A Fascination for Fish
Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer
David C. Powell
Chapter 9
The Lure of Sharks
The year was 1969 and Sea World was doing well. However, the management knew that for the park's success to continue repeat visitors needed to be offered something new. With this in mind, a small group got together to brainstorm ideas that might be developed into future exhibits. The topic of sharks came up, stimulating considerable discussion and interest.
At that time, aquariums and oceanariums on the East Coast of the United States had successful exhibits of large, nearshore sharks like lemons (Negaprion brevirostris), bulls (Carcharhinus leucas), sandbars (C. milberti), and sand tigers (Eugomphodus taurus). Such hardy sharks didn't occur on the West Coast, however. Moreover, there had been little success in the past with the open-water pelagic sharks common off our deepwater Pacific coast. It was decided that these pelagic species might have potential as exhibit animals, but research needed to be done to find out for sure. To this end, Sea World committed financial support for a modest shark research program.
As a rule, shark species living close to shore tend to adapt to life in an aquarium better than those that live in the almost limitless water of the open ocean. These nearshore sharks, however--which on the West Coast include leopard sharks (Triakis semifasciata), horn sharks (Heterodontus francisci), and swell sharks (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum)--are all bottom dwellers: not what the average aquarium visitor comes up with when visualizing a shark. The animals that everyone thinks of as "sharks" are the pelagic species: blues (Prionace glauca), makos (Isurus oxyrhynchus), the occasional smooth hammerhead (Sphyrna zygaena), and, of course, "Jaws" itself, the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias)--to name the most common ones found off southern California.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, marine biologists knew little about keeping pelagic sharks in captivity. Every one that had been brought to an aquarium had soon died. Obviously, something was not being done quite right. Sea World decided that a research effort might lead to success with either the blue shark or the mako shark.
As the curator of fishes, I took on the responsibility of designing this challenging research program. Going about it logically, I reasoned that three somewhat independent problems had to be solved, and steps followed, if a shark was to be displayed successfully in an aquarium. The first problem is the actual capture of the animal; second is the method used to transport the shark to the aquarium; and third is the design of the tank where the shark will live. Although these problems are somewhat independent, they are also linked. And of the three, the third is perhaps the most telling. For obviously, if you don't have a suitable holding tank ready for the shark to live in, you won't know if the first two steps were done right.
With no prior experience to help me out, I made my best guess and designed a relatively inexpensive, behind-the-scenes tank that I hoped would meet the needs of a pelagic creature like the blue shark. Trying to think like a shark--which is not easy, I found out--I reasoned that because blue sharks are rarely found near shore, they may be able to sense when they are approaching shallow water. They probably don't like sharp corners, since none exist in their watery world, and, because they swim constantly, they would most likely do best in as large a tank as possible. With those parameters in mind I designed a circular tank with a bottom that sloped up, becoming shallower toward the outer perimeter. Its size, fifty feet in diameter, was limited by how much money was available for the whole project. Bigger would obviously have been better, but you work with what you can get.
While the tank was under construction, we experimented with capture and transport methods. I had fished for blue sharks with rod and reel before from my own boat and knew from experience that they have a keen sense of smell and good vision. Our method of finding them was to take advantage of that sense of smell and allow them to find us. A fifty-pound burlap sack of ground mackerel was towed slowly behind the boat for half a mile or so, leaving a trail of odor that would smell like lunch to an almost-always-hungry blue shark.
For transport, we had a seven-feet-long-by-two-feet-wide plastic- lined tank made. It was restricted in size--but, I hoped, not too tight--because we were working out of a small, but fast, eighteen-foot outboard that didn't have much room or weight-carrying capacity. Knowing that the blue shark normally swims constantly in order to pass water over its gills, I made a flattened plastic mouthpiece that fit inside the animal's mouth. The mouthpiece had five holes on each side that theoretically lined up with the five gill slits of the shark. Through this device, water supersaturated with pure oxygen was pumped by a small submersible pump sitting in the narrow transport tank.
Surprisingly, this improvised low-tech system worked and the blue sharks we practiced with were as lively as could be. We'd capture them and hold them in the long, narrow tank on board--facetiously nicknamed the "shark coffin"--for a couple of hours and then release them. We found, too, that they became quite docile and relaxed when held upside down and became active again when righted, and on being released they would take off swimming just like a normal, healthy shark.
