Shorelines (17 page)

Early one morning we left our digs – the home of Jules’s mother Trudy Dickens and her husband Derrick in Sandbaai, near Hermanus – and drove off to Kleinbaai to join Dyer Island Cruises for a boat-based whale encounter.

I was looking to shoot the perfect ‘sailing’ photograph of any whale we encountered. ‘Sailing’ is what happens when the whale stands perpendicular to the surface of the sea and all that one views of him is his lovely tail. I wanted that tail, feverishly. Having been out to sea for ‘whale tail’ more than a dozen unsuccessful times, I was finding it somewhat of a mission. But my palms were, as yet, unbloodied.

Attired in bright orange mackintoshes and lifebelts, we walked in a saffron cloud of eager tourists down the main road of Kleinbaai to the little harbour and onto Wilfred Chivell’s boat,
Whale Whisperer
. Once out at sea, we passed the good boat
Shark Fever
, which had just hit the jackpot. A great white was showing off his ‘Air Jaws’ manoeuvres to the stunned group of adventurers on board. But for me today was ‘Whale Day’ – the shark thing would wait for another time.

We came across a gathering of brindled southern right whales engaged in recreational sex. Pale Male, as we called him, was schmoozing a far larger female, turning and exposing his snowy belly to her. They began embracing one another with their flippers. Everyone on board laughed quietly, totally seduced by the scene. The whales peered at us briefly before rolling back onto one another with an air of measured exuberance. But not one of them showed the faintest urge to ‘sail’ for my sweaty cameras.

Then the girl whale rested her head on Pale Male, forming an affectionate T-shape, and I forgot my particular mission for the moment. Just like the whaler Terry Wise, I was transfixed by these great animals.

“Men no longer go whaling from London and Belfast, Liverpool and Newcastle,” he concludes. “Gone forever are the whalers of Scotland, the Shetland Islands, South Africa and Holland …. In a score of small hamlets men now spend the long Norwegian nights gazing at their souvenirs and scars and remembering the savage beauty of the untamed, ice-bound Southern Ocean. I suspect it will not be long before the men from Russia and Japan also cease to make that long, lonely voyage.”

In the year 2006, with a health scare, a much-reduced taste for whale meat and absolutely no need for a whalebone corset, the world is still waiting for its remaining whalers to come to their senses …

On a stormy midsummer morning in Mozambique, I am all of six years old and deep in the drink, encircled by questing sharks. I have been nagging my stepdad to let me join his band of merry fishermen for days now. I want to catch a barracuda, all teeth and attitude and quite pleasant to eat with a touch of
piri piri
sauce. Grudgingly, with a list of fierce warnings from my anxious mother, they allow me on board. My virgin deep-sea fishing adventure.

So maybe I am the young Jonah of the crew, because things go horribly wrong on the little
Four Escudos
fishing boat out there, between wind and wave. We capsize and go “up so floating” in the words of the poet (ee cummings). I am dragged onto the hull by a relative as the tide takes the belly-up
Four Escudos
out past Inhaca Island and towards the open waters of the Indian Ocean.

As the others wave shirts and things at passing cargo ships, I am trying to dislodge a large fish hook from the fleshy part of my inner thigh. There is some of my blood in the water. But hell, it’s a big ocean, who’s gonna notice?

Ha. Within the first hour you can cue in the
da-dum da-dum
music as ominous black fins begin appearing around the boat. Numb from shock, I can only stare with fascination as the sharks make their enquiries. Some approach so close, we can all see into their beady black eyes. Are you possibly food? Won’t you just lean a little closer into the water?

After 12 hours at sea, we’re saved by a Norwegian fishing trawler. Mother is at quayside, gently steaming. Her little boy grows up with a big fish in his memory bank.

More than 35 years later, I am sitting in a garret in Vrededorp, Jo’burg, writing The Never-ending Novel. One of the subplots concerns The Submarine, a 9-metre great white shark that comes from False Bay and eats a six-pack of Chinese long-distance swimmers (by accident) as they come flapping around Cape Point, earning everlasting hatred from their boss, a Hong Kong gangster.

