Cage diving.

Editor's Note: "Sharks in the Mist" is a three-part story. The author, C.J. Bahnsen is a freelance writer based out of Orange County, CA. Parts of this story previously appeared in the LA Times.

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"Peter Benchley is on The Horizon," our dive ops manager, Tracy Andrew, announced as she disembarked from the panga boat and climbed aboard our 85-foot charter dive vessel, The Ocean Odyssey. I was among the 16 shark divers and 10 crewmembers who stood bunched and excited on the afterdeck upon hearing the news. Hard as I tried to keep the dignified aura behooving a journalist on assignment, I found myself hip-checking through the small crowd and, with overeager impatience, asking, "Did you talk to him?"

It was November of 2004. Our vessel sat anchored in the northeast leeward side of Isle de Guadalupe, some 300 yards off an area known as "Shark Heaven." The Horizon, sister boat of the Odyssey, sat at anchor not far off, also loaded with shark divers, led by ecotour operator, Paul "Doc" Anes. I was signed on with Patric Douglas, youthful swarthy-tanned CEO of Absolute Adventures-Shark Diver, for a five-day live-aboard package. Tracy had been tooling around on a panga with the shipboard shark researcher, Mauricio Hoyos Padilla, who was tracking acoustic transmitter signals from tagged sharks with a hydrophone. When they motored past the Horizon, there was Peter Benchley and his wife, Wendy, among the dive party. "We just waved a 'Hello' to him," she said to my disappointment.

Guadalupe breaks open the sea 160 miles offshore of Baja California Norte. Cinder cones, geological folds and vermillion striations of lava rock are evidence of the island's volcanic birthing. It is a rugged, 22-hour, stomach-churning steam, 220 miles due south from San Diego Harbor to get there. As far as weather during the journey, we had drawn the short straw. And Patric hadn't minced words amid his welcoming orientation, forewarning us that seas were not ideal for the long crossing as the boat pulled out of H&M Landing. "I hope you're all ready," he said, "because this isn't going to be a trip; it's going to be an expedition."

To further send that message home, Cory Grodske, head chef, emerged from the galley in apron and a white paper hat and said, "Since we'll be traveling due south, we'll be in a trough." To illustrate, he held one hand up as a makeshift boat, rocking it side to side. He warned us to pour our own hot liquids. Trying to find someone else's cup with a pot of scorching coffee in rough seas would be an act of scalding stupidity. He demonstrated how we should brace a shoulder and hip against the center serving island, while keeping one foot spread out, braced against the base molding during the act of pouring. Cory also requested that, as the seas deteriorated, the male divers (there were four women among us) sit down when using one of two heads to relax our bladders. "The women will love you for it," he said, smiling serene through his reddish beard stubble. My first thought was, Geezus, are we going thru a typhoon?

When we hit 10-foot swells about five hours into the trip, I realized my chewable bonine pills, ginger root capsules, and Queaz-Away wrist bracelets weren't doing jack to ease the barf knell. "As we travel farther south, we'll be getting into more unprotected waters," Cory said, when I had discreetly asked how bad the seas would get. Also a scuba instructor with a 100-ton captain's license, Cory struck me as a nurturing soul gifted with steel nerves. He looked out the starboard galley window at the sugar-topped rollers then back at me: "This is calm… So can I set you up with a little bucket to have in your bunk?"

Alan DeHerrera, my dive bud from Fullerton, California, gave me a knowing look as we sat in the salon, aware that my main concern wasn't the great white sharks on this trip but the seasickness that dotted my past. (Especially the deep sea fishing trip as a preteen off Miami Beach, when I ended up doing "the big spit," as Hunter S. Thompson called it, over the starboard rail, my dad bracing me with his arms and body saying, "Let 'er rip, kid!"—which is how I ruined his brand new Sperry deck shoes.)

