Photo by Ken Steil
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Editor's Note: This is part two of a three-part story. Click here to read part one. The author, C.J. Bahnsen is a freelance writer based out of Orange County, CA. Parts of this story previously appeared in the LA Times.
Guadalupe represents an aqua Eden for researchers and shark divers. Unlike South Africa, Australia and the Farallon Islands, visibility is often crystalline, well over 100 feet on the best days and, provided you chum the water, white sharks are almost guaranteed to show up everyday during the season.
It was Benchley's first time diving at Guadalupe and his last encore with great whites. He and Wendy were celebrating their 40th Wedding Anniversary on the trip.
"In South Africa, they do most of the cage diving off these monster seal colonies," said Benchley, when I asked him how Guadalupe rated against other shark sites. “The sharks are all over you there; 15 to 20 at a time in a given day… I've been to South Australia half a dozen times and I've always had pretty bad luck there. On one trip, we saw only one shark in eight days. Guadalupe was certainly better than my experiences in Australia. There were more great whites there and they were much less shy. To have about three or four sharks around the clock for four straight days was top of the scale."
I also saw sharks regularly during those same days. Although Benchley and I were on separate boats under different eco-operators, the drill was essentially the same on the Odyssey and her sister vessel, the Horizon. Each one-hour dive rotation constituted dropping into on of two 10' X 20' cages deployed over vessel's stern, four divers per cage. Unlike everyone else on the Odyssey, I was not a certified diver at the time—the reason why Patric had stressed taking an introductory scuba course, pre-trip. "Some people get claustrophobia or panic," he had warned. "The last thing you need to worry about is breathing through a regulator with great white sharks swimming in your face."
Non-certs are allowed on these dives since you don't go below ten feet and breathing is done with a hookah. Odyssey divers were each cinched in a 60-pound weight harness so we wouldn't be bobbing around like loose corks. The water temp here averages 60-62 degrees, which constitutes coldwater diving. And because you're standing immobile in a cage rather than swimming, your core body temp drops like Bush's approval ratings. "I don't like coldwater diving," said Benchley, who wore a 40-pound harness and considered the water temp "marginal for a wetsuit."
On my first dive, I was bordering on sensory overload as I wrestled into a 7mm wetsuit, then the head-shrinking hood, boots, and gloves—all borrowed from Alan. The whole getup felt like a black python had me in a goodnight squeeze. There was so much to think about, like the rules Tracy had laid down at first dive meeting: Never stick any part of your body outside the cage and never make any sudden movements that might trigger a "predator-prey reaction," she admonished. It was easy to get distracted by Tracy's easy, Sandra Bullock looks, until she administered instructions with disarming authority. By day she wore navy blues—pants, collared shirt, and a tight cap, brim low slung. But at night it was as if she stepped out of a phone booth, transformed from serious-mannered dive ops manager into sensual hostess, wearing a flowery sheath, her dark chestnut waves braided and no longer stuffed under a cap.
Tracy would monitor us from the dive platform. Another sharky would man a push-pole during rotations. "If a shark were to come in too close to the cages, we push it off," Tracy said. "It doesn't harm the shark. We just give them a little extra nudge to keep them from entering the cage, because sharks don't have a reverse mode."
Patric and crew had been tossing five-gallon buckets of tuna parts, hang bait and powdered chum—made from dried fish and blood meal—over both gunwales. "By using dried product, we hope to not put anything into the environment like parasites or bacteria," Patric told me.
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