Rowboat in a Hurricane (17 page)

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I said. Dolphins were becoming a regular occurrence.

“There’s a whale, too,” Colin added.

That sounded exciting. I emerged from the cabin with our large video camera. But I was already too late; the dolphins were swimming away, and the whale was submerged.

“What’s that?” Colin said, as he pointed to a small, dark dorsal fin about ten metres away. At first I thought it could be the whale or a large dolphin. But the fin did not rise to reveal the curve of a dolphin’s back or move in the slow manner that typified other visiting whales. Instead, it sliced through the water, a black blade cutting a straight line through the surface of the sea. I was mesmerized at what was undoubtedly our best shark sighting so far.

But the fin was more like the tip of the iceberg. The shark’s behemoth bulk was hidden beneath the water. When the shark rose to the water’s surface, the dark triangle quadrupled in size.

“Oh my God, that looks like the sail on a windsurfer,” Colin said.

The fin had risen to tower more than a metre. Its enormous appendage created a small V of ripples as it cut through the water. This could only be a great white shark, the only shark in these waters that can reach that size.

To coincide with my quickening heart rate, the shark’s pace sped up. Normally, great whites cruise at a leisurely pace but they quickly increase velocity during an attack to reach speeds of forty kilometres an hour. They can even generate enough speed to launch their two-thousand-kilogram-plus bodies completely out of the water.

Why was this shark accelerating? I couldn’t help but feel concerned, and I knew my gut reaction was worth taking seriously. A perusal of statistics compiled by the International Shark Attack File shows that great white sharks have attacked and sunk boats ranging from sea kayaks to sailboats and have knocked people overboard.

We stared in awe as the shark circled our boat a second time. Colin added the soundtrack of the two-note
Jaws
theme song:

“Dun, dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun.”

The fin eventually disappeared, and the sea seemed empty once again. But as if watching a horror movie in which the antagonist leaves the screen, we waited apprehensively for a sudden reappearance. The shark could be less than a stone’s throw away, completely invisible beneath the surface.

“Fancy going for a swim?” Colin asked.

“Thank God that Jaws didn’t visit us a few hours earlier, when you were scraping the bottom of the boat,” I said.

“You might have been rowing to Florida alone.”

“Don’t joke about that,” I said, still nervous that the shark might be around.

I had read Sylvia Cook and John Fairfax’s book,
Oars Across the Pacific,
detailing their
361
-day row across the Pacific Ocean. Fairfax was a risk-taking, womanizing gambler who liked to fight sharks to raise money for his rowing expeditions. When he was rowing across the Pacific Ocean, he continued to embrace his penchant for danger and had his arm sliced through to the bone by a three-metre shark. Sylvia had sewn up his wounds and rowed the remaining thousand kilometres to land where he could see a doctor.

“I bet removing those barnacles was a calling card for carnivores,” Colin said. “I watched all those mashed, meaty bodies rain down into the depths. It must have smelled like a doughnut shop for sharks.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t scrape the hull anymore,” I said. Next it would be my turn, and I didn’t relish the prospect.

Colin ignored my comment and pointed to the waters twenty metres in front of us. “The whale is back.”

I could see the large dark grey form slowly approach our boat, and I moved the video camera towards it. It began its slide directly beneath our boat, about a metre beneath the surface. The animal’s girth was as large as the beam of our boat; it looked to be at least six metres long. I was amazed to see such a majestic creature just inches from our hull, moving with the gentle care that I had come to expect of whales. I wanted to reach down and touch its back.

Through the viewfinder of the video camera, I noticed something seemed odd about the whale’s tail. It was aligned vertically to its body, not horizontally. I glanced up from the
LCD
display for a clearer view. This tail was just like the dorado we had caught, but about a thousand times bigger.

“That’s the shark,” I said in a low voice.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so mesmerized—or perhaps frozen with fear might be a more accurate description. Just an arm’s length away swam a hulking two-thousand-kilogram carnivore looking for lunch. It eyed the hull of our boat, wondering if we would make a good meal, trying to decide whether to take a test bite.

This is how great white sharks attack humans. It’s not that the shark particularly enjoys
Homo sapiens
—we’re rather bony and muscled and lacking in fat, compared with sea mammals. But they don’t know this until they take a test bite. Apparently it’s more like a gentle nibble, and I’ve even heard some call it “mouthing”—as when a puppy puts its mouth around your arm without biting hard. Unfortunately, even a nibble from the greatest predator in the sea can have lethal consequences. After the initial bite of human flesh, most sharks don’t come back for seconds, but the damage may have already been done.

With our quarter-inch plywood hull, even an affectionate lick from our new friend would probably send the boat to the bottom—leaving Colin and I as morsels for dessert.

The shark finished its slow slide under our boat and vanished from view.

“Wow,” I said, exhaling.

“I thought we were goners,” Colin said, half-seriously.

“That’s not out of the question yet.”

We both stared into the water looking for shadows or dorsal fins. After five minutes, Colin said, “Looks like the coast is clear. Maybe we should get back to rowing.”

I was mildly disappointed. The shark frightened me and aroused my curiosity at the same time. After all, seeing a great white shark is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and the biologist in me wanted a chance to examine it in greater detail.

“If only our boat was a little more solid, we could throw some food overboard to lure him back.”

Colin stared at me for a second before bursting into laughter.

“What? I’m sure any marine biologist would be excited to have the opportunity to observe a shark that large,” I said.