But somehow, overnight, after holing up in my coffin-sized bunk for 10 hours, I had acquired my sea legs. Alan rousted me at 6 a.m., chanting my name until I pulled the privacy curtain aside and was met by his chipper dark featured countenance. He had already worked in his calisthenics on the bow to a Mexican sunrise and was much too awake for my morning sensibilities. But I had made it to Guadalupe without letting my stomach fly the coop and was able to enjoy Cory's chow from that moment forward.

Nineteen miles long and five miles across at its widest point, Guadalupe Island is a bio-diverse pinniped sanctuary: Northern elephant seals, Guadalupe fur seals, and California sea lions congregate at rookery and haul-out points around its perimeter. There is also an excess of big game fish that attracts sport fishermen, especially yellowfin tuna and yellowtail. In 1998 long-range fishing boats out of San Diego began reporting great whites making shock-and-awe attacks on their catch. Word spread like chum. The island has since became infamous for hosting one of the largest aggregations of white sharks in the world, making it part of what's known as the "Grand Slam" shark circuit that includes South Africa and Australia.

It was at the end of our second dive day that we learned of Benchley's presence on the Horizon.

I've had Peter Benchley on the brain since 1974, the year I watched his opus, Jaws, with my dad at Miracle Mile Drive-In back in Toledo, Ohio, where I grew up. It remains the only movie my dad and I ever went to together. It's also the only movie that radically altered my behavior long after the credits rolled, terrorizing me beyond earthbound conception. I wouldn't swim or dangle my legs in dark water for many years, whether it was Lake Erie, a quarry or an unlit backyard pool. The resonating power of that film overrode all rationale. How could I have known that, 30 years later, I would be climbing into a bucking shark cage to shake hands with the "Man in the Grey Suit," and that Peter Benchley and I would be swapping stories about it, like Quint and Hooper (actually I was more of a newcomer, like Chief Brody, who could only contribute an appendectomy scar)?

It burned me that I was never able to get close enough to speak with him during the four days we were both at Guadalupe, being that our vessels remained about 600 feet apart. So when I returned to my bungalow in Orange County, I sought Benchley out via his publisher. I wanted to include him in the travel story I was working on at the time. More importantly, I had to know what he thought about the shark experience we'd both shared, albeit from different boats.

His first email reply to me revealed he was closely following the shark poaching issues at Guadalupe. On January 5, 2005, he wrote: "Did you hear that not long before we were [at Guadalupe], local fishermen had come upon a sportfishing boat with anglers hooked up to two great whites? The fishermen asked the captain of the boat to release the sharks but were told to bugger off. So the fishermen cut the anglers' lines. The boat, they said, had covered up its name, home port, and I.D. numbers."

I had heard about the shark harvesting going on in Mexican waters which are prowled by trophy hunters and fin raiders—whose practice is slicing the fins off a shark and discarding the still-writhing body to sea.

"Sharks are sold as food by the pound, so the value is that they're big," Benchley told me on Friday morning, January 28, 2005, after inviting me to phone his East Coast residence. There is a bursting demand for shark-fin soup (equated with status and virility) in Japan, China and other Asian nations where a single bowl can fetch over $100 dollars. "I've heard a big white shark jaw brings in $10K. I bought a fabulous fiberglass reproduction of a jaw in Florida," he said. "You don't have to kill a shark anymore to get great jaws… And the shed teeth of white sharks are no longer something people wear as jewelry, although my wife still wears an old shark tooth."

Patric had mentioned a recent run-in with poachers. "Four trips ago, a 40-foot fishing vessel pulled up on our chum site and threw a huge hook over the side with braided wire and a big piece of meat on it," he said, as we waited for the roguish seas to abate enough to dive on the first day. "Sure enough, they hooked one of our sharks, with the intention of killing it." Patric and his sharky crew were able to talk them into releasing the animal. But another great white was harvested not long after this incident; probably the one Benchley was referring to.

"One set of great white fins on the open market today is worth upwards of $25,000-5,000 a fin, plus jaw. Outsider Mexican fishermen have picked up on that," said Patric. "Something truly special is happening at this island and I believe it's absolutely incumbent for any ecotour operator to give back or channel funds into any sort of research going on. But without direct engagement with the Mexicans, we will lose this site."

