Jaws of a Dilemma : Fearful Surfers Help Close Diving Excursions That Lured Great White Sharks Off Santa Cruz

The first shark appeared well off the stern, sticking its massive head out of the water and rolling from side to side, as if to size up the situation.

Those aboard the 65-foot Pacific Star, out of Moss Landing in Monterey Bay, were elated. They went scurrying for their scuba gear and within minutes were plopping into the water.

They wanted to get a closer look at this magnificent creature--a 17-foot great white with teeth enough to tear them in half.

They had paid $650 apiece to get so close a look.

And for three days and nights they got their money’s worth, watching in amazement as sharks as wide as rhinos and as long as Cadillacs materialized seemingly out of nowhere in the murky distance, gazing curiously about before disappearing back into the blackness.

“There were times where they would run in and hit hard at something, but otherwise they were nonchalant, drooping little dinosaurs,” said Jon Cappella, a 39-year-old resident of Santa Cruz who organized the excursion earlier this month off Ano Nuevo Point, a jutting peninsula 20 miles north of Santa Cruz.

Cappella, his crew of nine and 12 customers, were making history. Never before in California--or in the United States for that matter--had anyone successfully attracted great whites for recreational divers to view and photograph underwater.

Yet while the customers, protected by submerged aluminum cages secured to the boat, emerged unscathed, Cappella did not. In a sense he had bitten off more than he could chew.

Cappella attracted the sharks by “chumming,” dumping more than a ton of fish byproducts mixed with mammal blood into the water. And he chummed not far from where hundreds of surfers and windsurfers ride the waves and the wind every day. That turned the people of Santa Cruz against him.

“The problem is, they’re getting the sharks into a hyper-excited state with the blood and mackerel, but they’re not giving them anything to eat,” Steve Merril, one of the founders of the Surfers Environmental Alliance in Santa Cruz, said in the days after Cappella’s excursion. “When the sharks come back inshore, they’re going to be just ready to go. At least there’s the potential for them to be ready to go.”

Fear had indeed gripped the picturesque and usually serene community of about 50,000. Cappella’s life was threatened more than once, and because of an obscure regulation regarding chumming in the federally protected waters of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, he was eventually forced--at least temporarily--to cancel his dive trips or face legal action.

“Unfortunately, there’s a certain mythology regarding the shark that is ingrained in our culture,” a frustrated Cappella said of the uproar. “There’s the folklore and then there’s the modern folklore that started in the ‘70s with ‘Jaws.’ What’s going on within the surfing community is hysteria based on a Hollywood legend. I’m up against a myth. Oh boy, it is tough.”

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As proprietor of the Santa Cruz-based TriShark, Cappella had been chumming sharks for recreational divers for four years. But he had done it in different areas within the sanctuary, and only for blue sharks and mako sharks.

Nobody complained.

Like others, he was well aware of the presence of great whites not far from shore. Elephant seals and California sea lions abound in the protected waters of the sanctuary, 350 miles long and covering more than 5,000 square miles. And great whites find the many submarine canyons ideal routes to the coastal rookeries in which they often feed.

Cappella put his 12 customers at the base of one of the canyons in 70 feet of water not far off Ano Nuevo Island at about 9 a.m. on December 31.

“Ano Nuevo is like the Safeway for great whites,” Cappella said.

It’s also less than a mile off a coastline dotted with hundreds of surfers on a normal day.

The chumming began and by 2 p.m. the first shark appeared.

Within 10 minutes there were six divers in two 12-foot-tall cages, and although the visibility was only about 15 feet, the sharks made their presence known.

“At first they stayed off in the distance, except for the bigger ones,” said Dave Cregar, 25, a diver from Pasadena. “The bigger ones came right to the boat. It was like they didn’t care. One got caught between the boat and cage and made a big splash.”

The sharks hung around for only short periods of time until the night of Jan. 1, when several great whites swam boldly about the brightly lighted water from 5:30 until 11.

By that time it was even more difficult to see, as the ocean was thick with chum.

“When you were in the cage, you couldn’t see the person next to you--only lamb legs and pig heads,” said Jim Knowlton, 28, a diver from Santa Barbara.