The behind-the-scenes holding tank at Sea World was finally ready and the water system turned on. Now came our chance to see how well a blue shark would do. "Gator" Bill Ervin and I went out a couple of miles off Mission Bay (where Sea World is located), laid our chum line of delicious mackerel juice, and waited. Pretty soon a six-foot shark showed up off the stern. Using a heavy nylon hand line, I tossed out the baited, barbless hook attached to a short wire leader. The shark quickly took the bait, and I instantly realized, as it nearly pulled me overboard, that this was no blue shark but most likely a much stronger mako. After finally getting it alongside our boat, Bill and I had an awful time lifting the heavy and uncooperative shark into the boat. Once it was lying upside down in the transport box, with the mouthpiece in place and the oxygen pump running, we took off for Sea World. I noticed that this particular shark repeatedly bit down on the mouthpiece, something I hadn't seen with the sharks we'd practiced with.
Hoisting the "shark coffin" off the boat and driving it the hundred yards to the waiting shark tank, we released the shark and it swam vigorously off. The transport method seemed to have worked fine. The shark looked good as it cruised around the fifty-foot tank.
We spent the next eight days trying to get the shark to take food. It refused everything we offered. Only once, when we poured a bucket of mackerel blood into the water directly ahead of it, did it show any response; but it still wouldn't take the mackerel we dangled in front of it. On the eighth day it died, and only then did I realize that what we had caught was not a mako, but a young great white shark. I felt pretty stupid for not recognizing it when we caught it, but in the excitement of catching and getting the shark into the boat neither of us took the time to study its identifying features.
On the next trip out, and on many subsequent ones, we refined the collection and transport method to the point where we could bring two blue sharks in at the same time if they weren't much longer than six feet. Unlike the great white, the blue sharks readily began to feed and appeared to do fine--but only for a month or so. Then we noticed a change in their swimming posture: no longer perfectly horizontal in the water, they began to swim in a slightly tail-down position. Too, they seemed to be working harder at swimming. It became clear that they were losing weight, and autopsies later showed that much of the weight loss was from their liver.
Most species of pelagic, or free-swimming, sharks have large, oil-rich livers that, in addition to their metabolic functions, act as a buoyancy organ. As the oil in their liver was used up to provide energy they became heavier in the water and had to work harder to stay up. It became a vicious downward spiral: the harder they worked to stay up, the more they consumed of their liver, which caused them to grow heavier in the water, and so they had to work harder to stay up. In spite of being given all the food they could eat, they were using up their stored energy faster than they could replace it.
Our conclusion was that the pelagic blue shark is designed for long-distance cruising in a mostly straight line with a very low expenditure of energy and need for food. In its own environment, this design is very efficient, but I had created a tank that forced them to be constantly turning. Their metabolism was simply not designed for that much energy expenditure.
Our success with makos was almost zero but for different reasons. Makos are like the race car of the shark world: they need to actively swim at all times to stay alive. Just supplying them with lots of oxygen as we did with the blue sharks was not enough. After only forty-five minutes in transport they were barely alive when we arrived at the shark tank, and they died shortly afterward. Apparently the rhythmic contractions of the muscles during swimming play a vital role in the circulation of the blood of the mako shark.
Our lack of success caused us to terminate the research into local California sharks. Today, thirty years later, there still has been only mixed results displaying blue sharks. However, it is still possible they may do well in a much larger, correctly designed tank that has long straight runs and no turns except at the ends. Blues are one of the most beautiful and graceful of all the sharks, and it would be wonderful if they could be kept in good health in a large aquarium somewhere. Hopefully someone, somewhere, will have the opportunity to try it. Showing aquarium visitors the beauty of the blue shark may help stop the killing of hundreds of thousands every year for shark-fin soup, or as unwanted by-catch in the worldwide open-ocean longline and gill-net fisheries.
Flying Texas Sharks
With the end of our experimental work with local temperate-water sharks, we turned our attention to East Coast warm-water species that we knew did well in aquariums. The only problem was, they were three thousand miles away. How could we get them all the way to the West Coast? As luck would have it, an opportunity soon came along to test the feasibility of shipping tropical species of sharks by air.
