Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008 - (Page 30)

Great white shark cage diving is much like a lion safari in a Land Cruiser: you are in the beast’s habitat but armored from assault. It is a cosseted form of risk-taking, like checking out Darfur in a Popemobile. The body of water between Santa Cruz and Bodega Bay is called the Red Triangle because over half of all recorded great white attacks on humans have occurred in this small patch of the Pacific. At the heart of the Red Triangle are the Farallon Islands, the largest of which is four square miles and encircled by up to 100 great white sharks. The middle island is called the “pimple” and the others are just bits of misty rock, 25 miles off the coast of San Francisco. They say that people have a better chance of being struck by lightning than being attacked by a shark. This may be true for the majority of the world’s population, who live in third world megacities, and have never seen an ocean. The chances must certainly go up if you live along the coast and spend more than a few hours of your life in the ocean. South Africans and Australians splash about in great white habitat, and seldom get bitten. But it is northern California, where few go into the frigid water, that has the greatest incidence of great white attacks. These hardy few, mainly surfers in thick wetsuits, have more to fear from sharks than lightning. Incredible Adventures (www.incredible-adventures.com) offers Farallon cage diving for $875, and launches its 59-foot boat from the dock at Tiburon, a wealthy enclave on San Francisco Bay, named after the Spanish word for shark. I arrived at the dock at 5:30 am, tired. People settled on the ship, sliding into large booths that gave the boat the aspect of a floating diner. Most of the passengers fell asleep immediately, leaning against dive bags, or resting their heads on the tables. Much of the orientation focused on throwing up. Divers were told to never throw up in the head and never throw up into the wind. Julia Bissinger, the dive instructor, was like a Bond girl in her black leotard. She had sleek, practiced movements that gave confidence. Sheltered in San Francisco Bay, placidly passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, dwarfed by footings clung with fog, none of us knew that an 11-foot swell was rushing toward us, breaking over a massive sandbar called the Potato Patch. Captain Jeffrey Knight called the waves, “the biggest I have seen this year.” Eleven feet doesn’t sound that big, but the face of an 11-foot wave is three times larger, or 33 feet. The captain steered the boat diagonally across tens of waves, which were wrapping themselves around the Marin Headlands and magnifying into breaking, open ocean super-waves. Once past the Potato Patch the journey entered a period of repose. People nested as best they could, the silence broken only by the smokers making their way back and forth from the rear deck. The fog thinned into wispy sunshine, and soon we approached an anchorage a few hundred yards from the North East Island, which looked as inhospitable to human life as the moon. It was all harshness. The crew lowered the aluminum dive cage, which was designed like the safety cage in a race car. It was one of the largest in the world and held nine divers, each weighted down with lead, feet on a mesh floor, breathing out of tubes pushing compressed air. When we enter the ocean, we do so as aliens in space suits, removed from our earthly element. To a shark, watching these cages lower into the water must be like one of us seeing a UFO above New Mexico. We were divided into three groups and I was in the last. Each group submerged for 20 minutes and then rotated out. We struggled into our thick, seven millimeter wetsuits, and were led down a gangplank, handed air tubes, then lowered into the cage. The visibility was 35 feet, better than usual, and the view was unwaveringly blank. It became a zen exercise, a focusing on nothingness, like a night sentry. Unlike the rest of the world, chumming is banned at the Farallones because it would affect shark studies. So the crew wrapped a boogie board in carpet to mimic an elephant seal. It didn’t work. Most of the time divers don’t see a shark. The crew said that half of the time, people see a shark from the boat, but perhaps only 10 percent see a shark from the cage. My group was the third and last to dive, and after our time was up, the cage was open to whoever wanted a second turn. Few accepted. I stayed in, my core chilling, the cage mostly to myself. After 40 minutes I got out and joined everyone else, who were mostly sleeping. The naturalist told me that a shark can smell a drop of blood 500 feet away. So I went into the head, cut my finger with a Swiss Army Knife and went back into the cage, without incident. Then the boat pulled anchor. But few noticed, sleeping as they were. 30 coastaltraveler winter http://www.incredible-adventures.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008

Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008 Contents Coastal Hotel Coastal Adventure Coastal Gambler Coastal Rider Coastal Skier Coastal Art Santa Barbara Pismop & Avila San Luis Obispo Big Sur Carmel Monterey Santa Cruz San Francisco Sausalito Mill Valley Stinson Beach Bolinas Olema Point Reyes Station San Geronimo Fairfax Iverness Marshall, Tomales Sebastopol Petaluma Sonoma Coast Redwood Coast Napa Map

Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008

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