Caution to the Wind
One Man's Story of Adventure
by
Jack Slack
Copyright 2011 Jack Slack
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ISBN 978-0-9849589-1-7
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the kind help of Cher, my mate of 40 years, the aid and editing of David Reymers, the professional editing of Dorothy Hoffman and digital conversion formatting done by Maureen Cutajar's very competent professional services.
CONTENTS
Chapter 2. Lure of the Islands
Chapter 3. Trouble in the Triangle
Chapter 7. The Stuff of Dreams
Chapter 11. Diseases of the Deep
Chapter 14. Sails Are For Sailors
Chapter 15. Survival of the Fittest
Chapter 16. A Wide, Wide, Shrinking World
Rulers of the Deep
To be brave is to behave bravely
When your heart is faint
So
you can be really brave
Only when you really ain't.
(Piet
Hein)
Facing a predator charging toward me that hasn't changed in 200 million years was horrifying. It was a creature straight out of the Jurassic age, a White shark, and the most dangerous species of shark. Fear paralyzed my brain. This shark had just trashed my diving buddy's speargun then turned to attack me. To defend myself, I had only a camera in my hands.
***
My dive buddy Bissell and I dove into the water to film a school of Pilot Whales. We were in the Gulfstream between Florida and the Bahamas. A visibility of about 200 feet, allowed us to spot the shark deep below as soon as we entered the water. The shark didn't concern us because he looked to be only about two feet long — a baby. However, the clarity of the water deceived us, but when the monster spun around and came at us we got a closer view. We stared at an 8-foot White Shark with Its tail whipping in full attack mode, not the slow sweeping tail movement of an inquisitive shark, and we realized our situation had changed from onlookers to prey.
Bissell, riding shotgun for me, did exactly the right thing — he dove straight at the shark in an attempt to drive it off. Either the aggressive, threatening move would make the shark turn away, or he'd pull the trigger of the speargun when the shark's nose was a few feet away. We'd done this before with a lot of sharks, but never a White.
The shark never slowed and by the time Bissell finally pulled the trigger, the 5-foot long spear stuck in the shark's snout before it cleared the barrel. The beast started shaking its head wildly to throw off the spear and broke the barrel of the gun, causing an explosion of compressed air bubbles bursting from within the barrel of the gun. That unnerved the shark, causing it to spin around in a wide circle. Fortunately giving Bissell time to surface and climb into the boat, but I was left facing a pissed off White Shark with only a camera as a weapon.
***
The cold dead look in the shark's eyes sent shivers to the depths of my being. Helpless with the boat not close enough to climb into, I did the only thing that could drive off a shark. I dove directly at it hoping the act would scare it off, but it did not, and it kept coming. The head-on view of a White Shark is frightening. When people normally think of how big a shark is they envision the length of its body, but the diver who faces the monster sees only how wide it is, and the front view of a shark is very wide. The monster attacking me was all teeth. I felt a fear so deep that it nearly paralyzed my reasoning. The teeth were large and deadly looking, and they were heading straight toward me. Each tooth was the triangular shape of a surgeon's scalpel and just as sharp. I had no other choice. I had to keep going toward it. It contradicted my gut reaction to flee, yet it remained the only chance at surviving this nightmare. Despite being against every fiber of my being, every nerve in my body, every emotion in my soul, I had to maintain the slim grip on reason that still dominated, though barely. I braced for the hit and slammed my camera casing aggressively against the shark’s snout.
Now came the moment of truth. The shark would either bite the camera out of my hands, or get rattled and swim off. Luck favored me. It made a wide circle, giving me time to climb into the boat which Bissell had thankfully brought close. Poetry in motion describes my grabbing the gunwale, lifting myself over it, and landing on the deck a split second after my hand touched the boat. The flight might have been pretty, but the landing wasn't graceful. Who cares? I was safely sprawled on the deck.
"Jack, tell me you got my big moment?" Bissell asked as I climbed aboard.
"No," I said "I was scared shitless."
He looked at me as if I'd refused a place in the lifeboat for a crippled old lady.
"How often are we going to have a movie camera on board, fully loaded inside an underwater case when something like this happens?"
"Probably as often as I'm going to be attacked by a White shark without a speargun in my hands?" I responded sarcastically.
I knew he had done his job, and I had failed at mine. My job as cameraman for the whale filming consisted of a partnership with Bissell riding shotgun for me. The whales presented no danger, but we knew the deep-water pelagic sharks that often accompanied them certainly represented a hazard. I'd had head-on meetings with attacking sharks before, but in previous contacts, I had a speargun in my hands, not a camera. Most of all, I had never faced a White shark, nor had I psychologically prepared myself to confront one. I had seen a few in passing and always kept them in sight until they disappeared. Deep-water sharks don't circle as much as reef sharks, maybe because their food supply isn't as abundant so it's a case of "get 'em while you can" aggressiveness.
"You clutched." Bissel said.
"Yep I clutched."
"It was my first White shark too you know."
"Yeah, but you had gun. I had a camera."
"Yeah, I admit that makes a difference. Remember this when I clutch."
***
I am always intrigued by how new divers react to their first shark attack after having been told by experienced divers that if they want to save their ass from being eaten, then their only option is to aggressively dive toward the shark. They invariably do the right thing. You can't out-swim a shark, so your life depends on resisting the impulse to flee. When an experienced diver talks to a neophyte about that beforehand, it sticks in his mind. Fight or flight is an instant critical decision. It weighs emotion against reason. I've seen divers do it properly who were otherwise quite timid souls. I suppose it is a testament to man's rational survival mechanism.