Sea World was negotiating the trade of a pilot whale to the Searama oceanarium in Galveston, Texas. Searama had a number of bull sharks and lemon sharks in their large central tank that they had collected right in Galveston Bay, and they agreed to let me run a simulated shipping test with one of their six-foot bulls. The plan was to design and build a shipping container in San Diego and send it, together with life-support equipment, to Galveston for the test. When this was done I flew back there to set up the equipment at the side of their exhibit tank. The next step was to capture one of the bull sharks and simulate the conditions of a real shipment.
The main display tank at Searama was quite interesting. It contained a collection of just about everything from the Gulf of Mexico-- alligator gars, big green morays, red drums, great barracudas, stingrays, giant jewfish, and, of course, several bull and lemon sharks. Young women in bikinis performed daily underwater feeding shows. I was amazed that these young women were swimming with notoriously dangerous bull sharks, which are known to attack more people worldwide than any other shark. And not only were these young women swimming with the sharks, but they were carrying food for the other fishes as well.
The bull shark lives close to shore and often goes into brackish water and sometimes even freshwater. It has been caught three thousand miles up the Amazon, and once up the Mississippi as far as Ohio. For many years this shark was known in other parts of the world by different names--the Zambezi River shark in South Africa, the Lake Nicaragua shark in Central America--until they were all shown to be the same species.
Curator Tom Whitman explained that it was quite safe to swim with the bulls because they treat the tank most of the time with a low dose of copper sulfate to control algae. This suppresses both the appetite and the aggressive nature of the sharks. Periodically they discontinue the copper, and the sharks are then fed. It still seemed risky to me, but they'd been doing it without a problem for a number of years, and I couldn't argue with that.
Tom organized the capture of our test bull shark. First his divers, using a large crowder net, herded the bull into a small connecting holding tank. It was then lifted out on a stretcher and lowered into my test transport tank. The oxygen was already on, and the bull shark quickly settled down under the mildly sedating effect of the high oxygen concentration. The test was to run for twenty hours, which was the estimated time for a real shipment of sharks from their tank in Galveston to our tank in San Diego.
Partway through the test a man named Gerrit Klay came by. He was an aquarist from the Cleveland Aquarium in Ohio and was down in Galveston to collect small bonnethead sharks (Sphyrna tiburo) to ship by air to his aquarium. The sixteen-or-so-inch bonnetheads, a relative of the larger hammerheads, were small enough that they fit into large plastic bags in standard Styrofoam shipping containers. He was very successful with this method, and it was quite an achievement to have bonnetheads exhibited at an inland aquarium in Ohio. Gerry Klay showed great interest in my experimental shipping test, especially the pump method of achieving high levels of oxygen. Two years later he left the Cleveland Aquarium to set up his own shark collecting business in the Florida Keys using the same transport methods he saw me using in Galveston.
After twenty hours the bull shark was released back into the exhibit. Although it was a little groggy for the first hour, it recovered completely and the simulated shipping test was deemed a success.
We next planned a real shipment of three bull sharks and one lemon shark from Galveston to San Diego. In addition, a whole menagerie of other fishes, including seventeen alligator gars, two huge three-hundred-pound jewfish, a beautiful giant green moray, and an assortment of smaller fishes from the Gulf of Mexico, would be transported--all in exchange for Sea World's one pilot whale. Of course, you don't just buy a ticket on a passenger plane for a shipment like this, so a Flying Tigers cargo jet was chartered to fly the pilot whale in one direction and all the fishy creatures in the other direction. The key people, besides myself, were Kym Murphy of Sea World, Tom Whitman of Searama, and--once again relenting to my plea for help--Bob Kiwala of Scripps. I'm sure he later regretted agreeing to come along "just for the fun of it."
All of our various-sized fiberglassed wooden shipping boxes had been sent ahead to Galveston, and at midnight we set about catching the animals in preparation for the drive to the Galveston airport and the waiting cargo plane. The four sharks were herded into the murky water of the small holding tank adjacent to the main display. To get them out we had to jump into the two-foot-deep pool and try to grab them as they swam by. It's quite unnerving having a six-foot bull shark push its way between your legs while you're trying to grab another. This was definitely in the days before government-mandated safety standards.
Somehow we managed to get all the animals into their respective shipping containers. The only casualty was one Searama diver who inadvertently backed up against the dive ladder in the main exhibit tank, where a totally unnerved giant green moray, taking refuge from the madness, had wound itself among the rungs. The moray lashed out in self-defense and bit the diver on the shoulder. He was rushed off to the hospital bleeding profusely but was okay the next day with a great story and some small wounds he could impress the girls with.