Before operating ecotours at Guadalupe, Patric logged seven years offering one-day shark dives at the Farallon Islands, another seat for great whites and part of California's notorious Red Triangle, 30 miles west of San Francisco beyond Alcatraz Island. He has been an ardent sponsor and ally, both financially and logistically, to research efforts at Guadalupe by such renowned shark scientists as Dr. Felipe Galvan, from the Centro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias del Mar (CICIMAR) and Dr. Peter Klimley, from University of California, Davis, who has been featured on the Discovery Channel's "Shark Week." Mauricio, a 29-year-old doctorate student at CICIMAR, is working under the advisement of both scientists in studying the fine-scale movements of great whites around this island. Never without a smile, Mauricio seems to maintain a perpetual state of bliss from doing exactly what he was born to do. When a diver asked him how long he has wanted to study sharks, his Spanish-accented reply was, "Ever since I was a sperm."

Last fall, Patric was instrumental in helping to establish the first semi-permanent research base in the history of the island so that Mauricio and fellow researchers can remain on Guadalupe during high shark season (September through early December), as well as during other parts of the year. Patric's outfit also assisted the research team in deploying a RAP (Radio Acoustic Positioning) system—an array of sonobouys placed off "Elephant Seal Beach" that allows up to ten tagged sharks to be monitored at the same time. It is the first such system ever placed in Latin America.

Guadalupe represents an aqua Eden for researchers and shark divers. Unlike South Africa, Australia and the Farallon Islands, visibility is often crystalline, well over 100 feet on the best days and, provided you chum the water, white sharks are almost guaranteed to show up everyday during the season.

It was Benchley's first time diving at Guadalupe and his last encore with great whites. He and Wendy were celebrating their 40th Wedding Anniversary on the trip.

"In South Africa, they do most of the cage diving off these monster seal colonies," said Benchley, when I asked him how Guadalupe rated against other shark sites. “The sharks are all over you there; 15 to 20 at a time in a given day… I've been to South Australia half a dozen times and I've always had pretty bad luck there. On one trip, we saw only one shark in eight days. Guadalupe was certainly better than my experiences in Australia. There were more great whites there and they were much less shy. To have about three or four sharks around the clock for four straight days was top of the scale."

I also saw sharks regularly during those same days. Although Benchley and I were on separate boats under different eco-operators, the drill was essentially the same on the Odyssey and her sister vessel, the Horizon. Each one-hour dive rotation constituted dropping into on of two 10' X 20' cages deployed over vessel's stern, four divers per cage. Unlike everyone else on the Odyssey, I was not a certified diver at the time—the reason why Patric had stressed taking an introductory scuba course, pre-trip. "Some people get claustrophobia or panic," he had warned. "The last thing you need to worry about is breathing through a regulator with great white sharks swimming in your face."

Non-certs are allowed on these dives since you don't go below ten feet and breathing is done with a hookah. Odyssey divers were each cinched in a 60-pound weight harness so we wouldn't be bobbing around like loose corks. The water temp here averages 60-62 degrees, which constitutes coldwater diving. And because you're standing immobile in a cage rather than swimming, your core body temp drops like Bush's approval ratings. "I don't like coldwater diving," said Benchley, who wore a 40-pound harness and considered the water temp "marginal for a wetsuit."

On my first dive, I was bordering on sensory overload as I wrestled into a 7mm wetsuit, then the head-shrinking hood, boots, and gloves—all borrowed from Alan. The whole getup felt like a black python had me in a goodnight squeeze. There was so much to think about, like the rules Tracy had laid down at first dive meeting: Never stick any part of your body outside the cage and never make any sudden movements that might trigger a "predator-prey reaction," she admonished. It was easy to get distracted by Tracy's easy, Sandra Bullock looks, until she administered instructions with disarming authority. By day she wore navy blues—pants, collared shirt, and a tight cap, brim low slung. But at night it was as if she stepped out of a phone booth, transformed from serious-mannered dive ops manager into sensual hostess, wearing a flowery sheath, her dark chestnut waves braided and no longer stuffed under a cap.