According to the neurosurgeon Dr. Antonio Damasio, in his book "Decartes' Error" on the subject of emotions, reasoning, and the operations of the brain, good critical decision-making requires a roughly 50-50 mixture of emotion and reason. The emotion process offers a flexibility of response that takes place in an instant based on a person's particular history of facing danger. The reason part is a choice. Contrary to what most of us have been taught to believe, to remove emotion from a critical decision is not beneficial for the best immediate critical decision-making. However, I'm sure in the case of a person's first shark attack, reason is severely suppressed because flight, not fight, floods the brain. The thing that tempers emotion and supplies the rational survival component of the decision-making, is having considered the situation beforehand.
The average person has never stopped to think about what he would do in a shark attack, and as a result would probably panic and resort to an attempt to flee, but lots of skindivers have considered it beforehand, so reason becomes a larger percentage of the decision to fight or flee. The big advantage man enjoys in the animal world is the amazing ability to adjust to his environment faster than the rest of the world's species. Once a diver has been told by other divers he respects that swimming toward an attacking shark is his only option, it remains in his mind, and he does it for his very first shark attack. I have witnessed this repeatedly with new divers.
***
Being too young and too macho to heed common sense, we returned to the water to finish filming the whales. It was a perfect day for filming, one of those calm tropical days with an effervescent ethereal blue sky completely absent of clouds.
We had not started the day to film whales; we were on our way to the Bahamas on a commercial spearfishing trip. We had no plans to stop in the middle of the Gulf Stream for a sightseeing dive into the deep blue. There is not much to see there. However, when we spotted the school of Pilot whales; we immediately grabbed the 16-MM Bell & Howell camera we had packed away, along with the Plexiglas underwater case we had made for it.
The camera belonged to Bissell, but we had both built the underwater case for it. The camera wasn't an integral part of our equipment. The important tools were our spearfishing gear, and we brought the camera in hopes of finding time to test the watertight integrity of the underwater case. Bissell and I were overjoyed at the chance encounter with the whales.
***
Bissell and I met in college. He is a skinny blonde with a crew cut. A student at that time, he had, and still has, a tendency toward wry, sarcastic humor. He had a wife and a newborn baby when we met. He paid for college by working summers in the construction business in Illinois, but tried to switch to working at diving instead. Marilyn, his pretty wife, also blonde-haired, supported almost anything Biss wanted to do. When we both finished college, we formed a spearfishing partnership, selling our catch to restaurants and seafood wholesalers.
He loved to party, and lamented that I wasn't the party type. He drank a lot and I drank an occasional beer. I was an artist while Bissell said the only art he ever produced was when he took advantage of a fortunate accident in rendering a layout in architecture. Despite those differences, we got along well. Both of us loved diving, and we had the same circle of friends, all divers.
***
As soon as we returned to the water, the shimmering deep blue ocean immediately became transparent, almost colorless, leaving us with a sensation of flying in clear pure air that supported our bodies as if by magic, enabling us to glide up or down at will. We wore weights for free diving so we could dive without fighting buoyancy, thereby allowing us to hold our breath longer. We had neutral buoyancy from about 10 to 30 feet down. The deeper we dove after that, the less buoyant we became, but that aided the dive because we often stopped kicking to conserve oxygen in our lungs and continued to glide deeper. Reducing physical effort enabled a longer dive time. The crystal clarity of the water was breathtaking. We were in water thousands of feet deep with no view of the bottom. It felt like floating in the air with so little sense of being in water that there is a momentary hesitancy to let go of the boat for fear of falling to the ocean floor.
With the White nowhere to be seen, we re-entered the water with a new loaded speargun. We used the same system of one of us riding shotgun for the other, but remembering that day, I wonder what motivated us to return to the water with that monster. Usually after a shark attack, we sat in the boat and talked about whether we should continue the dive. Maybe we did on that day too, but I do remember commenting to Bissell just before we dropped off the boat:
"Keep a bad eye out."
I'm sure we felt that because we'd succeeded in driving off the shark once we could do so again should it still be around. That being a gamble we automatically determined left the odds in our favor. I recognize now that such a decision was decidedly chancy, but it's the kind of thing many of us do all of our lives. A shark attack was not something unique in our diving experience; in fact it was almost common. We had survived dozens of them. The uniqueness this time was the species of shark. We had never experienced an attack by a Great White.
Fortunately, with the shark gone, it enabled me to film the large grapefruit sized eye of a Pilot whale that, unlike that of the shark, moved in its socket to follow every move I made. It otherwise ignored me even when I touched its smooth hide. However, that expressive eye touched something deep within my soul. Obviously, this giant creature examined me with the same curiosity I had for it. No fear existed between us, just contact, deep and expressive as only eyes can convey.
I have the soul of a gambler, but I don't believe in betting on something unless I determine the odds are overwhelmingly in my favor. That doesn't mean I don't take chances — I merely make a distinction between gambling and taking a chance. I admit it's an artificial distinction of my own creation, but I love the thrill of winning after taking a chance, and I can pretend it was a daring act.