Cappella maintains that his “secret formula” consisted of 95% fish or fish byproducts and only 5% mammal blood and blood meal, and that the chunks of meat were suspended around the cages to act as lures.

According to divers, the sharks never appeared to be in a frenzied state, but remained cautious and seemingly aware of their surroundings.

“Any time they were agitated--and it only occurred maybe twice--the shark . . . left the scene,” Cappella said. “They didn’t want anything to do with anything that would stress them.”

One shark did bite an inflatable boat manned by the crew, deflating a small section of the boat.

“After getting a mouthful of air, it was pretty much discouraged and took off,” Cappella said.

And after a third day of close encounters with perhaps the world’s most notorious predator, Cappella and his customers took off for Moss Landing, having enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Cappella, however, had incurred the wrath of the surfers, who were quick to remember attacks by sharks on surfers, most recently in in 1991, when there were two attacks a few months apart.

The most recent shark attacks of any kind in the Ano Nuevo area were on a kayaker in November of 1992, and on a skin-diver in March of 1993. No one was seriously injured.

But shark experts later played down the danger issue involving Cappella’s operation.

“If he is more than a mile off, to me that presents very little potential danger,” said Ken Goldman, a shark researcher at Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco. “I don’t think the danger is anything significant, if any at all. Now if he was 100 yards offshore, I would say that would be a huge impact, potentially.”

Ralph Collier, founder of the Shark Research Committee in Van Nuys, said, “He isn’t drawing white sharks from 100 miles away. Those sharks were already in the area. All he did was bring them to one location.”

But, as Ed Ueber, manager of Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, whose jurisdiction extends south to the northern part of the Monterey sanctuary, put it, “White sharks upset people.”

Death threats began filling the tape on Cappella’s phone answering machine, including one from a caller who threatened to cut off Cappella’s arms and legs with a chain saw and feed him to the sharks if he dared make another trip.

Tim Loomis, of the Surfers Environmental Alliance, an offshoot of the Surfrider Foundation, condemned such threats, but also vowed to stop Cappella’s operation by nonviolent means.

“If we can’t have the law on our side--if we find out that it is perfectly legal for him to be doing this--we will go out and demonstrate. We’ll paddle out to his boat and and do the whole thing,” Loomis said in the days after Cappella’s return.

Cappella, meanwhile, vowed to continue his shark dives, claiming to be motivated more by science than by profit. Even so, when calls from hundreds of prospective divers began pouring in, he quickly increased the price of the dives.

“I’m going to be doing a lot more, not only in the Ano Nuevo area but elsewhere,” he said. “I want to see if great whites are migrating and if they are, I want to follow that migration path. If they are residential, I want to spot those locations where they are residential.”

The success of his first trip interested scientists, who know little about the life cycle of white sharks. Experts who study sharks at the Farallon Islands off San Francisco contacted Cappella’s customers to request photographs, trying to determine if great whites migrate from the Farallons to the mainland.

“This is a unique opportunity for us,” said Goldman of Steinhart Aquarium. “Even if these are not the same sharks, we will keep (the pictures) in our catalogue and maybe it will be a shark we can identify down the road.”

The controversy raged for more than two weeks before sanctuary personnel, under pressure from the surfing community, informed Cappella of a regulation that prohibits chumming unless it is done while “engaged in traditional fishing practices.” He was also informed that it is against the law to chum with mammal parts.

The issue finally came to a head at a meeting last week in Pescadero, north of Santa Cruz, where scientists, conservationists, surfers and divers met to “get things out in the open.”

Cappella was buried.

“What he is doing is not advantageous for humans using the same area, so it’s a public safety issue,” said Ueber, who chaired the meeting. “And there’s a definite fear issue. Whether he is attracting sharks to the coast or not, what he is doing makes people afraid.

“Also there was concern by other groups that this is critical habitat for marine mammals and this activity, which increases feeding in the area, may not be good for Steller’s sea lion (an endangered species) or other animals: elephant seals, harbor seals and California sea lions.”

Cappella says that he has not given up, adding that he has been told by sanctuary personnel that he could apply for a permit that would enable him to continue.

“I’ve been told it would take between 60 to 90 days,” he said of the permit process. “But that’s assuming there’s no controversy involved.”

The dust is already settling on Cappella’s cages.