Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies...

The Discovery Channel Shark Week 20th Anniversary box set review, continued

AIR JAWS

If I were five years old again, and we'd had DVD players then, this show would be on a constant loop.

Did I ever tell you about my freakout over Jaws when I was a little kid? I probably did, but I will repeat it here anyway. I don't have total recall of my younger years, but I will remember this forever.

My Dad took me to see Jaws at the theater when I was a kid. I was either five, or had just turned six, when we saw it. I remember wanting to watch it again, right then, but we didn't. I wasn't scared at the time, I was too busy collecting up the pieces of my five (or six) year old mind, which had been blown into tiny pieces.

During the Summers I would help the old man on the shrimp boat (a small boat we used to shrimp in the Intracoastal Waterway, we never had a big enough boat to shrimp the ocean). At that age my job was mostly just sitting there watching, or culling out the shrimp from the net haul as we trawled for a second load. I didn't mess with letting out the doors, or pulling in the net, until I was a bit older.

So, after seeing Jaws that weekend, my Dad took me on our usual weekday shrimping expedition. We'd get up around 4:30 in the morning, and drive down to the Wildlife boat ramp down by the Snow's Cut Bridge (the ramp is on the opposite side of the waterway, further down - that's just a pic of the bridge itself). The only other people awake at this time were drunks swerving home from the beach, and other shrimpers. There was usually a small line waiting to unload at the ramp (which was really just poured concrete which had broken into a hundred pieces over the years). Most of these guys were black dudes in their late 60s or older, fishing and shrimping to stock up their freezers or to ice down and sell out of the backs of their ancient trucks (you can't do this anymore without a license).

I started getting a little nervous, remembering the dock scene in the movie, the one with the ham on the chain, and how the shark had just pulled the whole end of the pier into the water, and how when you finally saw the whole shark he was much bigger than the boat we were getting ready to put in the water, and how he had demolished the Orca just by launching into it.


I asked the old man if there were any sharks out here, and he laughed and said Yeah, maybe a few sand sharks. In my little mind a sand shark was something that could not only swim, but also tunnel through the sand and take a chunk out of you right on the beach.

He let the boat off the trailer and looped the line to a post, leaving me to stand on the dock and watch over it as he parked the truck. I remember looking out nervously over at the tall water grass and wondering what was hiding in there, and watching the old black guys crank up their outboard motors, waiting for that huge mouth to launch out of the water and bite their boats in half. It always smelled of gasoline and cigars and rotting fish and old men on the boat dock in those still dark Summer mornings before dawn, I can close my eyes right now and the smell will come back to me.

The old man came back and got into the water, leading the boat away from the dock and out of the shallows so he could jump inside and crank the motor. He was up to his chest when I saw it.

A fin, as wide as the one which sliced through the water in Jaws. It was just sitting there, waiting for us to come into range.

I completely lost it. I jumped up and started pointing and screaming and crying for my Dad to get back in the boat, he's coming to get you, he will eat us all, it's the shark, the shark , THE shark that that dog and ate Quint, he's back. I swear, I could see his huge body under the water, that tail slowly waving back and forth as he hovered in place, just biding time until the opportunity to spring forward arose.

All the people on the dock stopped what they were doing and started watching me.

My Dad asked me what the hell was the matter with me, and I screamed even louder because he was wasting time instead of getting in the boat.

He shook his head and moved towards the fin. He moved towards the fin. I nearly sh!t myself from all the screaming.

He grabbed the fin. Grabbed. The. Fin.

And pulled it out of the water. Just a piece of wood, that's all.

I was too young to feel like an idiot (those feelings would begin to occur frequently a few years down the road), but I knew I wanted to go home. NOW.

I had to listen to him curse a blue streak while he loaded the boat back onto the trailer, and all the way back across the bridge, and all the way back home, and I think I might have started to feel like maybe the shark eating him wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world.

***

So, if I were five again, the section of the DVD of this show would be worn out, but I would also never get into another boat again, ever. Because these sharks can fly.

This is one ton, moving at about 20 mph, launching from the ocean

There's a small island off the coast of South Africa, called "Seal Island." It is populated with, you guessed it, seals. The waters surrounding the island are populated with Great White Sharks. It's the only area in the world with this much concentrated Great White activity. The ferocity of the attacks on the seals is breathtaking. We're talking a ton or more of teeth and flesh launching out of the water, sometimes several feet into the air, sometimes with enough force to flip the shark end over end.

This is Dr. Rocky Strong, and that's a pulp fiction name if I ever heard one. Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, The Avenger, Dr. Rocky Strong. See, fits right in.