All the boxes of fish and the four sharks were finally loaded onto trucks. Because it was rush hour and we were running late, the City of Galveston provided a siren-screaming police motorcycle escort to the airport. They took their job seriously and were practically running motorists off the road so our trucks could pass. Eventually all the heavy boxes were on the plane and we were ready to go.
Concerned about the angle of the plane during takeoff, we asked the pilot to keep it as level as possible so water wouldn't spill out of the open boxes. We then strapped ourselves into the bucket seats at the rear of the cargo space behind our fish. The plane roared down the runway, and as soon as it was airborne the pilot pulled back on the controls and aimed for the sky.
Just as we had feared, water and fish poured out of the boxes. We couldn't do a thing about it until the plane leveled off a little. Then we scrambled around grabbing fish and tossing them back into their tanks. Kym Murphy was slipping and sliding on the deck rollers--intended for the easy moving of heavy freight containers--trying to pick up a slithering moray; somehow he got it back where it belonged. We then bucketed water from full tanks into ones that had lost water. The seawater that had surged out mysteriously disappeared down into whatever was below the deck.
The cockpit was open and Bob went up to talk to the pilot. He said, "That was a pretty impressive takeoff. You lost two hundred gallons of saltwater!" Without turning around the pilot said, "You take care of the fish and we'll take care of the airplane." Well, okay, we thought. Glad it's your plane, not ours.
All went well until we crossed over west Texas and hit a violent thunderstorm. The plane was thrown around and the groupers and alligator gars freaked out, leaping and splashing and spilling even more seawater down below. Moving about to check on the pumps, batteries, and our fishes was extremely difficult thanks to the steel deck rollers, which made walking upright virtually impossible. So we crawled around on hands and knees, hanging on to whatever we could grab.
Things calmed down after Texas, and pretty soon we were about an hour out of San Diego. About then all the lights in the plane went out: we instantly knew that the spilled seawater had shorted out the electrical system. Now it was pitch black in the back except for the meager beams of our flashlights. We all prayed that it was only the lights and not the plane's controls that had shorted. Up in the cockpit red lights were flashing as the engineer peered into the electrical panel, a concerned look on his face.
When we got close to the San Diego airport, the pilots had a problem getting the landing gear down. We circled around for a while before they succeeded. At this point smart-ass Bob went back up to the cockpit and said, "Well, we took care of the fish; how you doing with the airplane?" He got no response. We'd been told that the plane was supposed to leave that night for the Philippines, but we heard later that the plane was laid up for two months for electrical system repair. That flight, together with another later one by Gerry Klay, led to strict design and construction guidelines of shark-shipping boxes so they couldn't lose water. From years at aquariums experiencing what seawater can do to electrical systems, I knew that was a wise policy. I don't think they addressed problems caused by know-it-all pilots, however. Flying Tigers refused to charter planes to Sea World for some years after, and Gerry Klay was banned by all cargo airlines for a while.
In spite of the difficulties, the sharks, the groupers, and all the smaller fishes made it. Sadly, we lost some of the seventeen gars because of overcrowding. Unlike most fish, gars are air breathers, but there was so little room in their boxes that they couldn't all get up to breathe when we hit that turbulence over Texas. Indeed, we learned a lot from that ambitious, pioneering shipment.
A Reconnaissance Trip
Our success with the tropical sharks from Galveston encouraged us to look for a closer source of warm-water species. The Gulf of California isn't far from San Diego, but little was known about the abundance and distribution of the sharks in the upper part of the Gulf.
There was one useful publication on eastern Pacific sharks, written by Susumu Kato of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but none of us at Sea World had any personal shark experience in the area. No cargo planes fly down to the upper Gulf, and the only paved road went as far as San Felipe in Baja California. We decided to make a reconnaissance trip and put out baited setlines to see what we could catch. We didn't plan to bring any sharks back on this first trip; we just wanted to find out what was there.
Because of its long, narrow shape, the Gulf of California at its northern end, near San Felipe, is noted for having the second highest tidal change in the world after the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. During the time of the new and full moon spring tides, the water level rises twenty-five feet from low to high tide in six hours. That's an incredible amount of surging water.