The book contains huge helpings of sex slaves, heroes on Harleys, an evil professor in a Tiger Moth bi-plane, mystical Bushmen and a crazy pub crow in a Namaqualand village called Wolf Harbour – it’s really Port Nolloth, but don’t tell a soul.

Throughout all the action (entitled
Little Fish Tremble – Unpublished
) the villainous Johnny Lo Fat pursues The Submarine up the coast with a passion equalled only by Captain Ahab in his chase after the white whale in
Moby Dick
.

You’ll probably never get to read
Little Fish Tremble
in its current format. So let me say right here: the shark wins.

Far from instilling deep fear in me for old
Carcharodon carcharias
(the great white), that little childhood spill in Mozambique was the beginning of an enduring love affair with this fish, so elegantly designed and intensely focused.

Another five years later, I am finally back with the real thing on a boat called
Predator
with a local legend called Brian McFarlane. We’re at Kleinbaai in the southern Cape, and with us is a young adventure-nut called Roger Underdown, a night-shift maintenance fitter from Kent. Roger, who says “sumfink” instead of “something”, thinks I have the funniest accent he’s heard all week.

The cheerful traveller is going to meet a great white today from the confines of a cage lowered into the sea near Dyer Island, which is where the sharks normally gather for their Supersized McSeals. Roger has seen the eclipse in Romania, has climbed Kilimanjaro and, as soon as he’s ticked off his shark experience, is driving down the Garden Route to throw himself off the tallest bungee spot in the world. Then he’s off to Madagascar to look for a really big butterfly.

Back home, Roger sits there on the night shift surrounded by pulsating machinery and travel brochures, making up his mind where his mighty English pound will take him next.

As he emerges from the cage four hours later, Roger has clearly had an epiphany. His hands shake, his eyes shine and the words come tumbling from his mouth.

From the viewing deck on
Predator
, I am equally gobsmacked. A 4-metre great white shark has come boiling out of the water in pursuit of Brian’s foul-smelling chum and for a while it’s all about many white teeth and grey speed and those eyes, those implacable, black-hole eyes I remember from my childhood brush with death.

You see movies on TV about sharks and suddenly your sitting room becomes a fish tank and you’re on the great white lunch menu. As the killing machine lunges out of the wide screen, you take cover behind the coffee table. But once you’re out here and the wind is blowing over the sea and the boat is bobbing and the shark is rising from the water, it’s not about fear. You stand in awe of this living cruise missile that has been here, in this perfect form, master and commander of the southern seas, for many millions of years. And it’s nothing like seeing the old
Jaws
shark at Universal Studios in California, either.

The boat-based experience is so mystical and life-changing that your next urge will be to hunt down every shark-fin diner on Earth, tie a sardine to his forehead, stretch him out on a sea-going rack and let the gannets have their way with him.

When you first meet Brian McFarlane you notice he has hands like plates. Almost everything about the man is larger than life. His roots run deep in the local seafaring community, going back to his great-grandfather, who opened up the first hotel in Gans Bay. His dad, Brian Snr, came back from a World War II prisoner-of-war camp and began the first perlemoen-canning business at nearby Onrus.

Brian Jnr spent his childhood days diving for perlemoen.

“I was paid sixpence a perly,” he said. “I probably earned more than my schoolteachers. At 16, I had a Jeep and a boat. I could not see the benefits of going to school any longer, so I left for a life at sea.”

His first professional appointment was on a fishing boat, but his diving skills soon led him to look for sunken treasure. McFarlane’s life story is one of those Boys’ Own adventures, with not a Game Boy or computer screen or Internet chat room in sight. He and his mates found the fabled 24 guns of the
Sacramento
, which were sold to collectors and museums around the world. Then Brian went diamond diving on the West Coast, and they still talk about him to this day up there in the mists of Port Nolloth.