The fly in the ointment is that it's just a guess when I determine that the odds are in my favor, sometimes they're not, and the consequences can be life threatening. With Sharks and skindiving, I've been lucky or I'd be dead, but it involved the flight or fight aspect of the animal world, something most animal species live with constantly. I take chances with my artistic decisions, but they are smaller because of a confidence in my abilities. Those decisions depend more on a strong desire to do what I love to do, more than to my talents; though I believe one eventually leads to the other. It confirms the adage that whether you think you can, or think you can't — you're right.
***
Those were the 1950s —- the early days of diving, within a dozen years or so after Cousteau invented the aqualung. We didn't yet have SCUBA gear and all our diving was done without a breathing apparatus. We became experts in breath held dives and earned a hundred bucks or so each week spear fishing, and/or sponge diving, and taking any other kind of diving job that paid a few bucks. The going wholesale market price for a gutted fish was .18 cents per pound gutted, and/or .50 cents per pound for just fillets, but only a few restaurants bought filleted fish. Most wanted the whole fish, as did the wholesalers. The simple reason being that it's hard to tell what kind of fish they're buying from looking at a filet.
It wasn't long before we added SCUBA gear to our equipment, but we seldom used it for spearfishing because it would have slowed us down in the speed of swimming underwater, not to mention climbing in and out of the dive boat. We didn't hunt our prey by cruising along underwater. We hunted from the surface using snorkels and dragging behind the boat. We seldom anchored the boat. After spotting the fish we were able to dive, spear the fish, and carry it back to the surface in just a few minutes, even in 50 to 70 feet of water. Because of our methods, we were constantly in the water except for the trip out to the reef and the return home. Good physical condition was a necessity, but we seldom gave it a thought. It was just a fun way of making a living.
Our commercial spearfishing produced techniques honed by experience and market forces. We speared only the biggest fish because that is what the seafood wholesalers and restaurants wanted. This meant 50-pound groupers give or take 10 pounds and snapper in the 15 to 20 pound range. We worked in 3-man teams, two in the water at all times, and one driving the boat, which never stopped. Because we didn't anchor we were constantly moving slowly down the edge of a reef, with the two divers hanging on to a special bar installed at water level on the stern.
When learned how to use the snorkel when we learned how to dive, but we had a few Florida friends who had been diving from childhood, before the snorkel ever existed, so they had never used them. In fact, they poked fun at divers who did. When we pointed out that the snorkel enabled us to both pursue and track a fish from the surface, while they had take their head out of the water to take a breath, thereby taking take their eyes off the fish, they sarcastically responded that we should learn to hold a breath longer. They used the same method of dragging behind the boat and although they persisted in avoiding the snorkel for a few years, they quietly started using snorkels when they finally realized the obvious advantage. However, they did have a point, because they dove deep and stayed under a long time.
Constantly holding ones breath for short periods all day long, causes a person to expel a lot of co2 from the lungs, thereby eliminating some of the natural trigger mechanisms that cause a person to breathe. It's a form of hyperventilation and enables a diver to hold his breath much longer. Using a snorkel, a diver is breathing regularly. The exception would be that in rough water a diver is constantly expelling water from the snorkel and as a result is hyperventilating and accomplishing a greater exhalation of co2 from the lungs.
Each side of the transom had a six-inch PVC tube set at an angle and each tube contained half a dozen additional five-foot long 5/16th inch cold rolled steel spears, sticking up within easy reach from the water. We made the spears ourselves from ten-foot lengths of cold rolled steel bar. We attached single swivel barbs. The PVC tubes full of spears enabled either of the divers to pull another spear as needed. When a diver released his grip on the towing bar to dive for a fish, he taps his companion, who immediately drops off with him in order to stand by to assist if needed. We always worked in the water as a two-man team because it was safer and more efficient. The diver at the surface was always directly above the diver working the fish, thereby providing a marker for the boat driver to circle, and ready to help the diver below should he need an additional spear.
We used multiple types of spearguns, depending on the job. The most primitive, yet highly useful one is the Hawaiian sling. It consists of a piece of bamboo about eight inches long, with a loop of surgical rubber tubing lashed firmly to the bamboo tube. Essentially, it's a slingshot. The loop end of the surgical rubber contained the receptor for the spear. It was a .38 gauge shell casing lashed in place. The sling didn't have a great deal of range, and the occasional long shot of say, 15 feet, had to contain a lot of what shooters call, “Kentucky windage,” the estimated distance one must aim ahead of the target. The trajectory of the spear is often an arc meeting the targeted fish at a predetermined spot. This is instinctive shooting at its finest.
We became excellent shots, and very often killed the fish with one shot to the head, either hitting the brain or severing the backbone, accomplishing that even with a moving fish, frequently at a distance of 15 feet, and sometimes 20 feet or so with a compressed air gun. We used free spears with no line attached because if it is not a kill shot a second spear is needed, but not the entanglement of a line with a thrashing 50-pound fish at the end. Our arsenal of spearguns also consisted of air pressure spearguns of the type that never lose their pressure because no air escapes on firing. This is simply because the compressed air is used to push an "O" ring sealed valve, which in turn pushed the spear. No air escapes. Of course, that meant that after each shot, I had to cock the gun again by pushing the spear against the air pressure, compressing it even more, until the valve clicked in place for firing.
That limited the amount of air that I pumped into the gun to my physical strength in cocking it. I had a spear-point loading handle I carried dangling from a short string tied to my wrist. It was a small, T-shaped piece of plastic with a seat for the point of the spear. Cocking the gun consisted of using my hands and feet. By placing the handle grip end of the gun on the top of my foot, then using the loading handle over the spear point, I pulled on the business end of the spear and drove the blunt end of the spear down into the barrel until the valve clicked in place. The gun is powerful and on a long-range shot had very little arc. It penetrates deeply or completely through the fish.