The local fishermen of San Felipe have learned to take advantage of this tidal fluctuation. When a fishing boat needs work done below the waterline, they simply drive the boat at high tide to a low spot near the middle of town and wait for the tide to go out. The boat is then high and dry and they have a few hours to do their work before the water returns to refloat their boat.
Our team consisted of two Sea World aquarists, John Hart and Jerry Kinmont, and myself. Together we loaded up John's truck and then towed our eighteen-foot outboard collecting boat down to San Felipe. Our plan was to use it to set out small, bottom-fishing setlines. We had also made up a half-mile-long floating setline that we would set from a bigger boat to see what larger sharks might be there. This line was to be buoyed up by a series of truck inner tubes, with the baited hooks hanging twenty or thirty feet below the surface. An anchor at each end would keep the setline from drifting or being towed away by the current--or by any creature that might get caught.
We chartered a small fishing boat and hired its owner to take us out a couple of miles from shore to put out our gear. We'd brought boxes of frozen mackerel to use as bait. The baiting and setting of the longline went without mishap, and we returned to San Felipe Harbor to while away a few hours. When we headed back out to see what we'd caught, there wasn't a trace of the half-mile-long line with its twenty inflated inner tubes. We circled around for some time looking, but eventually gave up. We decided to return in the morning and search again before writing the line off as lost.
This was the first day, and it wasn't looking like a good start to our trip. We were totally bašed as to how the line could have disappeared without a trace. We had visions of some huge shark towing it off, anchors, floats, and all. The next morning we got up early and headed out to the same area--and there were all the inner tubes bobbing quietly at the surface right where we had left them. Suddenly it dawned on us: the tremendous tidal change also causes powerful currents. The strong current had sucked every inner tube completely underwater and out of sight. The pull on the anchors from that ripping current must have been tremendous, but they dug in and held.
We began to pull in our line to see if we had caught anything. Soon we felt something large on one of the leaders, and it was trying to head away from the boat. Eventually, as we continued to pull in, a head and large mouth came into view through the murky water. We were excited to recognize it as a still-alive, ten-foot-long great white shark. Unfortunately, even though it was still swimming weakly, the shark was brain-dead from lack of oxygen. Confined too long on the line, it had been unable to swim freely and to pass enough life-sustaining water across its gills to maintain its oxygen-sensitive nervous system. I knew from past experience that it wouldn't survive if we released it.
The owner of the boat said he wanted to keep it to sell in the fish market, but at an estimated eight hundred pounds it was much too heavy for us to lift into the boat. So he killed it with a knife lashed to a net handle and we tied it off to the side of the boat. Pulling in the remaining longline, we felt another shark. It also turned out to be a great white, this time an eight-footer, which we managed to get on board. White sharks make for good eating; this would be a fine catch to bring back to the village.
Our first day had been most strange: first a magically vanishing and reappearing line, and then two unexpected great white sharks. Not what we were after, but still very interesting.
The skipper, not knowing what to do about the larger shark alongside, decided to turn it loose tied to one of our inner tubes and come back for it later with more help. I was a bit puzzled by this decision. Didn't he know that in a few hours the tremendous currents that surge up and down the Gulf every time the tide changes would carry his shark and its float miles away? I was sure he'd never see the fish or the tube again.
We planned to do more fishing with the smaller longlines and were just rounding the north point when our 150-horsepower Mercury outboard made a screeching sound like tortured metal and shuddered to a stop. It was completely seized up. What now? We were about three miles from San Felipe in a heavy boat with one locked-up engine and two little paddles. A slight breeze was blowing south toward town, though, so we optimistically hung the vinyl shark stretcher from the shark-lifting davits to make a crude sail, and soon we were sailing along at a barely perceptible speed. Of course, if the current had started to run north, we would have gone backward at a much higher pace.
We had plenty of drinking water on board--a wise precaution in these unpredictable waters--so we just lay back and relaxed. A couple of hours went by and along came a Mexican fisherman in his trusty panga, one of the sturdy, efficient, seaworthy fishing skiffs used all over Mexico. A 50-horsepower Johnson outboard planes these impressive little boats along at a very respectable speed and fuel economy, regardless of their load. Laughing at our predicament and our huge nonfunctional engine, the fisherman kindly gave us a tow back in to San Felipe.