The shark didn’t come back, so we relived the event through the video camera. We huddled in the cabin and rewound the tape. I had not caught the shark circling the boat, but the camera had been rolling when it passed underneath. Since we didn’t have a polarizing filter, glare blocked most of the details, but the shark’s gargantuan size was displayed clearly.

“That is by far the largest shark I’ve ever seen,” Colin said. “He’s as big as our boat.”

I felt quite privileged to have seen such a large shark on my first ocean crossing. Based on Colin’s experiences and the accounts of other sailors, I knew it was uncommon to see a great white unless one travels to areas they are known to frequent, such as the waters off South Africa.

The shark that visited us was significantly larger than average. When we played the video footage frame by frame, we guessed the shark was over seven metres. Even if we over-measured by a metre, it was still substantial. Shark scientists estimate that the maximum size for the great white is between six and seven and a half metres, although five and a half metres is considered a giant.

Colin went back to rowing, and I flipped through the pages of our
SAS
Survival Guide
to see what they had to say about sharks.

“It says here that a good swimmer can outmanoeuvre a shark,” I said, laughing.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Not at all. It says you can escape an attacking shark by making sharp turns.”

“I’d like to see the author try that,” Colin said.

A great white can swim five times faster than an Olympic swimmer and they hunt some of the fastest and most agile marine creatures, including dolphins, tuna, and dorado. Not only can they reach speeds in excess of forty kilometres an hour, but they can turn on a dime. I couldn’t imagine any human swimmer capable of zigzagging out of the way of a refrigerator-sized mouth charging forward at the speed of a car. Over time, sharks had to evolve into capable hunters; otherwise they would not have survived
450
million years of natural selection. They even survived the catastrophe that extinguished the dinosaurs and
95
per cent of all marine life.

Everything from their colour and sophisticated sensory system to their power of thermoregulation has been honed to perfection by the force of evolution. Sharks are two-toned, white on the bottom and grey on top, so that they blend into the brightness of the sky from below, and into the darkness of the ocean depths from above. Even when seen from the side, their colour division breaks up their outline. Unlike most fish, they are not completely cold-blooded; a complex circulatory system allows blood in certain vital regions to be warmer than the surrounding water temperatures, allowing them to move and react more quickly. They also have a sixth sense—as if sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell weren’t enough—allowing them to detect electromagnetic impulses at the unimaginably low level of half a billionth of a volt. In other words, they can sense the nervous system of any living creatures nearby. We had been running our solar-powered desalinator earlier, and I wondered if that electrical generation may have also attracted the shark.

Like pretty much everyone who watched Steven Spielberg’s movie
Jaws,
I am terrified by the great white’s powerful jaws and teeth. Unlike most animals, which possess only two rows of teeth, sharks have six—two on the top and four on the bottom. The extra rows come out at different stages of growth, some visible and others just beneath the surface, so that every six to eight weeks, a row is replaced. At any given time, a great white has about four hundred teeth in its mouth and uses eighty of those for biting. Each individual tooth is shaped like a miniature saw, serrated edges cutting through meat and bone as the shark shakes its head back and forth.

But not all the features that allowed sharks to flourish for hundreds of millions of years serve them well now. Slow maturation and a low birthrate limit the ability of shark populations to rebound from decreases they’ve faced from fishing and purposeful slaughter. In
2003
Canadian scientist Julia Baum published a study in the prestigious journal
Science
showing that the great white shark population in the North Atlantic had dropped
79
per cent since
1986
. Since then there has been no sign of the population rebounding. Recovery will be difficult, if not impossible. Yet for the most part, sharks get little sympathy and fewer conservation campaigns than arguably cuter, or at least less toothy, species. Is it fear that prevents us from showing them comparable compassion? Perhaps. But what an impressive creature.

A STRONG CURRENT
funnelled between the islands of Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria, propelling us forward. We could see the volcanic mountains rising from the sea during the day and the glittering city lights at night. After five weeks at sea, the allure of land was powerful. Promises of freshly brewed coffee, fruits, salads, and cold drinks lay just a few kilometres away. Even beyond these cravings, we had practical reasons for going ashore. We’d lost both our sea anchors and could probably find a replacement here. We could also replenish our food supply in case the journey ahead took longer than anticipated. But the risk of being blown into the rocks as we neared the harbour was too high. We also knew that, if we needed to, we could stretch our food supply by rationing. And, for the moment, our makeshift drogue seemed to be working just fine.

Although I knew our decision was the prudent choice, I felt a pang of anxiety as we pointed our bow towards the open ocean and away from the Canary Islands. It would be at least five thousand kilometres and many months before we saw land again, and there was no turning back. The aft winds and currents increased as we continued rowing west to the other side of the ocean.

AFTER PASSING THE
Canary Islands, we began a more westerly course. Our plan was to head west on a southward curving trajectory to take full advantage of the prevailing currents and trade winds—light, steady winds that blow westward across the Atlantic. Our route was far from a direct great circle line, but it would allow us to avoid contrary conditions.

A great-circle route is the shortest distance between two points on the Earth. When this line is drawn on a Mercator projection it does not look straight, but curves north in the Northern Hemisphere and south below the equator. Thus, if we took the most direct route to Miami, we would follow a curve, first north of our destination, then slowly going down. The great circle route from Lisbon to Miami extends as far north as Nova Scotia’s latitude. Imagine pulling a piece of string tight between two points on a globe; the course the string naturally takes is the great circle route. An extreme example of the great circle concept is the most direct route from Adelaide, Australia, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—a course that would go over the South Pole. Or, to take an example from the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest route from Toronto to Bangkok is via the North Pole.