Shark feeding (again) part 1

[cdiver2]

After my first dive with SC I had no respect for them, after reading this even less. Stressing a shark so you can manage it for filming.

The shark whisperer
(Filed: 24/12/2004)

When Hollywood directors want to simulate a shark attack they invariably go to Stuart Cove - a scuba diver who can rustle up a school of man-eaters quicker than you can say 'Jaws'. He takes Adam Higginbotham under the waves to meet his killer cast

There are two, three, then four of them. Five, seven, ten, and then... more than that. Gliding in from where delicate turquoise fades into darkness, where the visibility fails and the bottom drops sharply from 30ft to 6,000ft, the sharks idle by, swimming in long curves of languid disinterest.


Stuart Cove: the sharks circle around him and eat what he has to offer

Stuart Cove kneels alone on the sandy sea floor. One hand rests on a plastic crate filled with freshly chopped chunks of fish; in the other he holds a short steel spike, bound at one end with silver gaffer tape, for grip. The sharks circle him in lazy, elliptical, overlapping orbits, closing on the bait box, nuzzling it until he pushes them away.

When he opens the crate to spear the first piece - a silvery chunk of grouper the size of a man's hand - even more sharks appear in the water around us. By now there are perhaps 20 of them - caribbean reef sharks - the smallest 4ft, the largest 9ft from nose to tail. They crowd in, bumping him, forcing themselves beneath the arm he keeps braced against the box, circling and returning, snatching suddenly at the bait.

Up close, from two or three feet away, their eyes are yellow and black, with narrow pupils like a cat's. Fine ridges of muscle kink across their bodies as they turn towards the food. Twenty minutes later all the fish has gone, and the sharks drift away. Afterwards, on the surface, Cove changes over his scuba tank and eats a ham sandwich as he prepares for another dive. I ask him how he feels it went: the first feeding of the day.

'That was nice,' he says cheerfully. 'Nice and mellow.'

Stuart Cove is Hollywood's most famous and prolific shark wrangler, a solid, jovial man who refers to the world above the surface of the ocean as 'topside' and speaks with the gently lilting Caribbean accent of a Bahamian native.

There is a slight tremor in his hands, and his face and arms are red-brown and covered with tiny purple lesions, the result of recent preventative skin cancer treatment made necessary by 40 years' exposure to the sun. 'I look pretty,' he says drily, 'don't I?'


'In my first film they said to me: "If the shark comes to you, just jump on its back"
On a beautiful morning in early November he strides down the dock on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, where his fleet of dive boats is moored. He sips a cup of tea made with evaporated milk, and gamely poses for photographs with his pet parrot on his shoulder. He has the affable but distracted air of a slightly harried corporate executive: smiling and friendly, but with a distant look in his eye that suggests his mind may be elsewhere.

Cove is the owner of Stuart Cove's Aqua Adventures, the largest scuba-diving and watersports operation in the Bahamas. With separately branded scuba, snorkelling and underwater-photography wings, and a contract with the islands' newest resort complex - the colossal

2,300-room Atlantis - Cove's distinctive hot pink logo is ubiquitous around Nassau and nearby Paradise Island. His list of diving students includes Princes William and Harry, Robert Redford and an apparently somewhat reluctant Sean Connery.

('He's a golfer,' Cove says carefully, 'Not a diver.') The company is successful enough to make him reluctant to admit exactly how much money he makes. 'Could we just say multi-million dollar? How about that?' he asks, when I enquire about his annual turnover.

But outside the Bahamas Stuart Cove is better known for one specific part of his business. Over the past 25 years he has created some of Hollywood's most memorable underwater sequences. He's captured, manipulated and cajoled sharks into scenes where they appear as sleeping sharks, radio-controlled sharks and - naturally - giant, man-eating sharks. His body of work includes three James Bond films, one Jaws sequel and,

a few years ago, a television advertisement for a Japanese toothpaste which involved him getting a shark to hold still underwater while he scrubbed its teeth with a 5ft pink toothbrush. This summer Cove completed filming on Into the Blue, a remake of the 1970s undersea classic The Deep.

But the film that made him famous is Open Water, the sleeper hit of 2004 and the most remarkable shark-horror film of the past ten years. Made with practically no money and filmed on shop-bought digital video cameras, the film depicted a young couple stranded in the open ocean by a negligent dive operator - and then menaced by sharks.

