Divers find great white beautiful, terrifying
By MARTIN DeANGELIS Staff Writer, (609) 272-7237, E-Mail
Tom Engle has seen lots of sea life off the New Jersey coast in his 25 years of scuba diving here.
But he'd never looked into the eyes of a 20-foot, great white shark until he and two friends took a dive last week about 20 miles east of Brigantine - just days before a great white attacked and killed a woman swimming off a California beach.
Engle, of Egg Harbor Township, and his buddies were 17 feet below the ocean surface, hovering near the anchor line of his boat, the Villain, after diving down to a wreck in about 110 feet of water.
The three veteran divers were just waiting to go up, enjoying the unusually clear water for this area - they figure the visibility was about 40 feet - when "we looked over and there he was," Engle says. "He was unbelievably big ... and he just sort of moseyed by us."
The three humans sharing the water with the shark weren't quite so calm.
"I scurried for the ladder," the 48-year-old Engle says. But first, he pointed out what the rush was to one guy who had his back to the shark.
"His eyes opened big time," Engle remembers. "We had a half-inch (wide) anchor line, and we were all trying to hide behind it."
Engle thought the shark was almost 25 feet long, but Chuck Cole of Pittsgrove Township, who was also on the dive, puts its size at 18 or 20 feet. Either way, this was a fish as tall as a two-story building - with a reputation heightened by decades of shark stories in movies and on TV.
"He was beautiful," Cole says, "to the point of terrifying."
And the shark was terrifying to the point that Cole - who should have kept swimming in shallow water another 12 minutes to avoid risking the bends, or decompression sickness - joined his two buddies in the rush for the boat.
"I didn't know what was going to hurt worse," he says. "I was just so scared that I wanted to get away from it. ... I figured if it got really bad, I could call and get a helicopter to take me to the hospital."
Cole, a 33-year-old electrical contractor, came up with a few bends symptoms, including pains in his left arm and stomach. But he started breathing bottled oxygen and felt OK by the time the boat got back to shore.
Despite their fear, Cole and Engle both emphasize that this shark showed no interest in attacking them.
"He had every opportunity to nail one of us," Cole says. "But he didn't make any aggressive movements."
Engle adds that the white shark's cruising path around them was lazy enough to give him a good look at its "real big, black eyes." He also saw seaweed hanging off the animal and a small armada of small fish swimming in its wake.
"He wasn't trying to get us," Engle says. "But another five minutes - you never know. We didn't hang around to find out."
In California last week, investigators said a 15-18-foot great white shark attacked and killed a 50-year-old woman swimming 75 yards out into the ocean off Avila Beach, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles. Witnesses say the victim was wearing a wetsuit and swimming with a group of seals - a favorite food source for sharks. The woman was the first human to be killed by a shark in the state since 1994, California officials said.
Greg Charbeneau of the New Jersey State Aquarium in Camden didn't see the New Jersey shark to confirm that it was a great white, but he wasn't surprised or doubtful that a shark of this size and description would show up in our neighborhood.
"Great whites definitely can be found off the coast," says Charbeneau, the aquarium's vice president of husbandry, or caring for its sea-creature residents. He added that a colleague at the aquarium has heard from several fishing sources lately about at least one great white shark being spotted off the coastline, and local fishermen have reported similar sightings to The Press recently.
Charbeneau, who is also a scuba diver, says he'd be "in heaven" to see this kind of shark underwater.
"I don't view them as eating machines or dangerous predators of humans," he said. "They're living dinosaurs ... apex predators, at the top of the food chain. They're very strong and powerful animals, but they generally eat injured, dead or sick fish."
The International Shark Attack Files, maintained by the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, counts a total of 873 shark attacks - not strictly by great whites - on humans in the territory of today's United States between the years 1670 and 2002. Sixty-three people died in those attacks, the ISAF says.
In New Jersey waters, the ISAF says there were 16 shark attacks in that 332-year period and 5 deaths - the last one in 1926.
To give a perspective on sharks' risk to humans, the ISAF compares shark incidents with other activities. For example, it cites National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics counting 9,361 bicycle fatalities in the U.S. from 1990 to 2001 - and eight shark-attack deaths in that same period.
The state aquarium's Charbeneau says the easiest way to minimize the "minuscule" risk of being attacked by a shark is not to go into the ocean around dawn or dusk, when sharks are most likely to feed.
Cole has heard all the statistics, and he believes them. But he also believes what he saw for himself that day in the ocean.
"I know our minds get polluted by 'Shark Week' on the Discovery Channel," he says. "And he, she or it was beautiful. I just didn't want to be in the water with it."
Still, he planned to dive again this weekend. So did Engle, both with a few new cautions: They won't do any spear-fishing, to avoid blood in the water near them, and they won't do any dives that force them into long safety stops under the boat. They also plan to dive somewhere else - somewhere they didn't just see a giant, Jaws-style shark.
"I feel very fortunate that we could see that and live to tell the tale," Engle says. "And I don't want to cause any panic, but I think people should know about this."
Now that he knows, this veteran of hundreds of dives isn't looking forward to any more shark thrill shows.
"I hope," Engle says, "that I'm never that lucky again."
