The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (49 page)

FROM GQ

 

I
T SEEMED SOMEHOW SIGNIFICANT
, or maybe particularly unfair, but anyhow a cold, dumb fact: Mathieu Schiller had just paddled out. He hadn't had a chance to catch a single wave. In a case of bad timing within worse, the 32-year-old bodyboarder, a former French champion and the owner of a local surf school, had launched from the beach as one of the biggest sets of the day humped on the horizon. There'd been a month of solid swell (which may have been significant as well), and though the wave heights were finally beginning to decline, it was still a big day at a surf break renowned for its powerful waves, and negotiating the set would take Schiller a little farther out to sea than the normal lineup. He duck-dived under the last wave, feeling the upward surge of power as the lip of the breaking wave threw out over him. He came up, streaming water, scanning the horizon with his characteristic enthusiasm, his ever-present stoke.

Then he burst up out of the sea. The shark stood him up, his legs in its mouth. And while he beat at its snout with the blunt end of his boogie board, another shark leapt from the water and bit into his torso. For one impossible, hopeful instant, while the second shark hung in the air, jaws snapping, the whole thing must've seemed like some kind of terrible hoax, or a collective hallucination. Then the momentum of the leaping shark carried man and beasts back down into the water, into a spreading pool of blood.

This primal scene of large wild animals hunting
us
could've been witnessed by any number of locals and tourists sunbathing on the beach or sipping drinks at the cafés along the promenade, for it was three o'clock on a sunny afternoon, September 19, 2011, the tail end of the surf season at Boucan Canot beach and a busy time at this festive resort town on the west coast of Réunion, a French island about 400 miles east of Madagascar. The lifeguards, surfers themselves and friends of the victim, saw it going down right in front of them. Vincent Rzepecki, a powerfully built 31-year-old, was the first guard to hit the water. He couldn't believe what was happening. He'd grown up with Schiller, had dinner with him the night before last. Now he paddled like mad, hoping for the best.

Of the half-dozen surfers in the water, Yves Delaplin had been closest to the accident. He remembers the fear and the shock, and the inner conflict of fight or flight. From about 20 feet away, he saw the slick of blood and heard Schiller call out from the middle of it, “Shit! Yves!” Time seemed to smear into one long panicky moment of hesitation—the sharks visible as fast-moving blurs, everyone yelling “Get out of the water!”—and then Delaplin, on a bodyboard himself, kicked toward the accident. He was holding Schiller in his arms when Rzepecki arrived on the paddleboard.

“Get out of here!” he ordered Delaplin. “Let me do my job!” And with that he took custody of the victim, shifting the stricken surfer up onto the deck of the paddleboard. Rzepecki saw at once that the situation was hopeless. Schiller's chest was torn open; water washed into the cavity. Still, he was determined to deliver his friend to shore. Then the next set arrived, a series of 12-foot-tall walls of water. Rzepecki heard the roar of whitewater behind him, and then he and Schiller were ripped from the paddleboard, driven down, and slammed hard on the bottom. Amid a blizzard of turbulence, still clutching his friend to his chest, Rzepecki was somehow aware of the sharks in the whitewater with him, gray shapes at the edge of his vision.

He surfaced with Schiller in his arms, gulped air, and the next wave bore down. Now his thoughts flashed back to a previous fatality at a nearby surf break, Ti Boucan. Three months earlier, 31-year-old Eddy Aubert had been killed during a late-afternoon surf session. Not a widely popular figure like Schiller, Aubert had been more of a soul surfer, a free spirit living with his girlfriend up in the hills. Aubert's death had seemed an isolated tragedy rather than part of a pattern. Now the pattern emerged. Same pattern of bites to leg and torso. Maybe the same sharks. Sharks with no fear of men. Rzepecki was suddenly very much afraid and close to panicking. He was hurt and he was drowning. His friend was dead. He had to let him go.

By the time he made it back to shore, the nautical crew from the fire department was already on the beach, equipped with scuba tanks, preparing to take on the recovery of the body. According to Rzepecki and other lifeguards, the divers ran into trouble immediately. Despite employing Shark Shields (devices that emit electronic pulses to repel sharks), they were forced to retreat into caves beneath the spit of rocks that delineates the north end of Boucan Rights, while the sharks, in a highly agitated state, frisked in and out of view in the impact zone. Mathieu Schiller's body was never found.