We also used the more common conventional rubber powered speargun, but we didn't much like them because manufacturing the spears required grinding in grooves for the wishbone clips used for attaching the rubber tubing to the spear. That weakened the spear and complicated making them. In addition, we shortened the length of the rubber, thereby making the gun more powerful. However, we didn't like the fact that the grooves in the spear for the wishbones were a pain in the ass to make, and big fish trashed a lot of spears so we wanted them cheap and easy to make. The rubber-powered spearguns were more for backup than regular use.
Those wishbone clips were stainless steel and eventually, with heavy use, snapped suddenly, slapping sharply against the hand, foot, or whatever part of the diver's body it hit. So we decided to use coat hanger wire, and although it rusts, it could always be counted on to last for one day without breaking or rusting. At the end of the day, we dumped the wishbones and made new ones for the next day and we never had to worry about a wishbone breaking after that. Coat hangers were free and plentiful.
Since the second diver who dropped off when tapped was there immediately to deliver the second shot, if needed, it allowed him to seek another fish while the first diver grabbed another spear from the stern of the boat. Meanwhile, the driver kept the boat close to the divers in order to keep additional spears within reach and to take the speared fish from the diver's hands. Our fish were shot in the head because a fish that was shot in the gut was not marketable. It bloodied the filet. We didn't aim along the barrel, instead pointed the gun at chest level. All of our shots were to the head, and most were kill shots. When one of us inadvertently shot a fish in the gut, the other would make a wry comment.
"Gonna' eat a lot of fish this week buddy?" We literally had to eat our mistakes.
A head shot didn't guarantee a kill shot, and failing to get a kill shot meant a delay because the fish holed up immediately in a cave and we had to go in after it to deliver the kill shot, and then haul the fish out. With the first spear still sticking in its head, the fish usually looked like it was tangled in spaghetti due to thrashing about in the cave and bending that cold rolled steel into a mess. In the course of a day we typically destroyed a few spears.
Getting a big fish out of a cave —- even a dead one —- delayed us because the mangled spear caught on everything, and a thrashing 50-pound fish added to the hassle. Sometimes we had to get a gaff hook from the boat, hook the fish in the lower jaw, and brace against the reef with both feet to pull him out. Doing this at a depth of 50 or 60 feet, required a long breath-held dive and a cooperative effort. While the diver was working to get the fish out of the cave, the other diver started down to be at the cave entrance to take the fish, allowing the first diver, who by now was in need of air, to head for the surface quickly without the drag of pulling a big fish.
If the fish still had some fight left, the second diver would have to expend so much energy on the trip to the surface due to the drag of the fish, that the first diver would take a quick gulp of air, and head down to relieve him of the fish. So passing a fish back and forth on the trip to the surface was common. A decent day's catch would consist of 300 to 400 pounds of fish, and a spectacular day would be 1,500 pounds. If weather permitted, we worked seven days, but mostly averaged 4 or 5 days each week, and we were in superb physical condition.
Being always on the move and trailing blood behind us, by afternoon we usually had a pack of sharks following us. That meant either calling it a day or diving with the sharks circling. Sometimes we decided to dive with the sharks, which meant changing our procedure to both divers heading down together. It depended on the number of sharks, how aggressive they were, and whether the wounded fish to recover was a big one. One diver was to kill the wounded fish and drag him out, the other's job was to ride shotgun for him and drive off the sharks. It was always scary.
We never managed to get a kill shot with a shark. This is probably because the shark brain is small relative to its body size and it is a Y shaped organ, making it that much harder to hit. Driving off a shark can leave both divers without another spear for a second shark, and swimming up with a bloody fish usually meant a face-off with another shark from the pack. Poking an empty speargun into a second attacking shark's nose to drive it off is the only remaining option, then jumping in the boat and holding a conference about quitting for the day. A conference usually involved a lot of nervous laughter.
"You up for some shark roulette?"
"Only if we get rid of that bull shark, he looks like a mean son-of-a-bitch."
"Screw it; we've got nothing invested on the bottom. Let's call it a day."
We tried never to leave a wounded fish. Aside from the cruelty, we had an investment of spears sticking in him, an unacceptable waste because the fish represented our paycheck. This often meant dealing with a school of hungry sharks circling the cave containing the fish and fending off several sharks determined to eat either the fish or us. In the course of a few years doing this, we soon lost count of the number of shark encounters. It was almost an every day event. We never became complacent. Every attack was hair-raising and most involved contact with a shark. We were young, foolish, and macho, but we respected those demons and were damned scared of them.
Thoughts of mortality are not uppermost in a young man's mind. Incredibly, even close encounters with it don't spark such contemplation. After a certain number of years in the game, we started losing contemporaries who died underwater from various accidents, encounters, or bad judgment. Even then, we continued the youthful mind-set of immortality. When a person reaches an age that it becomes something to think about, he reacts by becoming religious, a health nut, a fountain-of-youth seeker, or a pragmatist —- but he doesn't remain macho. As pilots have said for decades, "There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."
