Even With Sharks, Midlife Waters Are Too Tranquil

The afternoon’s first shark showed up like a silent marauder. Long, blue and sleek, it glided close to the boat for a look-see, made a swift pass near the bow, then swam off into open water. From the deck, we watched its sharp fin slicing through the sea.

“All right,” the dive master said cheerfully. “Everyone into the water.”

I don’t know. You get to be 43 like me, wonder what life is about and start looking around for some spice. Billy Crystal and a couple of buddies took on mid-life crisis by driving a bunch of cows across a prairie in a hit movie called “City Slickers.”

But I live in California where prairies are scarce, so I considered my options and decided on the ocean, with its inhabitants.

Another guy on the boat, George Goldberg, who publishes a magazine called Faces International, put it well. “I’ve been on this death wish lately,” he told me just before jumping overboard. “I did sky diving recently and then bungee jumping. I was petrified every time. All of a sudden you hit middle age, and you don’t want to miss anything. So I thought I’d try swimming with sharks.”

Fortunately, we live in an economic culture eager to satisfy such cravings. Welcome to shark diving, a fairly new leisure opportunity. A handful of firms offer this adventure. I paid Argo Diving of Avalon $250 for a daylong outing.

“The animals are much maligned. They won’t eat you,” said Argo dive master Steve Whitaker (Mr. Shark to his friends), who claims to have taken 1,500 divers on shark adventures since 1988 and not lost one.

Still, the animals did seem a bit hungry. They were not hovering around our craft by chance. We had encouraged them by hanging huge bleeding tuna heads over the side. This had been augmented by the constant bailing of mackerel blood as we made our way in a lazy arch several miles out to sea.

The idea, Whitaker told us, was to create a long strip of scent to be picked up by any shark that happened to cross it. Sensing nourishment, they would then follow the smell to its source, a wire mesh cage about 15 feet under the water festooned with the grinning tuna heads and soon to be filled with divers.

The cage gave me a bit of a fright. The wire was badly dented, evidence, I presumed, of previous battles with sharks. All around the sides of the cage was an 18-inch-tall “window” from which the wire had been removed for the convenience of photographers. “Just about 17 inches too tall,” Goldberg remarked.

But Whitaker assured us of safety. These would be blue sharks, docile creatures that would cause no harm. Unless you happened to be wearing yellow. He said he has observed that the sharks seem to like yellow. “It looks yummy to them,” he said.

As to the more dangerous great white sharks, while they are found in these waters, none has ever attacked off Catalina, and Argo has never attracted one with its shark-diving trips, owner Jon Hardy said. The cages often attract mako sharks, close kin to the great white and potentially dangerous, he said, but there has never been a mako attack in California.

I wasn’t first in the water. That honor went to one of Whitaker’s assistants, a young man whose job was to assist and photograph the paying customers.

What can I say about diving with sharks? They are beautiful, like expensive, well-oiled sports cars gliding along a multileveled liquid freeway. Curious about us black-suited, bubble-breathing creatures in the cage, they would gracefully slip in for a closer look, sometimes coming within touching distance, then turn back toward the bait.

Before taking a bite they would make several passes, cautiously circling the fish heads. Then they would lunge, grabbing hold with powerful jaws and ripping the fish flesh with rapid back-and-forth motions before swallowing it in huge gory chunks.

For a long time we hung in the water watching, sucking air from our regulators. As the minutes ticked by, the divers began feeling bolder. Some even reached out to pet the sharks, unable to resist the temptation to feel their sleek skin.

I was about to try when something caught my eye--the hue of my gloves, a bright, delectable yellow. I pulled my hands back into the cage.

Then came the coup de grace, the moment we’d all been waiting for. Whitaker had told us we could all get out of the cage to share the ocean with the sharks. We did, and the huge, fierce-looking sharks indeed seemed as tame as aquarium fish. I thought that somewhere in the universe is a unity of purpose that allows unfettered members of very different--and sometimes antagonistic--species to peacefully share the same space. But just in case, I kept my gloved hands close to my sides, and the sharks didn’t seem to notice their color.

“It was a very important experience for me,” confided Judy Levey, 25, the only woman on the trip. “This helped me overcome a major fear of my childhood. After I saw ‘Jaws,’ I wouldn’t go into the ocean for years. I used to have screaming nightmares that a shark would come out of the drain of my bathtub and eat me.”

And what did the experience mean to me? Did it make me feel more like a man, help confront the agonies of middle age?

Diving with sharks was interesting, and I probably won’t be able to resist putting one of those snapshots on my wall. But it wasn’t dangerous enough to get me out of my midlife doldrums.