What made the film notable was that it didn't use any stand-ins or effects. The two principal actors were actually filmed in the water with a school of feeding caribbean reef sharks. 'A lot of it wasn't acting. It was real fear. It should have been stunt people,' says Cove, who still hasn't seen the finished film. 'But they had no budget for that.'

The shark scenes were so frightening and so authentic that, earlier this year, the American magazine Entertainment Weekly included him on their list of the 100 most creative people in Hollywood.

 

[cdiver2]

A first-generation Bahamian whose parents came over from Newcastle in the early 1950s, Cove grew up in the sea. 'As youngsters,' he says, 'we had no television. So instead we'd go out, play in the water, go fishing.'

He did his first scuba dive in 1964, when he was five years old - so young that he now has no memory of it. He was ten when he saw his first shark. They terrified him: 'Our parents would always say, "Don't go too far out in the water. Don't go near that dark water, because the sharks'll get you."'

By 16 he was sufficiently experienced as a diver to become an instructor ('We used to chase the tourist girls - my pick-up line was, "Hey, you wanna go scuba diving?"') And in 1979, at 19, he began his education in the delicate art of shark-wrangling.

Having dropped out of university in Canada ('Pre-med. I'm the first male in five generations on my father's side of the family not to become a dentist') he found dive work on the filming of the underwater sequences for For Your Eyes Only, the first Bond film to be shot in the Bahamas since Thunderball in 1965.

The marine co-ordinators and stuntmen who created the show- stopping sub-aqua scenes in Thunderball had pioneered techniques for handling sharks in films, helping to establish the tiger shark as central casting's favourite man-eating predator.

Tiger sharks, which can grow up to 20ft long, are big and aggressive, widely renowned as among the most dangerous species on earth, frequently responsible for fatal attacks on humans.

But the Thunderball stuntmen had discovered that sharks have a metabolic quirk which makes it possible to manipulate them safely. When captured or placed under stress a tiger shark will initially struggle furiously but then become abruptly slack and enter a torpid phase from which it takes some time to recover.

During this period the shark can be released to swim along a specific course required for the shot; then it can be recaptured before it has swum far enough for its metabolism to return to normal. The reason sharks often seem to be lumbering, clumsy animals in films is because they're only half awake. In reality an attacking tiger shark would move so quickly you'd barely see it.

At 19 Cove was an experienced diver, but still utterly terrified of sharks. He had no idea, when he signed up to work on For Your Eyes Only, that he would be expected to work with tiger sharks. 'One day they said to us, "OK, this is how you do it. We have a shark-releaser holding the shark.

He's going to release the shark, the shark's going to do his thing and hopefully it's going to work out. And then we're going to have six of you guys out of frame and when you hear the camera stop rolling, if the shark comes to you, jump on its back. And just hold on to it.

" Then they turned to me and said, "OK, Stuart. You're one of the guys." And I'm thinking, "What? Are you out of your mind?" But then they said, "You'll get $150." And, well... as a teenager in 1979, that's a pile of money.' (Today, Cove charges around $10,000 for two to three days shooting with a tiger shark.)

So he took the money and made the dive. 'Honestly scared to death,' he says. 'I think I had diarrhoea and everything.' During the first take, the shark proved livelier than expected, evaded the stunt divers and escaped - much to Cove's relief. Embarking on a half-hearted pretence of looking for the lost animal, he was amazed to find it struggling furiously, trapped in a net at the perimeter of the set.

'So I go up and I grab it and it's trying to bite me, and then it relaxes like they said it would. I swim it back, and here I am, the little frickin' Bahamian boy who comes back with the shark. The hero who saved the whole day's shooting.'


Open water: sharks coaxed by Stuart Cove

After that, the divemasters made Cove one of the chief shark handlers on the film. He never told them he'd found the shark in the net.

The filming of For Your Eyes Only took four months and, as it went on, Cove gradually became less frightened of sharks. But there was one specific incident that permanently changed his perception of them. Twenty or so of the crew were working off a big boat, with divers in deep water baiting a long-line to catch a tiger shark, when one of the men shouted, 'Hammerhead!'

There was a great hammerhead shark sniffing around the bait on the line. And everyone on board who heard the shout jumped into the ocean - to get a better look at the exceptional animal they'd found. Cove was amazed. Before, when anyone around him had shouted about sharks, people had scrambled out of the water. Now, for the first time, he heard someone yell 'Shark!' and everyone jumped in. 'And so, all of a sudden,' he says, 'the fear of sharks kind of went away.'

