Up Close on Purpose : Few Divers Knowingly Drop Into the Middle of a Shark Feeding Frenzy, Let Alone Stir One Up. : But for This Video Crew, That Was the Whole Idea

“This,” Jack McKenney said, “is your shark club.” It was a broom handle with a nail in one end and I was supposed to use it underwater, while scuba diving, to whap the menacing sharks we hoped to attract and thus convince them, McKenney explained, that we weren’t to be considered appetizers. I said that a broom handle seemed somewhat fragile for the task at hand.

“Well,” McKenney said reasonably, “you won’t have to use it if you don’t get out of the cage.”

We were standing on the stern of a dive boat called the Atlantis, which was drifting in the channel between San Pedro Harbor and Catalina, near a place called 14 Mile Bank. The water was a glassy blue, under blue skies on a nearly windless day. Half a mile in the distance, dense clouds of sea birds were whirling and diving above several city blocks’ worth of ocean that seemed to be in full boil. Tony Aquino, the captain of the Atlantis, figured that bait fish were being driven to the surface by marauding sharks. I was looking at a couple of acres or so of pure terror.

The shark cage sat on the deck, tied to a boom that would lower it 10 feet into the water. I had always supposed that such a cage would be constructed of heavy metal, with wrist-thick prison-type bars. The contraption in question, however, was constructed, for the most part, from wire, the kind used as bedsprings in the cots you find in mountain cabins.

“How many sharks will we get?” I asked McKenney.

“Hard to tell,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be skunked. If we’re lucky, we could have as many as 20.”

“Oh, boy,” I said.

For a decade I’ve been diving and writing for various scuba magazines and have found myself in the water with dozens of sharks--from tiger sharks on the Great Barrier Reef, hammerheads off Central America, Caribbean nurse sharks, black-tip and white-tip reef sharks, carpet sharks, sand sharks and lemon sharks--but never intentionally. They simply appeared, unwanted, like ants at a picnic. The idea of purposely getting into the water with a dozen or so man-eaters seemed silly, suicidal, dumb as rocks.

Still, Jack McKenney had asked me to help make a documentary on shark diving, and McKenney knows what he’s doing. It was he, doubling for Nick Nolte, who made a free ascent through that shark feeding frenzy in “The Deep.” No longtime diver would pass up an opportunity to dive with him, just as no pilot would turn down an invitation to fly with Chuck Yeager.

We had been adrift for a little less than an hour and hadn’t seen any sharks yet. We were chumming for them, sending out little invitations: Come to the feeding frenzy. From the 400 pounds of foot-long frozen mackerel that sat on the deck, McKenney and his son, John, had packaged 15 pounds into two plastic-mesh boxes designed to carry milk cartons. These were wired open end to open end and dropped over the side on a rope, so that the contraption was half in the water. The rocking of the boat macerated the defrosting fish, and I could see oil and blood and bits of mackerel floating away in a snaking line. A cruising shark that crossed the chum line would turn and follow it to the boat.

I was going through a final check of my dive gear when Aquino mentioned--rather cavalierly, I thought--that “we got one.” It was a six-foot-long blue shark, and it had rolled over onto its back and was chewing, halfheartedly, on the milk boxes. It rolled again and one flat black eye looked up at the faces peering at it over the side of the boat. The shark turned again, like a jet fighter doing a barrel roll, and disappeared under the boat.

In the distance, about 100 yards off, I could see another fin, gliding along the path of chum toward the boat. Beyond it was a third, coming in our direction along the same meandering path. It was early in the morning, and the sun was low in the sky so that the water seemed cobalt blue. But the wake behind the shark fins was an odd emerald color that glittered on the surface of the glassy sea. There was a muffled thump as the first shark hit the chum box a second time.

Jack McKenney said, “Let’s get the cage in the water and go diving.”

Canadian-born Jack McKenney, who lives in Silver Lake, is a legend in the diving industry. A film maker, photographer and adventurer, he has filmed whale sharks and ridden manta rays in the Sea of Cortez; he has made more dives on the Andrea Doria than any other person. Hollywood has paid him to learn a lot about different kinds of sharks. In addition to being the stunt double in “The Deep,” he did the stunt work for “Shark’s Treasure” and filmed some of the underwater sequences in both movies.

