It has become a cliche among an entire generation to say this, but I love sharks and yes, “Jaws” is responsible. I remember sitting alone in our living room at about age 6 as I watched those stupid kids — OH MY GOD, GET OUT of the water — being eaten alive on the TV.
(No, this wasn’t parent-sanctioned viewing. But being a latchkey kid has its privileges.)
I would hug my knees to my chest to keep my feet from dangling on the floor. The floor was the ocean, couches and chairs were the boats, and pillows were the rafts that got me from one place to another. The movie was on HBO, which meant it played one thousand times a day for a whole month.
That was a kick-ass month.
I started checking out shark books from the library. Some were factual, science-lite books for kids, and some were sensational stories about shark attacks. (I also went on a vampire kick around that time, but it didn’t stick.)
The conclusion of my elementary studies was this: Great whites are awesome. Maybe because they’re so mysterious. We don’t know how long they live! We don’t know how often they give birth! We don’t know how they mate! We don’t know much about how they interact! And I guess it’s true that we fear what we don’t know, especially when what we don’t know can be 20 feet long and look like this:
Not my photo; source unknown.
So yeah, they’re scary. But they’re also sleek and beautiful and fast and smart. And so rare.
When we went to Cape Town, we knew we wanted to go cage diving. Seeing great whites from the safety of a boat would be incredible. When we signed up, however, we were forgetting something about ourselves. Something that you’d think impossible to forget. Something that must be emblazoned so brightly onto our brains by now that if we were to get bonked on the head and wake up in a Bangkok alley with two donkeys, no passports, and no idea of our own names — no memory of even being married to each other — the one thing we’d remember about ourselves, without fail, would be this:
We get very, very seasick.
That’s the trick of seasickness: When you have it, it is such misery that you wish you could die or, at minimum, be bludgeoned into unconsciousness. Then, a few weeks later, you find yourself thinking, “hey, we should take that ferry to Robben Island! Hundreds of people do it every day, so why on earth can’t we?” And you do it, and you hurl your guts into the sea, and the sickness only gets worse, and you cling to the pants leg of a stranger with unusually large hands and beg him to strangle you quickly, you’ll sign a waiver, oh God oh please JUST DO IT NOW.
Two weeks later, you’re researching diving vacations.
We’ve both experienced it more than once and have spectacularly gross stories. His involves a four-hour boat ride to the Galapagos Islands. Mine involves a whale watching trip off the coast of Massachusetts.
I guess you see where this is going.
We were picked up from our hotel the morning of our trip by an elderly driver who chain smoked and sported a large pot belly. All day I imagined him having a massive chest-grabber while driving us somewhere along the the cliff-side roads between Cape Town and Gaansbai.
We picked up two more groups, and I was surprised to see that I was the only girl in the van. Most the other passengers were Scotsmen working a ship that had just come into the port, and the ride to Gaansbai felt like an afternoon in a men’s rugby locker room.
I used to have me own wetsuit but it doesn’a fet anymoor. I think it likely shroonk.
Wetsuits don’t shrink, yeh fat fook, it’s because you’re too fookin’ fat now. Look at yeh.
M. took motion sickness medication an hour or two before we were to board the boat. I, being pregnant, could not. Not that the medication has ever worked for either of us anyway.
But that’s something we forget, too.
During the brief orientation before boarding, the leader of our dive said, “As to seasickness, I’ll say only one thing: It’s all in your head. So don’t think about it and you’ll be fine.”
And then I walked to the front of the room, bit off his arm, and shoved it down his throat.
(Don’t ever say that to a person with seasickness.)
Things we would soon discover:
1. The 57-foot boat on which we had reserved seats was actually 24 feet long.
2. It takes less than 10 minutes to feel woozy on a 24-foot boat.
3. You don’t get to put on your wetsuit until you get to your anchor point.
4. Putting on a wetsuit in the cabin of a pitching boat is the fastest way to Hurlville, population Me.
That’s right. I couldn’t even put on my damned wetsuit.
M. did alright with that part:
I hadn’t started throwing up, but I knew it was coming if I didn’t get control. So I staked out a spot on a bench and stared at the coast. I stared and stared. I plastered a crazy smile on my face, counted the houses, and described them out loud. I sang songs about them.
Pretty houses on the coast, which house do I love the most?
All the while, I had a perfect view of the chummer. Chum is smashed-up bits of fish guts. Do you know the smell of smashed-up bits of fish guts? Do you know the sound that is made when the chummer smashes up those fish guts with a shovel? Do you know that pregnancy dramatically enhances sense of smell and tendency toward nausea?
Do you know what a ridiculous combination this is?
x = Your Assumption2 (50)
Still, I held onto hope that I’d be able to get control of myself and do what I’d come to do. At that point, M. still intended to get into the cage, too. But for the time being, we sat on our bench, me chattering to the far-off shore and he staring at the backs of his eye lids while the boat pitched and rocked.
And if you look at the following photo and say, “But the waves aren’t high at all,” I am going to break your fingers one by one. And then I will re-set the bones with a rubber mallet. Meanwhile, you will sing a continuous loop of “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and each time you mess up, we will start over!
Not out of malice, you see. Out of principle.
Finally the, spotters began shouting. We all ran to one side of the boat to see our first shark.
And that’s how the afternoon continued for me: crazily spouting jibberish about pretty houses on the coast, which house do I love the most? until the spotters shouted, “Doyvehs, royt! Doyvehs, lift!”
I’d jump up to snap photos and gasp at the sharks, then I’d scurry back to my bench and coastline when the sharks disappeared.
In addition to using chum, we drew in the sharks with a wooden seal decoy and large hunk of tuna.
The sharks never got a bite of the tuna. The guides say it’s against regulations to feed the sharks, lest they begin associating trips like these with food.
Makes sense to me.
They don’t look very big here. And relative to the biggest great whites ever spotted, they weren’t very big. These guys were only about 10 to 12 feet long. But I can’t overstate how huge they looked to us.
I was near tears for half of the trip, frustrated that I couldn’t get my spinning head under control and fully experience this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I had a warped sense of failure — that I wouldn’t be a good role model for my kid by letting a little vomit and agony get in the way of an adventure. This is especially funny because I imagine that half of you are already dialing child protective services for my propensity to put my kid in mortal danger.
In the end, we had dozens of glimpses of sharks and neither of us could get into the cage. (In fact, while I started to get a bit better at the end, M. got worse.) But despite feeling miserable the whole time, I didn’t regret going. The sharks were worth every near-heave.
When we returned to land, we asked our driver to snap a memento photo of us. It turned out as blurry as our own vision.
Miraculously, neither of us actually threw up that day — not even when two women kneeled over the side of the boat and puked into the sea upwind from us.
A little over a month later, M. went back to Cape Town with some friends. The friends signed up for a shark dive, and M. called me the day before.
“I’m thinking about going, maybe.”
“Going? On the shark dive? Are you CRAZY?”
“Well maybe this time won’t—”
“Yes. It will. IT ALWAYS IS. DON’T DO IT.”
“Yeah… Yeah. You’re probably right.”
A month after that, friends invited us to Inhaca Island for the day. I actually dragged myself out of bed early, after a night of club-induced insomnia, and showered for our trip. I walked back into the bedroom, towel-headed, when M. asked, “Hey, where’s the Dramamine?”
I stopped in my tracks. We locked eyes. It all came flooding back to us.
“I’ll get the phone,” I said.
I may be going out on a limb here, but we may finally be learning.
Maybe.
