Sharks in the ocean

As a captain of a schooner in Maine, I hear a lot of questions. One of the most common is: "Are there sharks in the water here?"

 "Yes," I say. "In fact, there's an easy test a seasoned captain told me about knowing if there are sharks around:  First, you stick your finger in the water. Next, you taste it.  If you detect salt on your tongue, there are sharks around."

 It's only funny because it's true.

 Sometimes I'll overhear others answer the shark question before I do.  Opinions, sometimes shared as facts, often contradict what I would say but every opinion sounds sure. 

 "No, the water is too cold for sharks up here." That is simply not true, but sometimes it seems rude to correct people.

 Other say, "Yes, there are sharks here now. With global warming, they are moving north with the Gulf Stream. All the lobsters are moving north too."

 The “now” suggests that something is wrong, that we've never seen this before.

 Sometimes I think we are just apes with a primordial need to share opinions. As I don't even like some of my own opinions, I try to keep them to myself, especially on a boat full of strangers.

So I hardly ever jump into the waters of controversy when someone says something I know (or believe) is untrue.  Unless I am asked directly, I just listen to what people say and keep my opinions to myself. 

 “Is true that all the lobsters are moving north?"  They ask as if I know. All I can say is what I've heard.

 "That's what they say."

And yet, friends who fish or dive off Massachusetts, Rhode Island as far south as New Jersey have told me they’re still catching lobsters down there. Do I tell my friends they are wrong? (Sometimes) But I really don't know which “they”to believe.

They also say the seal population is way back up, and I believe it. And yet I've also heard that fish stocks are way down. It makes me wonder what the seals are eating until I see them charging through a school of pogeys.

 A few weeks ago, with a schooner full of passengers on a windless morning, I spotted a subtle V-shaped wake on the mirror-surface of the bay. I shut down the engine to drift up on it silently, curious as to what it might be.

 "What is it?" a passenger asked.

 "I'm not sure," I said.  "It could be a seal, a striped bass...maybe even be a shark."

 “Are there sharks in the water here?"

 "Oh yeah."   

When the iconic dorsal fin broke the surface, I knew immediately it was not a basking shark (too pointed and straight on the caudal edge). And it was too big to be that of a blue shark. And with no white patch it wasn't a porbeagle, which looks a lot like a juvenile white shark. This shark was very close. And very big. Had there been even I breath of wind, we would have gone by, completely missing what was right next to us. I couldn’t believe it. And yet, the truth was the truth, regardless of what any of us believed.  

 Though I had seen many sharks before the flood of internet opinions consented to their existence here in Maine, I'd never seen a great white shark up close. I had seen photographs of them, caught right in this bay, decades before a movie fifty summers ago scared half the country out of the water. The old black and white pictures revealed something, while dramatic, still seemed calmer and truer than the incessant emergency news (and the flood of opinions about it) that lurk forever now in the machines we carry in our pockets wherever we go.

 The creature glided just under the surface, down the entire length of the starboard side of the boat, before descending under our rudder not to be seen again. Its girth was more fearsome and impressive than its length. No animal gets that big without eating a lot.

 The still morning seemed perfectly designed for such an encounter. So enthralled in the realness of the moment I forgot to grab the everything tool - not the Leatherman -that's always in my pocket these days.  

 For a moment, all the people were silent.

I didn't know until after it disappeared that someone had taken a picture and immediately posted it on the world wide web.

By the time we got back to the dock, there was a buzz on the wharf about what we had seen. Even the local newspaper had called the office, fishing for details for a story about a shark in our little corner of the ocean.  

"Were the passengers scared? Was the boat in any danger?

Some questions seem silly. Others smell like more bait for the incessant frenzy of news, for which we are tempted to jump in with our opinions, and questions: “Terrible! Can you believe it?! A great white shark just off Curtis Island!" It is, of course, incredible to see such a creature up close. And yet it is was also incredible we were amazed to see such a shark in the ocean. Without the photo, those who never saw it would never have known it was there, and we who were there might have been left with only a memory of what we had seen with our own eyes. For some reason I can't explain yet, it seems to me now that may have been a better way to understand the truth about sharks in the ocean.