The pragmatist is sometimes an atheist and has the easier trip because he accepts the inevitability of death, but sees no point in agonizing over something he has no control over. He dismisses a consideration of an afterlife by deciding that its existence is improbable, and its non-existence means that nothingness follows. The pragmatist finds nothingness an acceptable notion because nothingness, while it might not be a clear prospect to think about, has the supreme advantage of being painless, free of worry, and by definition neither a positive nor a negative outcome! He would say, "Why should I waste time thinking about nothingness? I won't be there."
***
Because of our frequent shark experience, we were often approached by news photographers, marine biologists, and speargun manufacturers to participate in research or news articles. Several of our diving partners later became well known marine biologists. One noted shark researcher, Dr. Don Nelson of The Scripps institute, was a long time diving companion when we attended college together.
Strictly as a PR stunt, several speargun manufacturers arranged with an independent news photographer to hire two of us to test the effectiveness of their guns on sharks. That summer we shot some two dozen sharks of multiple species, all at close range, meaning at a range of one or two feet, all good head shots directly between the eyes on the top of the head. It was a vain attempt to find a kill shot. We did not find the sweet spot and we lost many spears, but the photographer got some great photos. We learned a lot about shark behavior, but mostly we learned that sharks are damn hard to kill.
The technique we used for the filming involved gut shooting a snapper so that its thrashing on the bottom attracted a shark. As the shark came in to take a bite of the snapper, we yanked the speared fish away from his snout, replacing it with the front end of the speargun, and placing a precise shot in the shark's snout. This pissed off the sharks, but most of them took off looking like a unicorn with a 5-foot spear sticking out of the top of their heads.
Except for those damn Hammerheads!
After the first shot, a Hammerhead would always turn away, but then, unlike most other sharks, would return after making a tight circle and come right back with the spear sticking out of its head, to attack the diver holding the wounded fish. Apropos of the scary wide head of a shark, the view of a Hammerhead's wide front was unnerving and we changed the technique for them. Either a second diver was ready for the turn around, or we carried a bang stick for it. We made our own bang sticks using galvanized pipe fitted with a 12 gauge shot gun shell at one end. We stabbed the shark with that end.
The bang stick consists of a threaded pipe-end, soldered on backwards to the end of a short 3-foot length of galvanized pipe. It contains a brass soldered-on firing pin. We inserted the shell into a piece of pipe we cut just a bit shorter than the length of the shell. Since the short piece was threaded at one end to fit the pipe-end, it could easily be screwed it into that pipe-end containing the firing pin, leaving the shell sticking out the front end. We coated the shells with lacquer in order to waterproof them. If you stabbed the shark anywhere within the vicinity of the head, it was a kill shot. The diver "banged" the shark thereby setting off the shell. We got the idea from a treasure diver named Art McGee. It would have been handy to have one for that shoot, but we didn't. Some years later, these devices were manufactured commercially in stainless steel, some with magnum loads, but in those days we made a lot of our own gear, and customized a lot of commercial diving gear to suit our needs.
While filming to attract sharks and shoot them, Bissell seemed to forget our Hammerhead protocol, and pulled a snapper away from the jaws of a Hammerhead, placing a damned good shot in the top of the shark's head, dead in the center. Maybe being too absorbed in the job of nailing the umpteenth shark that day, Bissell got careless, but I was hovering at the surface watching the action and I started down immediately when I saw the Hammerhead coming for the snapper. Bissell didn't wait for me to get in position and fired into the shark as he pulled the snapper away, then headed for the surface. The monster did his usual pirouette and headed straight up following Bissell, who kicked seriously for the surface. I passed Bissell going down to intercept the shark as he headed up for the surface with the Hammerhead heading for his feet. I got between them and firing at about five feet, I got a fair hit that was only inches from where Bissell's spear was sticking out. The Hammerhead took off in a lighting quick move and I felt the redemption I sorely needed to assuage my feelings of failure over the White shark incident.
Slowly over the years, my education as an ecologist began to make me feel guilty about commercial spearfishing and I quit. I switched to catching tropical fish for aquariums, sponge diving, and harvesting shells, but I soon learned that facing sharks underwater had a lot in common with facing man-sharks above water. I had never been exposed to a person who might be planning to murder me, but that was about to change.
Lure of the Islands
I started diving in Italy while in the Navy as part of the European Occupation Forces, and at the start of the Korean War. My first recreational dive was at the Isle of Capri in the Mediterranean and after that, I was hooked. However, it was when I started attending college in Miami that I became a serious diver. Since I was also a serious student, diving was the only thing that could drag me away from the books. I enjoyed some of the wonderful evenings spent with a few other students as guests in the house of one of our profs who enjoyed bull sessions with students. These were evenings listening to stories about notable local residents, including tales about the inebriated, but fascinating ruminations of Tennessee Williams or maybe if we were lucky we had some time with a small circle of students gathered around Robert Frost who at that time lived not far from the campus. I was not in the Robert Frost groups, but I did participate in some of the others and found them stimulating. Sometimes we enjoyed a visiting author like Phillip Wylie who loved after-hours talks with students. They were seldom on literary subjects, but more likely about making good home brew beer. We might even discuss whether John Stuart Mill had a 21-year platonic relationship with Harriet Taylor while she was still married. Once I recall we speculated on whether Mill would advocate the de-criminalization of drugs.
I lived in Coconut Grove, the proverbial birthplace of the art community south of the Mason Dixon line. I'd been a sculptor all my life, but it wasn't until then that I started carving rock, which oddly enough came about during my geology courses in rock types and crystallography. New Bedford, Indiana, limestone chipped and carved very predictably and became my favorite medium.