 

The world-famous left point break at St. Leu is the surf spot of my dreams, and of my nightmares too. In the predawn gloom, I paddle a big red rental longboard through the chilly glass of the tranquil channel.
Sanhn-Loo!
I know the place from boyhood lore,
Endless Summer
fantasies, and surf-magazine pics. French and African. So cool. A long and leisurely paddle out, and then a fast fun ride on a perfectly peeling left-hander. Truly one of the world's great surfing waves.

Normally, on this crowded planet, I'd never get a wave at a famous break like this. I'm not good enough, not aggressive enough. But things are far from normal now on Réunion. The locals here are staying high and dry, staging a kind of informal strike. According to native wisdom, the risk of a shark attack has become intolerable. Since the death of 21-year-old Alexandre Rassiga in July, the third fatality in just over a year, there have been protest marches, a lot of shouting, and a bit of violence, with surfers demanding that the government kill the offending animals. I've arrived in the midst of a turf war between man and shark. It's Saturday morning, August 25, 2012, less than three weeks after yet
another
attack, this one not fatal but nearly so—a mauling right here at St. Leu—and there's nobody out in the water but me and Mickey Rat.

Mickey—Mick Asprey—is a white-haired 64-year-old Australian shaper who owns a shop in town. Ten years ago, he was blinded in one eye in a collision with his surfboard; that and his irascible demeanor remind me of an Aussie Rooster Cogburn. Mostly I'm watching
him
surf. He's catching four waves to my every one, and whenever he disappears behind a glassy wall, I'm left alone in the lineup, wondering if at any moment my on-site reporting, and indeed my life, will be brought to an abrupt and bloody conclusion by a streaking gray blur.

For what it's worth—and I don't suppose it's worth much in terms of safety—I have some experience with sharks. When I was field editor for a scuba-diving magazine, I sought out sharks around the world. In the lagoons of Bora-Bora, I dove with lemon sharks the size of small submarines. In Micronesia I hung out in reef passes, kicking hard against the current to watch feeding blue and whitetip sharks. And once in the Galápagos, I ascended through a veritable tornado of hundreds of circling hammerheads. I was never afraid. Always the sharks seemed oblivious to us divers, as if we existed in separate dimensions. Awesome and silent, gray against the blue, they paraded past like disciplined thespians observing the fourth wall. Yet here in the waters off Réunion, it seems that the sharks have broken through that barrier. They
see
the surfers. They seek them out.

Certainly, on that day three weeks ago here at St. Leu, a shark sought out Fabien Bujon. It was late afternoon, getting close to sundown, a bad time to be in the water, as everyone knew. The first bite took off one of Bujon's feet, and the shark—a bull shark—came at him for more. As Bujon punched at its head, the shark latched onto his hand, severing it above the wrist. He crammed his other hand into its gill slits and the shark backed off. One tough hombre, Bujon somehow managed to make the 100-yard paddle to shore unassisted.

Now the sun finally crests the 10,000-foot-tall volcano in the near distance, turning the sea a glimmering silver. I squint through the translucent water at my gloriously intact feet, wiggling my toes, and recall the warning I received from a St. Leu local. Wild-haired, eyes red-rimmed from a hard night's partying, looking like the dockside prophet Elijah in
Moby-Dick
, the man fixed me with his stare and said, “The sharks, they taste the men, and they learn to eat them.”

If this is hysteria, it's highly contagious.

Surfing Réunion has never been safe—the International Shark Attack File lists 14 attacks on surfers, of which eight were fatalities, between 1989 and 2010—but the island has never experienced anything like the current spike: 10 attacks in the past two years. In February 2011, a shark tore off a surfer's lower leg at Roches Noires, a surf break near the harbor of St. Gilles, the island's busiest resort town. A few months later, a surfer at the same break escaped with just a chomped surfboard. Sharks also pursued a waveski and a canoe, neither incident resulting in injury, though in the case of the canoe, a closed-hull outrigger, the shark came out of the water and bashed in the upper deck—an act of unprecedented aggression, or desperation. These incidents, plus the Aubert and Schiller fatalities, all occurred within or nearby the Marine Reserve, a 12-mile-long protected zone established on the west coast to try to save the threatened coral of the barrier reef.