Out at the dive site I ask Stuart Cove what I should do if I'm actually attacked by one of the sharks he's feeding. 'If you are bitten, just take your arms in and lie still,' he says. 'Don't pull their tails.

If they're coming too close, punch them in the nose. If that doesn't work, poke them in the eye with your stump... I'm just kidding. Don't punch them. I've been diving with sharks for 20 years. You build up a repertoire of very bad jokes.'

On the bench beside him Chris - a Frenchman from the Cote d'Azur who is one of Cove's six regular shark feeders, and a stunt diver on the company's film projects - has gathered his equipment. He has

a battered-looking plastic ice-hockey helmet and a pair of dive fins that bear the marks of previous encounters with sharks. 'See,' he says. 'Some pretty cool bites. Here, and here.' He holds the black rubber this way and that, bending it to show the crescents of tiny lacerations over the foot and in the ends of the fins.

He unpacks the protective gloves for the feeding: two 4ft gauntlets knitted from a fine chain-mail, secured by straps around the neck. The gauntlets and the chain-mail full-body suits that the shark feeders generally use with them are now specially made by a company in New Jersey.

When they first started diving with sharks Stuart Cove simply used steel-mesh butcher's gloves, designed to protect the hands from being cut while chopping meat.

In fact, being bitten by one of these sharks is very unlikely. Cove has been feeding the caribbean reef sharks of New Providence Island since 1985, and, gradually, they've become something approaching tame. 'As tame,' he says, 'as a wild shark can be.

We learnt to interact with them, and they learnt to interact with us.' Now, he's careful to avoid a feeding frenzy; he keeps fresh blood and live, panicking fish out of the water.

And despite their reputation, many species of shark are very discerning eaters. Caribbean reef sharks are dangerous, but less aggressive than tiger sharks and, on different documentary projects, Cove's tried feeding them chicken, leg of lamb, lobster, even on one occasion a dead rat.

Each time, a shark has taken the bait into its mouth, tasted it and then forcefully spat it out. He's even seen them reject fish if it's been sitting around on the dock too long. Divers are the same: when the shark-

feeders' gloved and mailed hands are accidentally bitten, the animals immediately realise their mistake when they taste a wetsuit. 'They just go once, twice,' says Chris, 'then they feel the neoprene and let go.'

Even so, Cove himself has been bitten three times by sharks. Once he was bitten on the hand. He wasn't wearing gloves. 'They go very deep, the teeth. It's the worst pain I've ever felt. It bit into the knuckles. Hurt like a sonofa*****.'

Another time, as he was snorkelling and baiting the water for a photo shoot, a shark came at him. Unprotected, he could do nothing but roll away from it. It chewed its way up his back. Still, he somehow got away with only minor injuries.

Cove's most serious attack came three years ago, during filming for the Imax film Ocean Men. As he broke up bait underwater with his hands, a piece of fish landed on the top of his head. A shark came in for it and raked down his scalp, filling the water around him with blood.

He dropped the remaining bait to cover his head, and ten or 20 more sharks immediately closed in on the food. Everyone else in the scene saw Stuart disappear in a frenzy of sharks and blood. They assumed he was being eaten alive. 'It was,' he says, 'quite humorous. But it went right down to the skull. That really hurts - I was scalped.'

Still, Cove insists that each time he's been bitten he has been doing all the things for the camera you shouldn't do: waving his hands around in the water unprotected. 'Hamming it up,' he says. 'Pushing the envelope, just being an ***, really. But that's why we get the big bucks for doing it, too.'

For some shoots Cove and his staff have even simulated shark attacks - strapping bait between a chain-mail suit and their clothing and having sharks tear it off them.

'That's dangerous because they can actually rip your wetsuit and flesh and cause internal damage... Yeah, it's not smart. But you know,' he says. 'Fame and fortune. You'll do anything.'

HE SAID IT.

 

[JustAddWater]

I've seen sharks, but have never participated in a shark wrangle. My experiences with sharks have been thrilling, and I've developed a great interest and respect for the animal. I wonder if others who have had close shark experiences, such as in a wrangle, also have furthered their appreciation for sharks, and serve to improve the image of sharks? Ironically, what may seem like the harassment of the animal could also lend to helping its survival.

* I do recognize the argument that these wrangles may lead to sharks associating humans with food, and the troubles that may arise from this.