I often get asked about the shark tooth necklace I wear. Some people just assume it’s a souvenir from some tropical island, but others, knowing that I’m a wilderness guide and am into scuba diving, believe that there must be a story attached to it. And there is.
I’ve dove all over the world - from Cuba, Jamaica, and a couple other Caribbean locales, to Cozumel, the Maldives, even the Great Barrier Reef (for a shark feed!). But nothing I do will ever top my experience in the waters of the Galapagos Islands. And I wasn’t even scuba diving!
Back in the winter of '89 I went on a vacation with my parents and my brother to Ecuador. We spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s exploring the native villages and mountain passes surrounding Quito. If you’re ever looking for an interesting place to go at Christmas, head to Quito. The Indian villages are a great place to check out, and you can get some amazing hand made artefacts if you’re willing to haggle a bit. Even though I can’t speak more than a few words of Spanish, and the natives speak only broken English at best, there wasn’t too much problem being understood. It’s amazing how much you can convey with hand gestures.
As interesting as all this was however, the highlight of the trip was the second week. We flew out to the Galapagos Islands and boarded a small boat for a 7 day cruise around the various isolated islands. There was a naturalist on board who would lead us on our daily hikes on the islands. She was an excellent guide - very knowledgeable and she had the ability to convey the wonder of the place to us. She was also the only fully bilingual person on the boat. The rest of the crew - the captain, the cook, and the 2 deck boys, only spoke Spanish. Each night, while we slept, the boat would sail to the next island, arriving just before dawn. We would awake to a new island and a new host of exotic creatures.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Galapagos Islands, they are a biologist’s dream. Made famous by Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle, the Galapagos sit right on the equator, off the coast of Ecuador. Since the islands are so far offshore and also scattered from each other, evolution was able to take a different turn on each. Due to the uniqueness of the area, the inhospitable landscape, and the distance, humans have only established outposts on a couple of the islands. The Ecuadorian government is doing its best to ensure that we don’t encroach too much on this fragile region.
Anyways, back to my story. One night our guide told us that the 2 deck boys, Jose and Manuel, were going to take the little rubber dinghy out to go skin diving for lobsters. Well, both my brother and I were intrigued by the idea and asked if we could come along. So the 4 of us jumped into the dinghy and off we roared. Or so we tried. This dinghy looked like a remnant of some old shipwreck - a small rubber raft. And the outboard motor was no better. After 15 minutes of tweaking and cajoling it finally sputtered to life. Off we, err, limped - straight into the night.
One of the really cool things about this area is the florescent algae in the water. If anything moved vigorously in it, like a propeller, it glowed. As we rounded the corner of the island (after only stalling the motor twice) we lost all signs of man. We were hundreds of kilometres from the nearest settlement, and our boat on the far side of the island was the nearest contact we had to people. We were definitely alone. Nothing but the countless stars, and the eerie glow in the water following us. As we approached some cliffs, the motor died. Now there were no sounds save the smashing of the waves against the cliff. Not a good spot to be stranded.
We looked over to see Jose donning his skin diving gear. Since we only had 2 underwater flashlights, only 2 people could go in at once. Neither my brother nor I was inclined to get into the water, not with that pounding surf and cliff face only a few dozen metres away. I figured we were in enough trouble as it was if that temperamental motor didn’t start - I certainly didn’t want to add the chance of being swept against the cliff by a wave. But that didn’t seem to faze the other 2 guys. Over goes Jose, and we watched his light darting back and forth below the ocean. Up he comes now with a Chinese Lobster (a lobster with no front pincers). Into the bottom of the dinghy, crawling amongst our feet! Back down he goes. After a while our dinghy drifted past the cliffs (thankfully!) and into some calmer waters. So I decide it’s safe for a gringo to jump in. After I strap on my mask and fins, Manuel gives me a sock to wear over my hand. The Chinese Lobsters don’t have pincers, but they still have sharp spines on their backs. The idea is that you dive down, spot a lobster moving about in your light beam, and grab him from the back. All before you run out of breath. I soon got the hang of it and before I knew it I had caught 4 or 5 of them. By this time though Jose had been in the water for quite a while and was starting to get cold, so he got out.
Now my brother could join me in the water. While he was strapping on his gear, I hung by one hand from the dinghy and floated up and down with the surf. The big difference for me between skin diving and scuba diving is that I feel more alien as a skin diver. I can’t escape my connection to the other world, the air. Scuba diving allows me to feel more natural in the underwater world, unconstrained by thoughts of breathing. Skin diving, while rewarding in its own way, makes sure you never forget that you are an intruder into this realm. The demands that your lungs make are constant reminders that you are a mere interloper in this place.
(Hold down the left button of your mouse to move around in this 360° Quicktime photo)
While I was waiting for Neil to get into his fins, I decided to see if I could get the algae to glow around me. So I turned off my flashlight and started shaking it violently back and forth, trying to stir up the waters enough to make an aura around myself. With some effort I was successful. And quite pleased with myself - it's not everybody who can say that they really do have a halo around them!
All of a sudden I noticed something strange. In the distance I could see a light. Now that may not seem so weird on its own, but remember where I was - out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. There wasn't another human settlement for over a day's travel. And if it was a boat I should be able to hear it. Since water is denser than air, sound travels much better below the surface. So I should be able to hear the sounds of a motor throbbing as it got closer. But I couldn't hear a thing, other than my breath ringing hollowly in my snorkel, and the never ending pound of the surf. But no motor. Meanwhile, as I'm thinking all this, the light is getting bigger and bigger. Now it's a full sized circle, growing ever larger in size. I was wracking my brains, trying to figure out just what the hell this light was. It wasn't another boat, and it couldn't be the light from some distant town, so what was it? Finally, curiosity won out over my powers of deduction and I switched on my flashlight. And guess what I saw?
A bloody huge shark! Coming straight at me! He must have been at least five metres long, and moving fast. So fast in fact, that it was its huge gaping jaws that were glowing - the florescent algae was glowing around his snout! I didn't need to think about my next move - with a warning cry of "Holy shit, shark!" , and one swift kick, I was over the edge of the boat. And straight into the bottom, with all the crawling lobsters. The spectacle of this, combined with my yell which, muffled as it was through my snorkel, sounded more like "smarrrrrk", had my three companions in hysterics. The sight of me lying at the bottom of the dinghy, snorkel still in my mouth, fending off lobsters, was more than they could stand. It was a good five minutes before they had stopped laughing so hard that they could actually hear what I was saying. When I finally got them to understand what had happened, Neil, very sympathetically asked if I "got scared by a little fishy"? This had them all rolling around with laughter again. I hate being the butt of jokes, so this really got by fur up. But what could I do? So as I start taking off my gear, still fuming about how embarrassing this was, I was surprised to hear everyone suddenly go quiet, and to see their eyes grow wide. I looked to see what they were staring at. It was my left flipper - it was missing about 10cm off the bottom. And caught in the rubber was a single tooth. The tooth I now wear.
Needless to say, we all decided that we'd caught enough lobster that night!