McKenney, 47, and his 26-year-old son, John, were making this documentary as their first video production for the home market, which they hope to reach through advertising in scuba magazines. The production would show that a shark dive in the midst of a feeding frenzy can be “a safe and enjoyable” experience--when done properly.

On hand to coordinate the dives were Budd Riker and Susan Speck, co-owners of Divers West, a dive shop in Pasadena. The people who were going to experience “safe and enjoyable” diving were novice shark divers: Paul Bahn, a musician; Laine (Buck) Scheliga, a bartender, and Pam Jordan, a flight attendant. Also on hand would be Bonnie Cardone, the executive editor of Skin Diver Magazine--it would be her second planned shark dive--and Chip Matheson, a stunt-man trainee, who’s appeared on “Riptide.” Matheson has been diving with sharks for seven years.

McKenney had also invited Marty Snyderman, an underwater photographer from San Diego, to appear in the video. About 10 years ago, it occurred to Snyderman that people weren’t paying proper attention to his photos of corals and “scenic” fish, of sponges and nudibranchs in blazing color. It was the time of “Jaws,” and the public was interested in sharks, Snyderman says, “so I became good at shark diving and shark photography. And when people know that, somehow they seem to find my other photos infinitely more interesting and beautiful.”

Since Snyderman spends so much time in the water with sharks--shooting stills and filming television documentaries--he has also seen fit to spend $5,200 on a customized Kevlar-and-chain-mail shark suit. In this suit, he told me, he has been “nipped” by sharks “literally hundreds of times.” McKenney hoped to get some good footage of sharks nibbling away at Snyderman.

The real stars of McKenney’s video promised to be the sharks themselves. There are 350 or more species of sharks--research is still being done on the matter--and not all of them are dangerous to man. In Australia, for instance, I have been diving with a small, sleek, pretty little fish known as an epaulette shark because of the white-rimmed spots it carries above its pectoral fins. It is a timid beast, and it flees the approaching diver in what appears to be a frantic subaquatic panic. Like the ostrich, the epaulette shark considers itself hidden if it can’t see you and can often be found with its head wedged into some small coral cave while the rest of its body is completely and ludicrously visible. This shark, incidentally, has no teeth, and Australian divers refer to it as a gummie. Dangerous sharks, man-eaters such as tigers and great whites, are called munchies.

Some fishermen and boating enthusiasts believe that blues are not munchies, that they are virtually harmless. But there are documented cases of blues attacking human beings. Don Wilkie, the director of the Aquarium-Museum at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, says flatly that “Blues are potentially dangerous, but it is extremely unusual for them to be involved in an unprovoked attack.” Setting out a chum line, Wilkie said, “is a clear provocation.”

Blues--fast, slim-bodied sharks with pointed snouts and saw-edged teeth--are common in the deep waters between Los Angeles and Catalina. They can grow to 12 feet in length and often follow boats, feeding off discarded garbage. Sometimes called blue whalers, these sharks are noted for the speed with which they materialize around slaughtered whales and for their piranha-like feeding frenzies.

“If there’s only six or seven down there,” McKenney had told me, “it’ll be pretty calm. If we get 20 or more, they can get a little aggressive. I suppose it’s competition: When there’s a lot of them, they have to move fast to get their share. Also, when there’s more than two or three, it’s hard to keep track of them. They can come up behind you and nip you.”

Which, I imagined, would be like getting “nipped” by a Bengal tiger, only underwater.

We had 50 feet of underwater visibility and everything down and up and all around was blue, including the sharks milling around us. Their bodies were brighter than the seawater, and their bellies were a contrasting white. The cage was positioned 10 feet below the chum bucket. Little white bits of mackerel were dropping down through the bedsprings. The divers brushed the stuff off their shoulders, like dandruff. I could see five blue sharks outside the cage, swooping lazily through the water like eagles soaring over the prairie.

Just getting into the shark cage had been an adventure. You don’t get to go down with it on the boom. Bedsprings won’t hold the weight of several divers. No, you have to swim to it.

“Go now,” Budd Riker had told me, as I sat with my legs just out of the water. The command meant that there weren’t any sharks in my immediate area, and I reluctantly slipped into the water beside the chum bucket. In a shark dive, you don’t want to roll or jump off the boat because the bubbles you create obscure the view for 10 or 15 seconds, during which time you could get “nipped.” Not incidentally, the bubbles also attract curious sharks.

