UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL : Protected by an Aluminum Cage, Divers Get an Unforgettable Picture of Sharks

After baiting and bloodying the ocean surrounding his 32-foot boat, Steve Thorne singled out one individual to prepare to jump in. That person was Ron Verderame, who was hoping to come face to face with a group of sharks.

Thorne had already packed dead mackerel into a porous milk crate, attached it to the boat with a rope and had tossed it over the rail, and was ladling blood in liberal doses over the side. His objective: To spread an oily chum slick that would attract sharks to his boat.

As for Verderame, he paid $250 for the chance to jump into the water with the sharks. Actually he paid to view the sharks--blues and makos--from inside Thorne’s 8 1/2-foot high aluminum cage, which was positioned 15 feet off the boat’s stern. “You don’t usually get a chance to see sharks while you’re diving,” Verderame said.

After an hour or so, a small mako shark moved in on the scent. It scurried about just beneath the surface, easily visible to Thorne and his passengers, each of whom stood up and stared over the side, their adrenaline level almost noticeably on the rise.

Torpedo-shaped, this power-pack of a shark gave the crate a few toothy sneers and disappeared, apparently disinterested, possibly full.

Soon two larger sharks appeared. Slender, these blue sharks moved about almost effortlessly, their backsides a radiant blue, their bodies sleek.

“Most people who dive never get to see blue sharks,” Thorne said. “They’re hardly ever close to shore. It’s the prettiest shark you’ll ever see.

“It’s time,” Thorne told Verderame, who was garbed in scuba gear and standing quietly on the swim step of the boat, as if he was being forced to walk the plank. Being the experienced diver he says he is, Verderame claimed to be “not a bit nervous.”

Meanwhile, Thorne’s on-board shark expert Len Tillim--who has worked with biologists and photographed sharks for the last four years--and his girlfriend, P.J. Jarzombek, quietly plopped in. It was their job to escort Thorne’s passengers 15 feet to the cage, a job they seemed to enjoy. “They’re beautiful creatures,” Jarzombek said of the blue sharks.

The pair would remain in the water outside the cage for almost the entire trip, spending four hours dangling precariously in the middle of the San Pedro Channel, above an ocean floor that lay 1,000 feet below.

Armed only with sawed-off ski poles, the two would guide Thorne’s passengers--when it was their turn--to the one-man cage, and try to keep the sharks in the vicinity by enticing them with whole mackerel.

“You try not to expose your back,” Tillim pointed out as the key to avoid being bitten.

Verderame followed, only his entrance was anything but calm. Once in the water, the Hermosa Beach resident dashed to the cage and shut its door in what seemed to be no more than a few seconds.

Once safely inside, however, he became almost tranquil. He watched and shot pictures--the primary reason he and Thorne’s other three passengers were here. Small blue sharks lumbered about outside the cage, but it was anything but spectacular. “One came to within a few feet away,” Verderame said. “He swam behind the cage but looked kind of nervous and disappeared.”

More blood and sliced mackerel was slopped over the side. Thorne was determined to “do better than this.” Soon, after each of his passengers had at least one turn in the cage, bigger sharks--between 7 and 10 feet--appeared off the stern, slowly swimming toward the cage, cautiously keeping their distance.

Tillim, with a dead mackerel in his hand, swam toward the sharks in hopes of luring them closer to the cage. Jarzombek watched his back--they used a circular swimming pattern to remain in each other’s view.

As the sharks increased in number they seemed to be more brave, biting the boat’s propeller, occasionally brushing against Tillim and Jarzombek, who used their aluminum “shark billys” and hands to push them away. “They’re really all right unless you grab their tails,” Jarzombek said. “Then they go nuts.”

Thorne’s four passengers were more relaxed now and each looked forward to his next turn in the cage, where numerous sharks were providing a picture-taking opportunity of a lifetime. Some of the divers reached out and touched the sharks as they swam by, at times bumping and biting the cage, seemingly dumbfounded by the sight of the bubbling scuba divers, encaged and out of reach.

By day’s end, all four of Thorne’s passengers were satisfied at having experienced what most other divers never have, and each had an ample number of photographs to prove their latest encounter.