Tracy would monitor us from the dive platform. Another sharky would man a push-pole during rotations. "If a shark were to come in too close to the cages, we push it off," Tracy said. "It doesn't harm the shark. We just give them a little extra nudge to keep them from entering the cage, because sharks don't have a reverse mode."

Patric and crew had been tossing five-gallon buckets of tuna parts, hang bait and powdered chum—made from dried fish and blood meal—over both gunwales. "By using dried product, we hope to not put anything into the environment like parasites or bacteria," Patric told me.

Down on the dive platform, a sharky threw the weight harness on my shoulders, cinching the belt snug while I fought off waves of claustrophobia. "Show me how to purge your mask," Tracy said, making sure I was ready for my first open water dive. I obliged then sat on the dive platform. Each diver's entry had to be carefully timed in between wicked surges so we wouldn't smash loose limbs between the 325-pound cage and the platform, or fall in between, vulnerable to patrolling sharks. I thrust the reg in my mouth, threw my legs into the lurching cage and KER-PLOOSH!

When the bubbles cleared, I was standing on the cage floor. Tracy's blurred face peered down at me. Her hand was underwater giving me the OK sign that I returned. I got tossed around a bit, trying to fight the currents until I realized the idea was to stay loose, knees bent in a boxer's stance. Visibility was at 25 feet, well shy of the usual 80-plus feet. A plankton bloom was turning the blue water green and dusky, caused by deepwater upwelling that comes from the submarine canyons here.

The rest of my dive team already stood in shark-watching position, camera-wielding sentries each facing a different direction. There was James Mott, an ink-laden guitarist in a punk band called Casket Gasket from Farmington Hills, Michigan; Ken Steil, a young Detroit police officer; and my dive bud, Alan, a nature filmmaker here for the second consecutive year. His footage of Guadalupe's great whites—featured in his documentary, California Sea Lions, narrated by Sean Astin—had convinced me to come along and see these animals in 3D.

Standing in the cage weighted to negative buoyancy felt like being on the moon at one-third gravity, only the hazy green cosmos was inverted, plunging between my neoprene boots, streaked by cornflower blues. Depths quickly nose-dive to over 1,300 feet moving out from the island.

A churning commotion in the neighboring cage caught my peripheral. It was as if someone has dropped a giant Alka Seltzer tablet into it. When the foamy maelstrom dissipated, I saw it was Paul Shinkman, a semi-retired neurobiology professor from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, dropping into the cage like a mini-disaster, legs peddling an invisible bicycle, trying to correct his hopeless entry trajectory. He landed upside down anyway. The professor had logged over 55 dives in tropical places like Spain and Cozumel, but this was his first cage diving experience in cold water with 60 pounds of negative buoyancy that induces an abrupt, almost hurling, descent. "I hate diving in a wetsuit," he said one night as we tossed back cups of Great White Chardonnay together. "I prefer warm waters, floating in neutral buoyancy." Yet he was having the time of his life. "These people are absolutely superior, especially Patric and Tracy." The professor's awkward coordination juxtaposes against his erudite manner. His mind is acrobatic. His thick paunchy body is not. To our relief, he stood upright in the cage, giving Tracy the OK sign.

We waited. Ten, twenty, thirty-five minutes went by. No sharks. I watched a long bamboo pole, duct-tapped flat at the end, enter the water above us. A sharky at the stern of the boat was slapping the surface with it. "Sharks are tuned in to every sound in the water," Patric had told us, "so when they hear something different, they want to investigate."

Then Alan was pointing down to our left. At first I saw nothing. Then part of the sea separated from itself, becoming a grey-green plasmatic specter that took on form. The preternatural girth of the animal—nine feet or so—reduced me to an awed simpleton.