In Coconut Grove, I had a sculpting studio in a two-car garage I rented for that purpose, but I've had a sculpting space in every home I've ever lived in, including years later when I lived in the Bahamas. In the Grove, I did exhibits and some commission bust work, but It wasn't until I was working with gold years later that I created a Ft. Lauderdale gold jewelry manufacturing company and in 1975 started producing my own line of animal and figure pieces, along with marine designs. It became a nationally marketed line and a company that I ran for 38 years. My kitten pieces became so well known in the trade that I acquired the nickname of "catfella" that has stuck to me for decades.
However, in the late 50s and early 60s I chopped rock, as I used to say. I liked the challenge of granite, but picks, chisels and all one's cutting tools required constant sharpening, sometimes more sharpening time than carving time, so I tended to stick with sedimentary limestone. The primary source in limestone is calcite, which in turn comes from a marine organic precipitate. I seemed unable to keep the sea connections from my life.However, living in South Florida made the lure of the Bahamas too great for me to resist. So boats became constant purchases.
***
I've owned so many boats in my life that I've lost count of the number, but I started with small fast ones that could minimize the trip to the outer reef diving spots. Since I worked the entire length of the Florida Keys, from Miami to Key West, it meant pulling the boat by trailer to various launching areas, some with proper launching ramps, and some with whatever the shoreline offered in the way of access. My diving friends and I realized that commercially made boat trailers did not fit the job, so we built our own. We made trailers that didn't need to be backed into the water. In fact, we never got the tires wet. We could actually launch a boat from a seawall if necessary, and pick it up the same way. At first, we built wood trailers, except for the axle and wheels. We used 2 x 12" pine as the main runners and 2 x 6" cross pieces, and then later used steel, welded with the same equipment I used for my sculpting. Our first trailer rollers for the keel of the boats were washing machine ringers. Later we used proper commercially made ones.
The key to our success in launching boats from almost anywhere was rather simple, involving a beefed up winch on the trailer and changing the location of the boat's bow eye. The bow eye on manufactured small boats is placed much too high on the prow, and as a result we always had to lower it on any new boat, to water level where the center of effort was in lifting the bow up and over the first roller on the trailer. After that, it was all about the strength of the wench, and there was never a need to get the wheels of the trailer wet. We never submerged a trailer.
We either customized or built from scratch a lot of our equipment simply out of the need to get the job done the way we thought it should be done. This included increasing the power of our spearguns for the long shot, even beefing up the boat for high speed in rough seas because we couldn't take forever to get to the Bahamas, then home to market. Often, we had to buy a new boat by arranging with the manufacturer for special layups in the keel and extra runners during manufacturing. For a remarkably reasonable price, most manufacturers were very cooperative.
We built our own fish storage wells in the bow, capable of carrying up to a thousand pounds of fish and ice, well insulated for keeping the ice for 2 or even 3 days because our diving range extended to the Bahamas. The big fish houses never questioned the freshness of our catch, as we were religious about gutting the fish straight from the water, and packing their insides with ice before storing them in the ice-packed wells. However, we never sold fish that were more than 24 hours old to one particular restaurant, because the owner was sharp enough to realize that any fish with clouded eyes was over 24 hours old, no matter how well it was iced.
We didn't pay much attention to the fact that all our trips crossing the Gulf Stream were in the dreaded “Bermuda Triangle,” the so-called graveyard of ships. That was strictly a label for tourist consumption. GPS satellite navigation didn't exist, so we navigated first by the compass and dead reckoning. We had no radio. Later, on my bigger boats, we had both a radio and an electronic radio direction finder. Regardless, we always allowed for a northward 3-knot Gulf Steam current, and varied the course depending on how long we figured we were in the current, and that was directly related to our speed. In my trips by motor boats, the course was usually 5 to 10 degrees south of the base line, but when I became a "rag man" meaning on sailboats, the course was usually up to 20 degrees south of the base line because of the additional time spent in the current.
I've crossed to the Bahamas in boats as small as 16-foot ski boats because when I had a water sports business in Freeport, Grand Bahama, we paid no entry duty if the boat entered under its own power. As a result, we sailed all our boats to the Bahamas. We preferred leaving Florida at night because steering by the stars was easier than staring at a compass or even at a moving cloud that you had to constantly change in order to line up with the compass course. The compass became an instrument we glanced at occasionally to confirm the course.
During lobster season we could make more money diving for lobster than spearfishing, so our efforts changed to an entirely different type of operation that didn't require a boat driver because at each reef containing the ledges and coral heads lobsters liked, we anchored and worked the area, then moved the boat to the next reef.
We didn't use the methods of the weekend amateur diver and they, for the most part, didn't use our methods because they didn't have the experience required to gain the skill of hooking lobster with the necessary speed. We used a plain wooden half-inch dowel with a 9.0 fishing hook attached to one end with the barb filed off because we wanted to remove the lobster easily without tearing the flesh of his tail. The method became illegal some years later, but it was fast and efficient in experienced hands.
The lobster almost hooked himself. The wooden rod has to be slipped under a lobster facing out from under a ledge, while making no sudden or jerky movements. It was even possible to gently touch the lobster's legs, then as the hook end of the dowel passes under the hard bodied part of the shell, the diver is able to drive the hook into the soft underbody of the tail, ensnaring the lobster. This requires withdrawing the hooked lobster in one smooth movement and grabbing it with a gloved hand. It has to be a continuous motion because, without a barb, only water pressure keeps the lobster would just flip off the hook and be gone. We carried potato sacks to contain the lobsters.