“I seemed to have a nose for those diamond pockets,” he said. “My boss used to introduce me to people as ‘my champion’.”

Sometimes, Brian’s boat would arrive back on shore well after the bank’s closing time, so he was unable to store the day’s ‘catch’ in its vaults.

“More than once I would be walking around with a thousand carats in my pocket and sleeping with a bagful of diamonds under my pillow.”

In 1993 Brian decided to come home to Hermanus and settle down. He bought the old clubhouse on the local golf course and set up a guesthouse. But he kept breaking plates and missing the sea, so he left the running of the guesthouse to his wife, Sandy.

Brian bought a small boat for fishing and tourist excursions. Some 12 years on, that ‘little business’ had morphed into
Predator II
, a large boat that could take 20 passengers. In three years of shark-cage trips, his clients had missed shark sightings on only nine occasions. And if they missed a shark, their next trip on
Predator
would be free.

The effect of the shark cage-diving business on the little town of Gans Bay was astounding.

“Just take my business alone. I employ 11 locals,” he told us. “I buy my petrol and bait there. Then there’s the knock-on effect: meals, guesthouses, tours, T-shirts. The eight operators here take out 30 000 visitors a year, at an average of R1 000 a time. That’s a R30-million annual turnover. It’s an established industry.”

And because the shark cage-diving excursions had become such an entrenched, important sector of the local economy, the controversy about the effects of cage-diving on shark behaviour had been carefully watched from the sidelines.

Great white sharks were killing people along the southern coast of the Cape and beyond. Shark numbers were increasing. Had cage-diving made the sharks identify humans with food? Was it because there were more humans in the water, looking like seals in their wet suits? Everyone agreed that sharks preferred to keep to their diet of seals (readily available from places like Dyer Island), but people were still being attacked in the waters around here.

Back in Cape Town, Jules and I had spoken to Dr Len Compagno, the ‘curator of fishes’ at the South African Museum. The US-born conservationist said there were more coconut-related deaths in this world than shark attacks.

“I lived in the Philippines once and I can tell you, those coconuts can be deadly,” he said with the type of deadpan delivery I last saw at a comedy club in Los Angeles. “What about drowning? Do you know how many people drown? Why don’t they do something about that? The whole thing is just hyperventilation, it’s the sky falling on Chicken Little’s head.”

Dr Compagno said the world should worry about real issues, such as man-on-shark violence.

“The harvesting of shark fins is dreadfully destructive,” he said. “Fishermen just hoist the shark up, hack its dorsal fin off and throw it back to die a slow, painful death. The market for fins outstrips the shark populations. The Chinese use it as a feel-good meal for weddings. And the irony of it is: if it weren’t for the added stock, shark-fin soup would be tasteless.”

Sharks are not serial man-eaters, according to Dr Compagno. Much of the problem is that sharks, lacking hands, use their mouths to explore live objects in the water. And an exploratory nip from that array of razor-teeth often proves fatal to humans.

“There’s no proof of a connection between the cage-diving industry and shark attacks on swimmers,” says Compagno.

We asked Brian McFarlane why cage-diving with sharks had become so popular. It was by far the most sought-after adventure activity among foreign tourists visiting the province.

“I put it down to
Jaws
,” he said. “The book and the movie scared people out of the water – and into a boat.
Jaws
made sharks into monsters, but it also gave them a mystique. People want that thrill of being safe in the presence of the monster.

“I love my sharks. A day without sharks is a day without sunshine.”

And what sunshine these sharks brought to operators and their tourists. It immediately became obvious that each shark had its own character and preferences. Some seemed playful and curious. Some were shy, contenting themselves with circling the boat. Others were aggressive and surged after the tuna bait like starved prisoners. There was one well-known fish that liked to be tickled just in front of its gills. In fact, it would keep returning to the boat concerned, just to be tickled there once again.