So I edged into the sea, broom handle in hand, and rocketed through the blue water and blue sharks to the open cage door in 10 seconds flat. Bahn and Scheliga were already in there. Cardone hovered just above the door, taking photos. Above, the boat was rocking in some gentle swells that had just come up, and the cage, which hung from the boom by a 10-foot line, echoed that rocking. I kept banging my head or knees on the wire, and the temptation to hold on to the side of the cage was great. But that meant that part of my hand would be outside, where the sharks were, and McKenney had warned us that holding on in this manner was “a good way to get nipped.”

The five sharks were milling around, aimlessly cutting sine curves in the sea. Occasionally, one would swim up to the chum bucket and nudge it with its snout. Then, with a figurative shrug of the shoulders, it would drop down to join the other sharks. They seemed curious and a little confused. Above, along the chum line, I could see another shark accepting our invitation. The new one was big, 10 feet long at a guess, and it was moving purposefully toward the chum bucket, which it hit without hesitation. Nothing there but a mouthful of mackerel-flavored plastic. It dropped down to join the other sharks, and they all made several passes just outside the cage door.

It came at us then, this new shark just off the chum line, but it was swimming slower now, and moving toward the cage at an oblique angle. I revised my estimate: Up close, this shark seemed to be a good 12 feet long. It coasted slowly by the cage, apparently staring off into the distance and not interested in us at all, but it passed within inches of the wire and I could see its near eye--perfectly round and flat black with a small circle of white around the pupil--and that eye swiveled back as the shark passed.

I’ve done pretty much the same thing: You’re walking along a city street and see a cop handcuffing some guy who’s shouting obscenities. A crowd of street folk has gathered, and you walk right on by, staring straight ahead but glancing surreptitiously at the scene out of the corner of your eye. You’re curious, but you sure don’t want to get involved in any trouble.

That was something of the message I got from the sharks cruising by the cage: If you’re weak and bleeding and helpless, they seemed to be saying, we’d be happy to rip you to shreds. But, hey, we just came for breakfast. We don’t want trouble.

In two days I logged more than seven hours in the water with sharks. We took goodie bags full of mackerel down with us and hand-fed the sharks through the pillbox-slit windows in the cage as they cruised by. (Hold the fish by the tail and shake it outside the cage. Keep your hand inside, of course.) Sharks do not roll over onto their backs when feeding, as one myth has it. They’ll eat in any attitude.

As the shark’s mouth opens, a kind of lower eyelid--a white, nictitating membrane--covers the eye so that, at the moment of munch, the animal is effectively blind. This protects the shark’s eyes from its prey. Several times, out of curiosity, I offered the fish, then yanked it away while the shark was blind. Nyah, nyah, nyah. After a while I began feeling a little guilt about teasing the man-eaters. They had these large, sadly surprised-looking eyes that never blinked--except at the moment of the kill.

On my second dive, I began to find the cage confining and decided to go outside where Jack and John McKenney and Snyderman were shooting. I had had a vision of sharks as swift predators, torpedoes rocketing in for the kill, and that’s the way they came up the chum line. But once they hit the chum box and began milling around, you could track them as they came toward you, as they made their studied, nonchalant passes.

Forty yards in the distance, Jack McKenney was shooting a sequence in which John swam alongside a six-foot shark and pushed it around with a broom handle. The shark seemed mildly annoyed, put on a slight burst of speed and came gliding in my direction. I had a full 10 seconds to get my own broom handle in position and when the shark was within a foot of me, I whapped it a good one on the snout. Its body twisted away from me--a snakelike gesture of avoidance--and the shark dove into the cobalt blue at a gentle angle.

I turned and saw another shark approaching from the rear and I beaned it as it made a pass. It seemed clear that the mildest show of aggression put these fellows off their feed. The broom handle was handy when a shark was coming at you with its mouth open and eyes closed, but you could also send them skittering off into the distance with a casual back-handed gesture, the sort of motion you’d use to shoo a pigeon off a picnic table in the park.

Conversely, the sharks hit anything that didn’t move. In general, a diver’s arms and legs are moving, but he tends to be motionless from the shoulders up and that is where he is likely to be hit: right in the back of the head.