Was the Reserve itself to blame for the eightfold increase in attacks? Some surfers and fishermen believed that it endangered one group (the surfers) by excluding the other (the fishermen). They felt that
la présence humaine
was needed to restore the old balance, with man at the top. Or were the attacks just a cascade of coincidences? Or were they due to some changes in the sea at large, or in shark numbers or shark behavior? To begin to answer those questions, in October 2011 the government of Réunion island launched CHARC, an ambitious water-safety and shark-monitoring program, the main thrust of which would be the tagging of 80 sharks by 2014. In the meantime, the popular beaches of Boucan Canot and Roches Noires were closed to surfing and swimming for the indefinite future.

As the CHARC scientists pursued their tagging program—catch each shark with rod and reel, immobilize it alongside the boat, surgically implant an acoustic beacon—France's biggest dive-training and certification organization took a more submersive approach: they hired the world-famous Belgian breath-hold diver, Frédéric Buyle, a kind of eco–Van Helsing of the monster-shark world, to swim down and have a look around. A passionate shark advocate, Buyle had won fame swimming with great whites—sans cage—and looking at them eye to eye. Here in Réunion, Buyle was amazed by what he saw, or failed to see. There were no sharks at all, at least none of the smaller reef sharks found everywhere else in the tropical world. Eventually, using baits, Buyle coaxed his wary quarry from the shadows. Moving in slo-mo and hugging close to the bottom, gray against gray, were specimens of
Carcharhinus leucas. Requins bouledogues.
Bull sharks.

“Ils sont timides, très, très timides, mais present,”
Buyle writes in his report of the expedition. They were there all right, but very, very wary. And very bad news.

When Buyle inspected the attack sites at Boucan Canot and Roches Noires, he concluded that both sites are ideal bull-shark habitat: sand beaches fronting ravines holding fetid streams. Roches Noires has the additional attraction of nearby St. Gilles harbor, with its murk of pollution and steady supply of fish carcasses. Buyle asserted he would never enter the water at either place without a dive mask for defense against ambush.

Nevertheless, he believed that closing the beaches had been a mistake. Who would assume the authority to reopen them? Who could decide when they would be “safe” when they never would be? Réunion island didn't have a shark problem so much as it had a people problem, peculiarly French. There was the French faith in the law, on one hand, that for every crime a criminal could be found and punished. On the other hand, just a careless plunge away, was a powerful and unpredictable species—evolving and adapting to conditions made more hostile by humans. The sea had become “a place of mass consumption,” in Buyle's words—and at the same time primo bull-shark habitat. He called the situation “grotesque.”

 

The bull shark is a species with a detestable reputation. Feared worldwide under various names—Zambezi shark, Nicaragua shark—it is perhaps the most intelligent, most adaptable, and least predictable of the large, dangerous sharks. Neither fast nor graceful like the tiger, nor majestic like the white, the bull is a bulky, round-bellied, seemingly sluggish beast, though capable of quick bursts of speed in attack. Mature females, larger than the males, attain a maximum length of about 11 feet and can weigh more than 500 pounds. Small eyes hint at the relative unimportance of sight in their hunt for prey, which they are known to pursue in coordinated attacks, often in turbid, low-visibility conditions. Through an adaptation called osmoregulation, their versatile kidneys allow them to move freely between salt water and fresh water, to enter river mouths and prowl miles upstream. On Réunion, with its steep volcanic slopes scoured by deep ravines, it had long been folk wisdom to stay out of the water after heavy rains, when fresh water laden with silt and debris sent long brown plumes into the sea. Above all, bull sharks are attracted to that turbidity, to murky waters for the cloak of invisibility. That's why bulls are rarely glimpsed until the moment of impact.

The most common explanation for why sharks attack surfers is the “mistaken identity” theory: sharks on the hunt for seals, sea lions, and turtles look up and see the silhouettes of surfers on their boards, mistake them for their natural prey, and decide to investigate with a bump or a bite. The theory helps explain both why some surfers are targeted and why so many survive their encounters with much larger, superbly evolved killing machines. As Mick Asprey points out, “We're not on the menu, mate!”