That pretty much ended the reconnaissance trip for sharks: there wasn't much we could do with an inoperative boat. Still, despite the brevity of the trip, we had learned something. Because we'd caught white sharks, which like cool water, we concluded that this was the wrong time of year for the tropical sharks we wanted. We had chosen this time of year to avoid the problems that scorching hot weather would have caused if we'd tried to ship live sharks up to San Diego. But clearly that didn't help if our quarry was basking in the warmer waters of southern Mexico.
Losing Sea World's Boat
We decided to resume our shark hunt in the early fall, when the water would still be quite warm but the air would not be a hundred-plus degrees like it is in the middle of summer. Even though our reconnaissance trip had been cut short, the plan for our second expedition was to bring live sharks back to Sea World. We had collecting permits from Mexico City--which, we hoped, meant there would be no trouble at the border or with the Oficina de Pesca official in San Felipe. Because we planned to bring live sharks back with us, the arrangements for this trip were much more elaborate and would, among other things, involve setting up a holding tank on the beach to keep the sharks in prior to driving them out.
I was again working with John Hart and Jerry Kinmont, as well as veterinarian Jay Sweeney and Dr. Murray Dailey, a parasitologist from Long Beach State University whose special interest was the parasites of elasmobranchs--sharks and their relatives. He was most eager to check out the internal parasitic fauna found in sharks and rays from this seldom-studied region.
We towed down the same eighteen-foot Thunderbird collecting boat, now equipped with a new 150-horsepower Mercury outboard engine. Arriving in San Felipe, we checked into a small motel on the beach at the south end of town. Murray Dailey was really impatient to get at his favorite animals--shark parasites--and he begged me to let him put out a small setline to see what he could catch overnight. Giving in to his pleading, I helped him launch the boat. Murray then laid out the small baited setline not far from shore and, when he was through, anchored the boat off the beach in front of the motel and swam in.
We all went into the center of town for supper and to discuss our plans for the next day. Arriving back at the motel after dark, we sat on the patio looking out to sea. Suddenly someone said, "Where's the boat?" We stared out into the dark; none of us could see it. We knew there was enough light shining out from the motel to illuminate the light-colored hull, but it simply wasn't there! We also noticed that an offshore wind had sprung up and was blowing out to sea.
A feeling of panic overcame us. We all jumped in the truck and drove into town to see if we could find a panga fisherman to run out and try to find the boat. We managed to raise one sleeping fisherman from his warm bed. Muttering something unintelligible in Spanish, he headed down to his boat and out into the dark sea. He came back in an hour, said, "No good, too dark, too rough, we go look mañana," and then went back to bed.
The offshore wind had picked up considerably by now, and we knew the boat must have drifted a good distance from shore, on its way toward the mainland of Mexico, seventy miles across the Gulf. We mentally reconstructed what had happened. Being unfamiliar with the extreme tides in San Felipe, Murray had put out what he thought was an ample length of anchor line. But it was low tide. When the tide came back in, the rising boat simply lifted the anchor out of the sand, and away it went with the offshore wind. It really wasn't Murray's fault, but he felt terrible. I blamed myself for not warning him about the Gulf's tremendous tides.
Feeling totally helpless, we went back to the bar for some tequilas and desperately tried to think of some way to find Sea World's boat. There is a little dirt air strip in San Felipe; maybe if we could talk an American pilot into flying out over the Gulf, he'd be able to spot the little boat drifting along.
After a sleepless night we got up at dawn to drive to the airfield. By now the wind was blowing about forty knots straight out to sea. But luck seemed to be with us: a Cessna was just getting ready to leave. We told the pilot of our predicament and asked if he would help us by taking a quick look for our missing boat. He said he was sorry but if he didn't get out of there right now and head for the States he wouldn't be able to take off later if the wind got any worse. We watched him taxi to the end of the strip, take off, and disappear. Our last hope of getting the boat back was dashed.
Even though it was still early morning, we headed for the bar, where we sat staring blankly out at the choppy sea, mentally preparing our resumes for our next jobs. Three tequilas later Murray said, "Look! What's that?" and pointed to two specks heading toward us from the horizon. As they came closer we recognized the distinctive Sea World Thunderbird and alongside it a panga, with one man in each boat.
Grabbing a large amount of cash from my room, we raced down to the harbor to greet the two returning boats. I could have kissed the two fishermen! What they were doing way out there in this awful wind I never did find out, but they had spotted our boat sailing merrily along toward the Mexican mainland. The keys, of course, were in the ignition and it had a full tank of gas. One of the men had just hopped in, started the boat up, and headed back to San Felipe, with the panga planing along beside it.
