Slumbering Sharks

The sharks I see do not scare me as much as those that swim somewhere in the back of my mind. Sharks underwater are making their living; when I join them I am only a tourist and no business of theirs.

On the reefs and banks north of West End, Grand Bahama, I saw more sharks than usual in the second week of July 1970. Warren Ross, a longtime friend and fellow diver, and I were working what we called Dry Bar, a few miles north of the light at Memory Rock. There, the Bahama banks, which form the eastern wall of the Straits of Florida, begin to break up, and the Gulf Stream runs free into the open Atlantic. The reefs stretch 30 miles north of the tip of land at West End before dissolving into the deep. Heading north, Dry Bar is the last shallow area.

Seen from underwater, Dry Bar is the top of a high butte swept by strong currents as the tide spills back and forth from the banks to the deep and vice versa. The butte is made up of interlocked coral ledges, connected by channels and tunnels over an area of 10 square miles, and on its seaward perimeter lie the bones of many ships. A diver soaring in the surface currents looks down on a fortified city, with blind alleys and closed courtyards lined with rooms.

Down at the edge of the butte, just before it tumbles off to the deep, there are five fathoms of water, and the current forces the diver along the sandy alleys. The residents in the chambers on either side are shielded from the current and the passersby. To peer inside the chambers and passageways you have to hold at the bottom long enough to let your eyes adjust to the darkness. A diver hanging on a coral outcrop flaps in the current like a flag in the wind.

The animals on Dry Bar are typical of the Bahamas except for their abundance. Wherever there is a crevasse, a crack, a ledge or a hole, fish are in hiding. The bigger the hole, the bigger the fish.

That hot week in July, Ross and I often saw sharks holed up in ledges or resting with their snouts under coral heads. This is not unusual for nurse sharks, but at that time divers believed that virtually all other sharks had to keep swimming in order for their primitive gills to wring enough oxygen from the water. Those we were able to identify were lemon and nurse sharks. There were other quite different species, which we were content to call bull sharks and sand sharks.

Their somnolent behavior inspired confidence in smaller fish. Schools of grunt, snapper and goatfish swam in and out of their shadows and even retreated into the recesses with the sharks when frightened by us. One day late in the week, Ross speared a hogfish, which flapped in the sand in front of a coral head that held three sharks. The smallest, a nurse shark, took alarm and fled. The big lemon and the broad grayish shark lay still. Live and let live. Most coral did not hold sharks, but we were careful to make sure what lurked in a ledge before taking a fish.

When we returned the following day, the heat of the Caribbean summer was still with us. By noon thunderheads and waterspouts were forming on the incoming tide. When the tide turned in mid-afternoon the squalls came back off the flats and broke the wet heat. Our boatman worked the skiff over promising spots along the edge of Dry Bar, keeping his eye to weather. At 3 o'clock Ross and I rolled from the skiff for one more dive. We were over the tops of ledges at 15 feet. The sandy bottom of the long street between the ledges was at 25. We cleared our masks as the current whipped us off in a fast drift. As a matter of routine caution, I pointed out the sharks beneath my belly to Ross, who was holding his spear toward others in the ledge across the alley.

The ledges were full. Heads were in every shadow, tails edged out into the light. Through holes in the tops of the ledges I saw fins and backs. The current swept me down the middle of the street and gave me a fleeting glimpse into the porches and rooms along the way. There were no vacancies, had I wanted to stay. Over the ledges to either side were other parallel streets. As in a pueblo that is seemingly deserted at high noon, everyone was indoors. The street came to a straggling end in an open coral ruin. Ross and I pulled up and held against the current, to catch our breath and bolster our courage. We held over the last coral tumble, kicking steadily. Lifting our heads we compared what we had seen in short gasps, the water bubbling through our words. Then head down, I looked carefully again. Twelve feet below, a lemon shark twice as long as Ross lay beneath an outcrop, hanging out at both ends like a hot dog in a bun. A little patch of yellow coral gave shade to its head. The big shark was inert, not even trembling at the gills. Another ledge, maybe 50 feet away, was walled with sharks. Over the sand, at the edge of visibility, two sharks were moving back and forth with the rapid, nervous change of direction by which sharks, who have not yet decided what to do, threaten.

I had a bang stick, Ross an Airmatic gun. The skiff held downcurrent over the open prairie, far enough away not to disturb whatever it was that we might see, but close enough to gun up when encouraged. We could count a dozen sharks from where we held at one side of the end of the street. They were of different kinds and sizes. In our first run, our angles of view had constantly changed but now we saw that every space was stuffed with sharks. We had seen a gross of transfixed sharks. If the closed balconies, hallways and inner rooms held as many as the spaces at the edge of the street, there had to be hundreds.