Snyderman, in his chain-mail shark suit, was shooting stills of the divers in the cage, who were watching half a dozen sharks swoop by. He was kicking slightly, but his upper body was motionless and the camera was steady. A shark came up behind him: the mouth opened, revealing saw-edged teeth, and the eyes closed. The shark hit Snyderman in the upper left arm. He elbowed it in the snout, the shark swam away, and Snyderman, busy shooting pictures, never even looked at it. Getting nipped was only an annoyance. Snyderman’s shark suit cost more than my car and I wanted one.

Jack McKenney didn’t have a shark suit, so either Matheson or John McKenney swam above him as safety divers, swinging their shark clubs over his motionless upper body while he taped. Jack McKenney wanted to get lots of sharks in the same frame, and he tended to hang around the chum line, where they were the most dangerous. On the second day, late in the afternoon when the night-feeding blues were getting aggressive, one came up from below and hit him in the finger. He was not wearing gloves, since he had to constantly adjust focus, and the bite, truth to tell, had been really just an experimental nip. The wound was a small, jagged tear, less than an inch long: the sort of thing that might happen to you if you brushed your hand over some barbed wire. A small bit of blood rose from the cut and floated toward the surface. In this blue water, surprisingly, the blood looked green. The sight of it did not send the sharks into a feeding frenzy. Everything was as it was before, and McKenney kept on shooting.

The little nipping incidents I saw tended to make me extremely alert when I chose to be out of the cage. It wasn’t that you had to watch just behind you: The sharks could come at you from every point of a sphere. You lost them at about 50 feet, and they would circle around and come at you from another angle. When there were more than three around, you could never keep track of them all. Cardone told me that she got a picture of me concentrating on a shark that was coming at my chest. “Did you know there was another one just behind your head?” she asked.

“Of course,” I lied.

After that, whenever I was out of the cage and there were no sharks in sight, I swung the broom handle over my head, just in case.

It took a tremendous amount of concentration to swim around outside the cage, and I found that 15 minutes at a crack was about all I could take before a kind of numbing fatigue sent me shooting back to the safety of the bedsprings. The two McKenneys, Snyderman and Matheson never got in the cage for the 10 underwater hours it took to shoot the documentary. They were pros and their discipline amazed me.

Snyderman and I were sitting in the galley, drinking coffee and discussing what’s likely to be the most talked-about sequence in McKenney’s video. Jack McKenney hadbeen shooting while Snyderman hand-fed several large sharks. As one six-footer rose to the bait, it closed its eyes and Snyderman thrust his whole forearm in its mouth. The shark ragged at his arm for a full 60 seconds. Snyderman was jerking the man-eater around in the way you’d play with a dog.

“What about the jaw pressure?” I asked. “Doesn’t it bruise you?”

Snyderman showed me his arm. There was no bruise, only a slight redness. “They calculate jaw pressure from the point of one tooth,” he said, “but I had my whole arm in the mouth, and that spread the pressure out. And then the chain mail tends to distribute the pressure over a larger area.”

The Neptunic shark suit is made by Neptunic Inc., a San Diego company headed up by the inventor of the suit, Jeremiah Sullivan. The under structure of the suit is made of laminated Kevlar, a material often used in bullet-proof vests. The chain mail forms the outer layer. It is made of about 400,000 stainless steel rings and weighs about 20 pounds.

“I put my arm in a shark’s mouththe first day I had the suit,” Snyderman told me. “I needed to know if it would work.”

“You’re right-handed?”

“Yeah.”

“You put your left arm in the shark’s mouth, then?”

“Well, I didn’t know if it would really work.”

“What does it feel like?” I asked.

Snyderman grabbed my forearm and squeezed, careful not to dig his fingernails into my flesh. I calculated that he was squeezing at about three-quarters of his full strength. “It feels like that,” he said.

Out on the deck, John McKenney shouted, “Hey, shark wranglers, we got four or five more blues coming up the chum line.”

We were, all of us, suited up in less than 10 minutes: eight fools in silly-looking rubber suits, one fool in a silly-looking chain-mail suit, each of us ridiculously eager to get in the water and battle man-eating sharks with broom handles. An outsider, someone who hadn’t been down there with us, would have to think we were brave as hell. Or dumb as rocks.