That was the best two hundred dollars of someone else's money I ever gave away! The fishermen were delighted to get this unexpected windfall from the crazy gringos. I was delighted to keep my job and happy that Murray Dailey didn't have to live with the lost boat on his conscience. I never told Sea World management what really happened and managed to conceal the missing money through some creative bookkeeping supported by indecipherable Mexican receipts.
Sharks In Mexico
With that nerve-wracking event behind us we turned our attention to catching sharks. The first project was to set up a twenty-foot-diameter circular portable plastic swimming pool on the beach. Having already experienced the extreme San Felipe tides, we wanted to be absolutely sure it was well above high tide. The logical approach was to ask the people who lived right there at the motel. They came out and pointed to a spot where it would be perfectly safe from the highest possible tide. Using buried plywood boards as sand anchors, we laid out the pool and its sunshade, an inexpensive army surplus parachute that worked well and was surprisingly windproof.
The full moon came a week later, and with it the spring tide with its extreme highs and lows. We watched as each day the high tide crept closer and closer to our precious shark pool. One day it was lapping at the base of the pool, and we hadn't even reached the maximum tide. I could have killed the man who said the pool would be completely safe, but he made sure he was nowhere to be found.
Faced with two more days of high tides, we rallied our meager forces and built a seawall between the pool and the incoming tide, using our empty fiberglass shark transport boxes and filling them with sand. Guests staying at the motel pitched in and helped shovel sand to fight the relentless ocean. We looked and felt truly stupid for erecting our pool where the ocean could reach it; however, we fought on and eventually passed the peak of the high tides. Now we had two clear weeks before the new moon and its series of high tides came.
Collecting began. We put out longlines in the bay of San Felipe; we caught mostly rays of several species and a few small sharpnose sharks (Rhizoprionodon longurio). Outside the bay in deeper water we caught a huge four-hundred-pound mako and some four-foot-long bignose sharks (Carcharhinus altimus), which were listed as rare in Sus Kato's shark book. They were small, but they did well in our holding tank.
One of the locals told us about a tiburoneros', or shark fishermen's, camp around Punta Smith a few miles south; we decided it would be smart to visit the people who make their living catching sharks. The camp was inaccessible by road, so we took off in the T-bird and headed south. Arriving in the afternoon, we were greeted warmly by the fishermen, who told us they had set their nets but wouldn't be pulling them until after dark. That was okay by us; we would wait. By now we'd been around San Felipe long enough to know our way back after dark.
In the late afternoon they graciously invited us to join them and their families for a supper of fish tacos--made, of course, from dried shark meat. Next to their small hut were improvised drying racks for strips of shark meat that would be shipped to the mainland of Mexico. The shark fins would be shipped to Asia. The smell of the drying shark meat was almost overwhelming, but the tacos were surprisingly good, maybe because we hadn't planned on staying out so long and we were starving by then.
Nightfall came and the tiburoneros set out in their panga to pull the nets they had set not far from shore. It was one of those beautiful calm, warm evenings that can be so magical in the Sea of Cortez. Not a breath of wind could be felt, and the sounds of the fishermen singing and dancing on the bottom of their boat came to us clearly across the mirror-smooth water as they pulled their nets. Hearing such happy sounds, we looked forward to seeing what kinds of sharks they had caught. They returned to camp and told us there had been nothing in the nets.
That evening with the hospitable tiburoneros still haunts me. We knew that even when fishing was good they were very poor and to catch nothing must hurt, yet there they were singing and dancing as they worked, knowing all along that they might end up with nothing. What was the secret to their happiness? We wealthy Northerners, with all our material possessions, would have been cursing our bad luck if we'd had a night like they had.
This collecting trip was not a great success. We ended up with two rather small bignose sharks that we brought back to Sea World. We'd had three beautiful two-foot-long hammerheads in our holding pool, but some kids saw them as great things to play with and killed them. I'm sure they didn't mean to hurt them when they were grabbing their tails and dorsal fins; they just didn't know how delicate they were.
Because of the poor results and the difficult logistics, this was our last attempt to collect sharks in the Sea of Cortez. Although expensive, it turned out to be more practical to collect on the East Coast of the United States and transport the sharks across the country.