No mere “Shark Week” could have prepared me for the overreaching immensity of my first carcharodon carcharias rising from below, 3,000 pounds and 15 feet of shark nearing our titanium-reinforced aluminum cage—not much comfort as my eye caught the weld repair to a strut in the cage window, a reminder of a previous trip when a shark stuck its head in and exerted about 10,000 pounds of pressure (the bars are rated at 5K crush strength), buckling the metal into scrap. No one was in the cage at the time and it remains Patric's first and only "mishap with these beasties" in four seasons at Guadalupe, he said. "We learned from that experience and we dropped the aperture down by two full inches."

Solar vines shimmered off the great white's back like lightning flashes as the titanic fish moved with eons of evolved efficiency. Even at first sighting I knew the design could not be improved on. Not as a cruising killing machine.

Her beauty was so overwhelming as to take away my fear. At that moment, I understood why Benchley loved sharks and why—through conservation work, TV appearances, lectures and nonfiction books like Shark Trouble—he spent the latter part of his life trying to defang the empire of terror he created with Jaws, which he meant as fiction, not as an excuse to go out and headhunt sharks.

The low viz, along with a great white's notorious ability to change hues—different combinations of blue, silver, charcoal grey, sea green and bronze—allowed the sharks to manifest like a haunting: near the surface a ways off one moment, right under the cage floor the next. The animals seemed to assemble from phantasmal mist, as if teleported from the deep. "It was very eerie," Benchley said about this phenomenon. "You'd turn around and there would be one right there. Doc Anes, a real character who ran the operation, told us, 'Remember, it isn't the shark you see that's going to get you, it's the one you don't see that does.'"

Benchley nearly lived those words. "I had my hand out to touch a shark passing the cage. Well, there was another shark following close behind that I didn't see at all. Had she wanted to, she could have easily had a hand or an arm for lunch," he said.

It turned out the female great white that cage-stormed my team was "Scarboard," named so because of the singular scars on her right flank. Scarboard is almost always observed with an escort school of pilot fish. She is one of over 70 adult and sub-adult great whites photo-documented in these waters by Pfleger Institute for Environmental Research (PIER), headquartered in Oceanside, California. PIER is a major funding source for Mexican graduate students like Mauricio. Headed by Dr. Michael Domeier, PIER has placed over 60 satellite tags on Guadalupe sharks since 2000. Return data has revealed that these white sharks spend at least half the year in deep pelagic waters between the California Coast and Hawaii, but what they're doing out there remains elusive.

Nor is it fully understood why great whites converge on Guadalupe Island every year with the approach of fall, then leave by December. There may be a correlation between elephant and fur seal migration and breeding patterns. Elephant seals are a white shark's favorite food because of the high fat content. Young male whites, averaging 11-14 feet, first appear in early July, while larger adult females begin showing up around September. The largest shark observed by scientists and ecotour operators was 16 feet, but local fishermen have reported sharks as large as 20 feet. Males and females are often gashed by scarring and some have chunks missing; territorial infighting is common. "We've seen a lot of violent aggressive behavior among these sharks," Dr. Domeier told me during my visit at PIER, post trip. "They're just really mean to each other."

There have been fears among conservationists and scientists that the advent of ecotourism and chumming is altering the behavior of great whites at this site. The island’s fishermen have reported that, since shark diving charters started showing up about four years ago, great whites have been shadowing their panga boats, associating the sound of a motor with feeding time. This was not the case before ecotours started in these waters.

The West Anchorage on the island’s windward side is a seasonal fishing camp for the same returning consortium of Mexican fishermen, also known as pangeros, and their families who spend 10 months harvesting Guadalupe’s abundant abalone and lobster. It's then shipped back to Ensenada, where most of them come from. Patric ritually offers them a few supplies, like fresh veggies, meat, batteries, sodas—even though they ask for beer—and fishing gear to maintain good relations. Some of the pangeros have become invaluable aids to shark researchers. Mauricio doesn’t necessarily view this behavioral change as a bad development because these sharks need more fat than is found in chum products or tuna. "They have to hunt elephant seals because their fat has twice the caloric value of muscle tissue from fish," he told Alan and I while we sat on Odyssey’s afterdeck, tiki torches irradiating the night sea with fire tones. "So maybe they eat the fish, but it will not become the main food of the sharks."

