Sharks

By Tracy K. Lorenz

For those of you who haven’t heard, Shark Week is coming up! “Shark Week” is an entire week the Discovery Channel dedicates to, understandably, sharks. I’ve loved sharks since I was a little kid and even wrote my first book report for Sister Wilma on sharks. I made a little cover where I drew a Mako Shark in attack position. I got a “C” on the report with a note that said “If you would have spent as much time on the report as you did on the cover you would have gotten an “A”. That was quite possibly the nicest thing a nun ever said to me and it wasn’t even all that nice.

I’ve owned sharks over the years, keeping them in aquariums with hopefully sufficient turn around room. Here’s a tip for those of you who’ve considered shark ownership: when the shark gets big enough to eat the other fish he will eat the other fish even if they seemed quite friendly in the weeks and months prior to the eating.

But all my shark experience hasn’t been limited to pets, sometimes I’ve seen them way closer than I’d like and I‘m not talking about those “Swim with Sharks“ tours. I’ve been on those “Swim with the sharks” tours and I’ll tell you right now those aren’t exactly real sharks. Technically you’re swimming with sharks but if the beast has a mouth like a vacuum and hangs out at the bottom of the ocean you’re probably not in too much danger, when a shark has whiskers it loses a bit of its menace.

Anyway, a few years back I got conned into going deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean. Now around here if you go out on a charter boat it has, like, a roof and it sits out of the water more than a foot. In Central America it’s a different story, you basically just hitch a ride with a local fisherman who feels little obligation to bring you back whole.

Now I’ve written before how I’m a bit claustrophobic and for some reason it hit me when I hopped on that little boat and I mean LITTLE boat. We took off like a bat heading for some area off the coast of Guatemala and things immediately went bad. Once we left sight of land the claustrophobia kicked in and I was quite sure I was having a heart attack. Then just as I was calming down WHAM! We hit a Manatee. You do NOT know fear until you slam into a 3,000-pound hunk of meat in a boat the size of a kayak. The driver / guide Marcus (who bore a striking resemblance to Snoop Dogg) stopped to check his motor while I feverishly surveyed the boat for leaks and / or life preservers and found neither.

So after awhile my heart restarted and we reached the fishing grounds, Marcus pulled out a fishing pole with a reel the size Rosie O’Donnell’s head. Apparently when you’re fishing in 600 feet of water you need 600 feet of really heavy line and he didn’t have one of those cool back support chairs they strap you into on nice fishing trips, I think he just had a bucket.

What Marcus didn’t realize is I’m the world’s worst fisherman, bar none. Every time I attempt to fish I not only crash and burn, I crash, burn, come back to life and crash again in the Peruvian mountains where I’m eaten by my bowling team.

If the rod and reel weren’t heavy enough, ol’ Marcus hung three large pieces of re-bar on the end of the line to use as sinkers. He put some bait on and I chucked the whole contraption over the side of the boat where a barracuda immediately ate the bait. The process repeated itself for quite awhile until Marcus said, “Maybe we’ll just catch the barracuda.” He changed the bait system and next thing you know I’m fighting a barracuda that has me greatly outmatched in the “will to live” department. That baby took off like an ape with a beehive on its head. I fought it for, oh, a minute and then Marcus took over for the next half hour. When it was about dead and close to the boat I reeled it in the rest of the way so, technically, I caught it.

That took care of the bait problem, now it was time to fish for whatever monstrosity lurked beneath us.

I actually hooked quite a few fish but in the process of getting them in the boat they would be eaten by sharks. Big, ugly sharks not pretty TV sharks. These babies had crooked teeth, rounded snouts, and could bite a forty-pound sea bass in half like it was a Twix bar. Every now and then one would swim near the boat and give me the hairy eyeball which was uncomfortable to say the least. If anyone fell in that water, and by anyone I mean “me,” it would be like falling into a wood chipper.

But wait! There’s more!

When it came time to leave after a day of catching nothing but one barracuda and a bunch of half fish heads the boat wouldn’t start. The sun was setting, the current was strong, there was no land in sight, the sharks were tucking bibs under their chins and the motor…isn’t…starting. Marcus switched gas tanks, he checked all the electronics, and at one point the even dove in the water to check the propeller. Nothing.
I was just about to get into the fetal position and accept my fate when Marcus noticed the boat wouldn’t start because it was still in gear. He put it in neutral and we high-tailed it back to Belize.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been happier to see dry land. As a reward I let Marcus keep the fish, (coincidently that night every “restaurant” on the island had a special on barracuda steaks) we shook hands and I walked back to my cabana totally exhausted or as I like to call it…shark weak.