TranspacII-8

TranspacBlogII-8
More on Sharks

The other shark story I carry around in my head is from my high-school friend Rob Rebstock, way back in the mid 70's. A couple of years after the attack I am about to describe, Rob and his brother came up to Santa Cruz, and told us this story. Now, I first got to know Robbie as a full-back on the "C" football team (the smallest and youngest division; he was a freshman, I was a sophomore). I was a guard, and watched him slam through the smallest of cracks I had made for him. My point is that Robbie was, and, I imagine, still is, very tough. He is an avid surfer and diver. I surfed with him several times in my youth, but haven't seen him in quite a few years, now. A few years after graduating from high school, he and his brother and two friend were in a small outboard just inside Point Conception, up the coast from Santa Barbara. Look at any map of California and you can see Point Conception. It's the big right angle bend that separates Southern California from the rest of California. The surf was flat, so the boys decided to go scuba diving.

They anchored inside Government Point (the inside eastern point of two) next to another diver who was warming himself in the sun. They asked him how the diving was. He said "Great, except I ran into a big white shark down there who kept tugging at my fin." He bent his fin, displaying an impressive set of razor cuts. Now, this diver was a "hookah diver", one of these crazy guys who hooks up an air compressor to a hose that gives him an unlimited supply of air. Now I call them crazy, because these guys typically play Russian roulette with their "dive tables", which scientifically tell you how long you can be at any particular depth before you will get the bends (the bends is a horrible condition that comes from nitrogen gas suddenly forming bubbles in your blood stream, typically as you come up after a stupidly long dive). Scuba divers usually pay attention to their tables, partly because they are just diving for fun, and don't have to stay down until they find enough catch to pay for their new car; but also, because they run out of air and have to come up to change air tanks, They have the luxury of looking at their table and saying, oh, rats, I can't dive anymore, today. By contrast, hookah divers are diving, not for fun, but for a living. In those days it was abalone, nowadays it is sea urchins. This dinner-table perspective, combined with the fact that they don't have to ever come up for want of air supply, means that they often exceed the maximum safe time specified by their dive tables. Some of these divers get the bends and die, but lots and lots of them just kind of lose their brains. I'm not sure whether this is urban legend, but most of my fellow surfers assume that hookah divers were all getting little mini-bends in their brains, kind of like mini-strokes; the legend is that this makes them get dumber and dumber, and more and more aggressive (they are pretty anti-social to begin with, but the veterans are really knarly).

Anyway, Robbie and brother and two friends weren't all that sure this guy's story was reliable. But just to be safe, they decided to motor another couple of miles around the point, toward Jalama State park. Later, they pieced together that the hookah diver had actually been diving in exactly the same location as Rob and company ended up. Anyway, they set their anchor, and Robbie was the first one in the water. He had his weight belt and fins and tank on, but was treading water while his brother Scott fetched his mask and snorkel. So at this point, it is worthwhile to consider the story from two points of view.

Rob's little brother Scott describes how he was just about to hand Rob his mask, when Rob erupted from the sea. When Scott tells the story, his wide eyes get really wide. In some way this story is more traumatic for him than it is for his brother. Scott describes an image that is forever emblazoned in his memory. He swears that from where he was STANDING, he could see both the shark, in its entirety, and Rob, with the horizon, unbroken, underneath them. When Rob hit the water, Scott and the friend were frozen by fear. They could not do anything. At all.

Photo by E. Cheng;
http://echeng.com/journal/2006/07/12/great-white-shark-breach-false-bay/

Rob's perspective is, of course, the scariest of all. He remembers that the harbor seals were all up on the rocks, but he never thought about sharks. When Rob described this experience, he was standing with his shorts on. He describes how the shark hit him from below at an incredible velocity. He shows how one leg was pinned in a bent position, while the other dangled way down into the gullet of the shark. The veracity of this story is SLAMMED home when you see that the tooth scars of this attack; which run down one side of his body, and up the other; come into perfect register when he bends his leg into the position in which it was pinned. There is the outline of this monster's jaws. This huge mouth covers three quarters of Rob's body length, from just under his arm-pit, to below his knee. I remember my mouth dropping to the floor when he did that little dance.

Here's another memorable detail of this attack that really gets me. Rob remembers the sensation of being lifted out of the water at an incredible speed. Ok. He says that it felt like he had been hit by something inanimate, the space shuttle, or a train or something. That's pretty amazing. But the thing that kills me is that he talked about the one and only hint that this ride was perpetrated by something living. Rob says that he could feel the torque of the head moving back and forth as the shark beat its tail on the way up.

The shark spit Rob out in midair, perhaps because he got bumped in the nose by the scuba tank Rob had on. Rob said he "flew" back to the outboard, and found himself on the floorboard, staring at his three catatonic crew. Rob had to exhort them to pull up the anchor, turn on the engine and drive full speed back to Point Conception, where they beached the outboard, and flagged a ranch hand for the two-hour ride to the hospital. They wisely decided to leave Rob's wetsuit on. That decision very likely kept Rob from bleeding to death. They sewed him up at the hospital with a million (plus or minus) stitches, further outlining the mouth of this behemoth. By the jaw size (actually the distance between the teeth), so accurately recorded, they estimated the shark to be 19 feet long. They were anchored in 18 feet of water. If you want the objective details of this and other California White Shark attacks on folks I never knew, i.e., if you are the kind that has to look at a car wreck when you drive by, check out:

http://www.sharkresearchcommittee.com/unprovoked_diver.htm

So, back to the Man Overboard scenario. To distort an old saying, knowledge is fear. You have just fallen off the Psyche, the boat has disappeared from sight, and you are looking under water for the torpedo.