or a wave will take you out before a shark will,” she told me. Dozens of agitated seals surrounded her during a long swim last summer, yet she managed not to panic.
It helps to know her support crew is a shout away. Still, she’s swimming over apex predators that could, she knows, rush her from the depths below. When that farfetched thought crosses her mind, she concentrates on her breathing, her swim stroke, the very low odds of such an attack, and the reasons she’s out there in the first place.
“The beauty outweighs the hazards,” she said. I keep all that mind when I dive these days, usually with a camera instead of a speargun, and never alone.