Dr. Strong and his team study Great Whites, and they have come to the island to find out why the sharks launch from the water when they attack, and also record their behavioral patterns. They are all inside a boat not much bigger than the sharks themselves. At one point in the program Dr. Strong says that if one of the sharks breaching the water were to land on the boat, the force of the strike would surely sink it, and they'd all be paddling around in the most dangerous place in the world for swimming.

This is a chart of recorded attacks off the coast of Seal Island. The heaviest concentration falls into what they call the Ring of Death.

One of the people on board says he's seen around 400 successful breech attacks in a four year period, with around that many unsuccessful ones. Sometimes the sharks miss:

You root for these little guys, even though what's happening is just circle of life and all that bullsh!t. These seals really work their asses off to get away from the sharks, doing backflips out of the water, juking and jiving and circling the shark and I was on the edge of the couch the whole time. One of the crew said these gruesome dances can last five minutes or more, and if the seal can last that long he or she usually makes it to shore safely.

This is what happens to a Great White when it is struck on the nose. It loses coordination, it's jaws reflexively fall open, and it veers off. Apparently the focal point of all the shark's internal sensors is in the nose area, and striking a blow there makes all those signals go haywire.

Dr. Strong and his crew put together a dummy seal and trolled it behind the boat, performing some tests on attack angles and such. I think they just wanted to take some wicked cool pictures:

They made another fake seal, this one with a camera inside. Another camera would be dropped deeper into the water, and run parallel to the Sealcam, so that they could gauge the speed and angle of attack from start to finish.



The Sealcam. Dr. Rocky Strong says that it is made of material that won't harm the shark, to which I thought Who gives a f*ck if the shark gets hurt or not? The sharks don't give a f*ck if the seals get hurt; in fact, that is their sole intention. Shark gets a tummy ache because he ate some fake Sealcam? Tough sh!t, shark.

The real seals are fascinated by the underwater camera:

See how cute they are? I spared you from screen captures of seals that the sharks had mortally wounded flopping around in the water, or when the crew had to pull a wounded seal into the boat because it was using the boat as cover and the shark might have attacked too close to the boat and damaged the hull.

They recorded attacks on the Sealcam, and found out that the shark attacks at an almost vertical angle, upwards of 20 mph. That's like a car with teeth hitting you and biting down at the same time. Most of the seals die instantly, but some roll around in the water, bleeding out, until the shark turns around for the mercy kill.

Then the crew found a dead whale near the African coast, which they drug out to the Ring of Death near seal island. Groups of Great Whites gorged themselves on rotting whale meat and blubber, reaching a euphoric state as they filled their guts. At which point they became almost stoned in a way, bumping into the boat, rolling around aimlessly. Dr. Strong went into the shark cage, because they were showing all the signs of presenting themselves for mating, and he realized a Shark Orgy was about to go down:



I am not 100% sure, but I believe this is a Great White Shark's willy johnson

The next morning, only a small section of the whale was left in the water. Dr. Rocky Strong climbed out onto the whale's decomposing, slippery carcass to take some close-up shots of the sharks:








Dr. Rocky Strong: Fearless Explorer, or Moron? You decide.


After the sharks had finished shoving whale down their necks, Strong knew that they would have a window of opportunity to explore the bottom of the area, in a specially made single-man propelled shark cage:



He found countless seal bones along the bottom, and mapped out the area so that they would have a better idea of why this was such an ideal place for breaching shark attacks. They found several deep channels surrounding the island, perfect spots for the sharks to gain the momentum needed for the spectacular aerial assaults.

Great Whites are swift, maneuverable, and voracious in their appetite. The island and the waters around it form a perfect capsule picture of the food chain, and gave much insight into the behavior of Great Whites. I still think of them as the sharks that ate the little Kintner boy, but after seeing that shark's junk they aren't as mysterious to me.

***

And this, this is why I don't know about the blogging deal anymore. I spent a lot of time capturing stills, writing and assembling this, and for what? I mean, really, for what? Other than the same four or five people that always read my stuff (and thank you for that, really, I don't mean to downplay what that means to me), who's going to see it? No one. Same thing if I were to travel around taking pictures or video, or recording audio, and writing about what I saw. It isn't a case of me having only been back at it for a couple of months. I know in my heart that this situation will be the same a year from now. The internet is flooded, like the back half of the destroyed Orca. There's no room for me in it anymore, and I don't have a compressed air tank to shoot and make a big enough bang for people to notice.