“The ordinary diver usually doesn’t get the chance to get this close to a shark,” explained Jim Annin, a long-time scuba diver and first-time shark viewer from La Canada. “I’ve always had an interest in marine life and wanted to view a shark from up close.”

Tillim and Jarzombek, meanwhile, had survived another day of work, though Jarzombek emerged minus her shark-stick, which was swallowed by one of the larger sharks after she dropped it.

Thorne, 21, has been chartering dive trips aboard The Last Bite, a San Pedro-based fully equipped sportfisher, for three years and has recently added shark trips for certified divers because he thinks it’s a novel idea--and thus he hopes a profitable one.

Also, he said, “It helps the divers because they’ll know how to act if and when they do come across one in the open--they won’t panic.”

Said Tillim: “It gives the average diver a chance to experience sharks in a relatively safe environment (meaning the cage)--to see something they would otherwise never see.”

Though not endorsing such trips, Don Nelson, a marine biologist at Cal State Long Beach with more than 20 years of experience in working with sharks, said there isn’t a great deal of danger involved.

“There certainly is some risk,” he said. “But I’d say it’s no more than moderate.

“You wouldn’t even see them (the sharks) unless you baited them, they wouldn’t come close to the boat otherwise,” he said.

The chance of being killed or even severely bitten by one, he said, is extremely remote. “And if it were to bite someone, it most likely wouldn’t be a hard vicious bite, but rather a smaller nibbling bite.

“But their teeth are sharp, don’t get me wrong,” he said.

Tillim, who has made more than 75 dives in shark-filled waters, was recently bitten by a medium-sized blue shark “that left a nice half-inch gash in my arm.”

The only other incident aboard Thorne’s boat occurred a little more than a month ago when one of a group of eight sharks nipped at a diver’s wetsuit and tore off part of his fin, which was exposed through the cage’s bars.

A blue shark recently bit down to the bone of Valerie Taylor, a noted Australian diver, while she was off the coast of San Diego. She was hospitalized for a brief time.

“Another time she was trying to feed one by hand and as she tried to knock it away it opened a gash clean through her wetsuit,” Nelson said.

For the most part, however, the blue sharks off Southern California are fairly docile, preferring squid and smaller fish to heavily-garbed divers, whose wetsuits and bubbling air tanks help make them formidable prey.

“Some days they’re more aggressive than others,” Nelson said. “Usually the more sharks there are, the more aggressive they become.”

Said Thorne: “A good number of sharks to have around the boat is three or four. If we get much more than that we get the divers out of the water.”

Nelson, who is currently working with the U.S. Navy testing shark repellents, supported Tillim’s theory that the key is to not expose your backside. “As long as your back isn’t exposed there’s very little danger,” he said.

Nelson did see a 15-foot white shark in the same channel 10 years ago, but said “the chance of one of those showing up is very slight.”

The Betsy M, a San Diego-based boat primarily booked by See & Sea Travel in San Francisco, offers similar trips that run 25 miles out of San Diego. These two-day affairs--which cost $995 per person--according to See & Sea’s president, Carl Roessler, it “may be just the experience for one to evaluate the big trip.”

Perhaps Roessler’s proudest offering, “The Big Trip” takes place in the waters off Port Lincoln in South Australia, where divers have a chance to view 3,000-pound white sharks feeding on horse meat and fish heads.

“We use a lot of bait--a ton or more of tuna, whale oil and horse meat,” he said. “On the last trip, three sharks ate two horses on camera. They stayed for two full days and gave us every kind of shot you could imagine.”

Though Roessler can’t guarantee a white shark will even show up, the avid underwater photographer said he has drawn Great Whites to the 65-foot tuna clipper on each of its 13 trips, the first of which he says began the same day “Jaws” opened in the theaters in 1976.

“The crew throws bait between two (three-person) cages and the shark comes in front of both . . . they try to bite the cage, put their noses between the bars . . . sometimes they get caught or tangled and really bump around. . . . I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Jim Crockett, a writer-producer and winner of numerous underwater photography awards, once wrote of his coming face-to-face with the feared predator: “There’s a friend of mine who swears he’s seen God. I’ve seen the Great White Shark. We’re about even.”

Roessler will be the first to admit that his Australian trip, at $8,000 per individual (air fare not included), “is not for the faint-of-wallet.” But, he added, “it’s certainly the crowning achievement of any diving career.”