Sometimes the lobster would actually come forward along the rod as if to intimidate you, making it that much easier to hook his tail. The procedure sounds a lot slower than it actually was. A good diver looked like a grocer taking cans off a shelf and putting them in a sack, and we could clear a particular reef in a matter of minutes.
We didn't use underwater breathing devices or SCUBA; it was faster free diving in Florida lobster areas where only half a dozen lobsters are found under any particular ledge, before we had to move on. To have to climb in and out of a boat wearing SCUBA gear or tend an air compressor would slow the operation considerably.
In the Bahamas however, especially in the Caicos Islands, we used hookah units, which were breathing hoses with a mouthpiece at one end and an air compressor in the boat supplying a constant stream of air at the other end. The greater number of lobsters in one place made it worthwhile to spend a longer time underwater collecting them. In the Bahamas, this was faster than free diving because the ledges and caves held dozens, even hundreds of lobsters.
One of the most remarkable sights in nature is the mysterious "lobster march" — thousands of lobsters forming columns that march together along the ocean bottom, head to tail, all going in the same direction. If we were fortunate enough to hear of one we could get to before it dissipated, we collected them, not by using the dowel and hook, but by spearing them using Hawaiian slings, and spears with no barbs. Hawaiian slings are very fast to use, as no time is wasted loading a speargun. One merely pulls it back like a bow and arrow. With the barb removed from the spear, it was quick and easy to slide the lobster off the end, or to be more precise, to slide half a dozen off because we kept spearing and sliding lobster down on the shaft like a spit. When the shaft was full of lobsters, we merely slid them off into the boat and kept using the same spear for the next bunch. In a matter of a few hours, a team of two divers could collect several hundred pounds of lobster. It’s an illegal method today, and subject to severe fines. We also dove for sponges, but the east coast of Florida is not nearly as productive as the west coast, so our sponge diving became something we did for our own use, and I still prefer natural sponge to the manufactured product by far. It's softer and holds more water.
When making my living as a diver, I used a variety of underwater breathing devices, depending on the job. For collecting sand dollar shells, it was mainly the hookah, just a hose from a compressor on the boat to a mouthpiece. The sandy bottom areas away from the reefs are literally carpeted with sand dollars. They are along the coast on the ocean floor at a depth of 10 to 15 feet. The containers we used underwater were the same containers we used to deliver the shells to dealers. They were the metal framed wooden milk delivery containers on which we stacked row upon row of sand dollars on edge.
When I gave up commercial spearfishing, for reasons of conscience, I started collecting tropical fish for several retail aquariums, my equipment changed, and I worked mostly on shallow reefs where it was faster again for a proficient diver to free dive without a breathing device. I used a single net in one hand, and sometimes a stick in the other. I held the net, preferably a square net, perfectly still against the top of a cave if I was collecting cave dweller species, and used my other hand (or stick) to "crowd" or "herd" the targeted fish slowly toward the net. I didn't move the net until the fish entered it, then I moved it smoothly but very gently with just enough speed to have the water pressure keep the fish against the net until I boated it into a container of sea water. That container had an airstone bubbling with a constant stream of air from a battery-powered electric motor, to keep the seawater aerated until I delivered the fish. I didn't use the Plexiglas "slurp gun," which sucks the fish into a container section because the action somehow traumatizes the fish and they don't live long afterwards in aquariums. I've always theorized that it is because sucking is the method large predator fish use to feed, so it follows that being sucked into the mouth of a larger fish is usually a one-way trip and definitely a traumatizing experience. I figured they didn't last long because they were suffering the post-traumatic stress disorder which we humans are so familiar with.
Tropical fish injure easily and everything about catching and keeping them requires a gentle hand. I learned the area and habits of each species. For instance, the Royal Gramma, is a beautiful fish in shades of deep purple, grading into red, then grading into yellow at the tail, but has one particular habitat that's rather odd. They spend their lives swimming upside down to make it easier to feed on the organisms on the roof of the cave. In a home aquarium, they swim right side up even if the aquarium has a cave, because home units usually have dead coral, hence no organisms.
My favorite was the Jewelfish, a spectacular looking fish with a beautiful deep blue body, containing iridescent paler blue spots that resemble sparkling embedded diamond chips; hence the name. Jewelfish like to live among various coral shapes like antler coral, or even stinging fire coral. The diver must be careful to avoid getting stung from touching fire coral. I seldom let the sting of fire coral slow me down because over the years I've become somewhat acclimatized to the sting, rubbing it quickly, and moving on with the resulting itch afterwards being a minor inconvenience.
The same applied to jelly fish stings. During jellyfish season, when there are schools of thousands, I usually swim through them, pushing the big ones out of my way with a bare hand because the skin of the palm of your hand doesn't have the pores found elsewhere on the human body, so it isn't subject to jellyfish stings. This absolutely does not apply to Man-O-War jellyfish, which will sting any part of your body, and if enough tentacles entangle a diver, it can affect his glands and even his respiration. While the poison is almost as venomous as cobra poison, it is seldom fatal because of the much smaller quantity absorbed through a person's skin.
Once I surfaced wearing a Man-O-War like a hat, my body wrapped in dozens of tentacles delivering a considerable amount of pain that made the glands under my arms sore and had me shaking and short of breath. I climbed in the boat covered in tentacles, which keep stinging until they are removed. With Man-O-War tentacles, this can be a rather slow process since nobody wants to help you using their bare hands. Having sympathetic people snagging the tentacles with a stick or a screwdriver without breaking them is a slow process while you suffer.
