My Week with the Great White Sharks

In the summer of 1975, I was four when my dad took me to see JAWS in a crowded theater.

It was a poor parenting decision — albeit one that resulted in my becoming obsessed (& terrified) of sharks for the rest of my childhood. I read every book I could find. I told anyone who asked that when I grew up, I was going to be a marine biologist. And I remained completely terrified of the ocean.

Now, fast forward four decades.

I am not a marine biologist, nor have I kept up my childhood obsession with sharks. (My fear of the ocean, however, has remained constant.)
So you can imagine my surprise when, a year ago, as my 50th birthday approached and person after person asked me how I was going to celebrate it, I responded with an idea that had never before even occurred to me:

Cage-diving with Great White Sharks.

Last week, after two different COVID-related delays, I finally got to do the thing.

It necessitated crossing two hundred miles of open ocean across heavy, undulating seas, until we arrived in the shadow of Guadalupe Island, an eight-million-year-old jagged mass of volcanic rock near the western coast of Mexico.

It featured three full days of diving, from sunup to sundown.

And it required donning a wetsuit, popping a regulator into your mouth, and descending the stairs of a metal cage into an underwater world replete with thick schools of mackerel, curious Sea Turtles, presumptive Amberjacks — and a cove full of the world’s largest Great Whites.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to see this animal in its element (which is, coincidentally, the only way to see them; there are zero in captivity). Their appearance is the only thing you’re waiting for, and yet it always seems to come as a surprise, no doubt in part because of the way they move — with the languorous air of an apex predator. And this predator clearly understood the game that was being played (it involved dangling a giant piece of frozen tuna off the back of the boat), which it mostly approached with the insouciance of a cat casually flicking the end of its tail — teasing, probing, yet always measuring its possible avenues of attack.

Then there were the moments they decided playtime was over.

Their dorsal fins would come in tight to their body, they’d give a few flicks of their massive tail, and then their one-ton cartilaginous frame would propel itself through the water like a torpedo — an evolutionary design so perfect for its environment that it is essentially unchanged for seventy million years.

Game. Set. Snack.

They are beautiful creatures — deserving of our respect and our protection. It was a worthy celebration of my 50th. And while my shark-obsessed days are behind me, I feel equally grateful for getting to spend a week floating atop a foreign world that was holding us up and that could, just as easily, swallow us whole in an instant.

“If you want to build a ship,” St. Exupery said, “don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”