He has witnessed white sharks in rare form over his many trips to Guadalupe. "Last year, I saw a shark on the surface opening and closing its mouth in aggression as it swam sideways, about two meters from this boat," Mauricio said. "It’s like a dog showing its teeth. It’s almost the same thing." This behavior is known as aerial jaw gaping, mostly seen in males, the territorial sex. "Another thing I saw is tail slapping, when a shark smacks its tail against the surface or against another shark, but he did it against the boat, because the shark considers the boat competitive. And we’ve seen full body breeches and leaps. It’s like a threatening display against another shark."

A party unleashed later on that night, the result of boat fever that had settled over us after three days at sea—26 people enduring a confined space without relent. Landfall on Guadalupe Island is prohibited by the Mexican government without special permits, so divers are left to their own devices during downtime aboard ship. Beer and wine wasn’t swigged as much as it was shot-gunned. Voices reached drunken crescendo. The Bee Gees’ 'Staying Alive' morphed the salon floor into a retro disco—one of the divers, Alan Waltz, a DJ from San Jose, had lined into the house stereo system with his laptop’s dance mixes. The couples aboard busted moves and one unattached woman got lugged up enough to do a pole dance. I couldn’t keep up, beaten down by the taxes of coldwater diving. As I descended the aft stairwell to my bunk I heard the DJ shout, "Okay, now everybody do the white man’s overbite!"

My dive teammate, Ken, was the extreme junkie aboard The Odyssey. The Guadalupe trip completed the Grand Slam circuit for him. Some people chase storms. Ken, 30ish and head-shaven, chases great whites. He is streetwise from pulling undercover duty in Motown’s 'Southwest' gangland. His fellow officers have christened him 'Shark Bait,' figuring the nickname will become a fulfilled prophecy if he keeps tempting white death. On a diving expedition in Australia off the Neptune Islands, he was only minutes inside the shark cage when a great white rushed up from below, hitting it so hard "the shark lifted the cage out of the water trying to get to me," Ken said. "No bait was even in the water yet." He theorizes the shark was attracted to the blood red color of his dry suit, the same dry suit he wore in our cage, until it sprung a leak and he reverted to his 7mm black wetsuit.

Ken has been on repeat expeditions to 'Shark Alley' in South Africa, an area between Geyser Rock and Dyer Island. It was there he witnessed a predation, when a great white bit a sea lion in half next to the research vessel he was on. "The front half swam in circles until it bled to death," he said. He agreed with Benchley’s take that South African sharks are "all over you," estimating that one in three sharks either bumped or bit the cage during his dives. I got the feeling he liked that sort of thing.

During a dive rotation on the second day, Ken stretched one arm then a shoulder through the cage window to touch a passing 13-foot white shark. That was when a push-pole abruptly konked him on the head—Tracy’s way of communicating, That’s a no-no. Putting a hand outside the cage is tolerated. Hanging part of your body out is not.

Patric expects absolute adherence to safety protocol under his watch, yet he exhibits the same fierceness about showing his divers a great time. For him there are two branches of shark operators. He categorizes himself with the "safe and sane shark divers," who are bringing shark diving to the masses. Then there are the "divergent rebels who are trying to one-up each other." Guys like Andre Hartman and Jim Abernathy. "[Abernathy] found a place to free dive with tiger sharks. And, now, he’s doing nighttime diving with tiger sharks," Patric said. "You know, if you’re in the water with an apex predator, you’re already at a disadvantage. If you’re diving blind with an apex predator known to feed at night, now you’re in the realm of the insane. And there’s a marketplace for that."