Somebody nearly suffocated me once with ammonia fumes with the good intention of alleviating my pain by applying ammonia to my mistreated skin. I don't know where that old wives tale treatment started, but it doesn't work, nor does vinegar, alcohol or meat tenderizer. What does work within minutes is soaking in hot water, which dissipates the polypeptide and protein molecule base of sea stinging organisms.
The Marine Hospital in the Florida Keys town of Marathon treated a friend who received the barb of a Stingray in his ankle by doing nothing more than soaking his foot in a bucket of water as hot as he could endure, which stopped the pain within minutes. They apologized for the apparent low-tech medical treatment, claiming they learned over the years that it was more effective than anything else was. He was in great pain and he couldn't walk when we entered the emergency room, and his ankle was greatly swollen. He walked out of the emergency room pain free, with only a slightly swollen ankle, about 30 minutes later. I don't think one would find this treatment in Miami hospital emergency rooms because you'd get higher-tech medical treatment, but you'd probably remain in pain longer.
Much of my diving experiences were determined by whatever activity underwater produced an income, and when the owner of a pro-shop at a golf course asked if I'd be interested in a contract job recovering golf balls from water holes, I thought that would be an easy task. I ended up signing contracts with 5 golf courses with enough water hazards to keep me busy diving every day at one or the other of the golf courses. A "ball hawk," as we were called, generally used a SCUBA tank and carried a mesh bag capable of holding hundreds of balls. Most water holes averaged about 20 feet deep and were pitch black at the bottom.
This meant feeling through the top inch or so of mud, sweeping both hands back and forth and defining a pattern mostly determined by where the most balls eventually landed, then on alternate days, covering the sparser areas with quick passes. Some courses have more alligators than others do, and the way I usually met an alligator was by feel. When my hand hit an alligator, he was off in a flash, so after the first few dozen encounters, I became used to it. The water moccasin snake was another "water hazard" the golfer never worried about, but the ball hawk did. Fortunately, the water moccasin never goes deeper than about 4 feet, so my wariness was confined to the entry and I quickly got below that depth upon entering the water. The few water holes that were shallow enough to be dangerous snake territory usually had good visibility, allowing me to keep a sharp lookout.
A good day's take consisted of about 1500 balls, for which I was paid per ball, depending on condition. For some contracts the entire take was mine to sell if I paid the pro-shop an annual license fee of $1000 or $1500, depending on the agreement. The main problem with ball hawking was keeping out crooked ball hawk divers who raided the course at night. Since a diver is working in pitch-blackness anyway, the job didn't require daylight. Talking to other ball hawks with the same problem, I soon adopted some of their techniques for guarding the water holes at night. This entailed night vigils at the courses, or setting booby traps underwater. The booby traps varied in design and lethalness, anywhere from setting multiple mousetraps using a ball as the "bait," to spring loaded bear traps, which could do some serious injury, all the way to setting a shotgun shell to go off in a "safe" direction when a ball was moved. I dismissed that one as a bit too dangerous. The bear trap wasn't cost effective because unless it was anchored well, the diver would carry it away. If it was well attached, you'd probably kill him by drowning. Therefore, I dismissed that one too. Nevertheless this presents a picture of just how pissed off the contract diver could get about night hawks.
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I decided one year to go windsurfing in Aruba, one of the three ABC islands off the Venezuelan coast, because it had great high winds. For exploration, it also has a coast full of caves along the cliffs on the north shore. These caves are mostly formed by ancient wave action as the islands rose from the ocean floor eons ago, or by rain causing solution holes that grew over the centuries. Since I was an amateur spelunker, both above and below the water, I had to tear myself away from some great windsurfing to explore the caves in the unpopulated section of the island; I had equipped myself with the ropes and lights needed to explore them. My wife Cher, accompanied me, and lamentably I had failed to inform her that we would probably run into bats, so when we did she froze like a statue and it took a considerable amount of coaxing to convince her they were harmless, despite buzzing quite close to her head. She said what frightened her most was feeling the air blowing against her face from the flapping of their wings, but like a good trooper she persevered, and deeper in the cave was empty of life because bats are only at the entrance.
Most of the caves we explored were Karst topography, formed by thousands of years of water erosion on rock like limestone or dolomite, which results in interesting and beautiful cave formations like stalactites (sticking down from the ceilings) or stalagmites (sticking up from the floor). The stalactites form first as the water drips from above, loaded with calcium mixtures in solution. Where the drops land on the floor of the cave is where the buildup begins to form a stalagmite. The more ancient the cave, the more formations they have and the more intertwined and beautiful they become. Both my graduate and undergraduate work in geography and geology added to my enjoyment of caves.
The stalagmites are the more interesting from my point of view as a student of geology. This is because cross-section cuts in a stalagmite reveal the various layers that look like the seasonal rings in a tree's cross section. They represent layers dripped down over thousands of years and they are uniform except for the occasional jump to the side of the pattern of rings. Such a change in the pattern could only be caused by the drip itself initiating from a slightly different spot, a millimeter or so away, hence falling to a slightly different spot, but emanating from the same stalactite above it. Only earth movement could cause that deviation, therefore they mark the times of an ancient earthquake; the bigger the deviation, the bigger the earthquake.