We only had one incident on the trip. Four-man teams were loading into the cages at mid-afternoon. Tracy was helping a diver with his gear on deck when crew were suddenly yelling, "Tracy! ... TRACY!!" She ran aft, dropping down the ladder to the dive platform. It was the professor, Paul. He was pulled out of the port cage sputtering and hustled inside the boat.

The "Acknowledgement of Risk Release" that divers have to sign for these trips includes unanticipated risks like "falling, collision, head injuries, equipment failure, striking obstruction or other persons, hypothermia and unforeseen attacks by sharks." We didn’t know what had befallen the professor until Tracy emerged 20 minutes later with news he was fine. I found him in the salon seated in a booth, wetsuit peeled off his upper body. He told me he had knocked his mask loose when he dropped, pell-mell, into the cage. Mask askew, one of his contact lenses floated away and he got disoriented, panicked, and swallowed some saltwater. Thankfully, he came out uninjured. "They really took good care of me," he said, spooning some of Cory’s clam chowder.

The great whites we saw averaged between 11 and 14 feet. Until our last dive rotation on the final day as the yolky sun waned over Mount Augusta, Guadalupe’s razorback 4,257-foot peak. The sea had turned docile blue overnight as the winds died. We weren’t bullied by currents in the cage and viz was 60 feet and improving. My consciousness was spilling into the big blue when a 14-foot female materialized from below The Odyssey’s hull. She passed close enough for a pectoral fin to rattle the cage bars. As she receded another great white, also a female, eclipsed my mask window. She swam beneath the cage and ghosted away.

Both sharks were hidden, but you could feel them out there. Movement erupted from the starboard. The new shark was a giantess, moving under the panga boat that had returned with Mauricio, lingering alongside it. I would have rebuked her size as some freak underwater refraction, except her body ran the length of the panga. That would make her at least 18 feet and about two tons. Mauricio, who observed the shark from above, corroborated this later.

The queen beast glided on pectoral wings, moving to the hang bait that floated just below the surface off starboard, mouth toward us as it yawned open. The upper lip crinkled back, revealing bloody gums, then a bony ridge filled with layers of serrated teeth like broken razorblades. The cavernous passage to her gullet waited. She tore the bait from the line with a fierce swipe of her head and continued toward us fronting a slack-jawed grin. She moved in along the cage, taking a good look inside. Her right eye landed on me like a duel-judgment from God and Old Scratch. I was looking into an omnipotent black hole that slung me back 11 million years, where nothing was ruined.

Author's Note:

When I first learned of Peter Benchley’s death last February 12 (he was 65), due to complications of pulmonary fibrosis, I was gobsmacked. It was just over a year since we had talked. My mind reflexively invoked his robust, gentlemanly voice—the way he said "Good day" to me on first phone greeting and the sound of his dress heels on a hard floor as he moved about his home in Princeton, New Jersey. He gave off no indications of being ill.

I never did share the interview material, until now. It seems right to give him a last word about sharks to break the silence of his passing.

In the face of much controversy about ecotour operators herding more and more people to remote dive areas, dropping them in cages, and tossing chum in the water to attract sharks, Benchley told me, "I think it’s fine to bring people to see sharks. I’m for giving anyone who can afford it the chance. Because the more you see and understand these sharks, the more you have the desire to save them and not run out and slaughter them."

What he did not sanction are shark operators who promote excessive risk by allowing divers outside a cage, or exploitive shark cowboys like Andre Hartman, who "leave a cage and try to ride a shark for kicks," he said. "It’s going to cause harm, because someone is going to get killed and then there’s going to be more hysteria, then another spasm of nonsense where people want to go out and kill sharks."

I had intended on keeping Benchley on the phone for no more than 20 minutes that day, knowing he was a wanted man. But I couldn’t hang up with him, especially when I realized he was talking to me, not as celebrity to journalist, but as shark diver to shark diver. The conversation would have never ended had he not gently remonstrated me. At the 50-minute mark, he said, "You know, we’ve been talking for quite a long time."