Kingfish, Page 2

warnings at the boat, but most continued to sleep. There were summer storms farther out in the Pacific, and rough sea conditions sent waves hundreds of miles, creating more silt in the water than usual, obscuring visibility. The anchor rope disappeared from view no more than six feet below the surface.

  His teeth chattered in the mist as Chambers put on his black wetsuit for the first dive of the day while Keefe started the compressor and arranged the tethers. They didn’t speak much during these practiced rituals. If the reef below was covered with legal-size urchins as both hoped, the basket would come up full a dozen times during the first hour before it would be Keefe’s turn to work on the bottom. Chambers normally wore a fourteen pound weight belt when free diving to offset the buoyancy of his neoprene suit, but today he wore an additional ten-pound belt. This allowed him to wear sneakers instead of swim fins and stand on the rocky sea ledge. Even though the bottom sloped at fifteen degrees, the crustaceans living on the massive outcroppings provided ample traction. He just needed to avoid stepping into fissures where moray eels would feel threatened.

  Ten minutes after anchoring, Tim sat on the edge of the hull with his feet in the water, adjusting his facemask and testing airflow. Brock handed him the “tool bag” inside the haul net that would be lowered and raised as Tim filled it with urchins. If all went well, they would have a full holding tank today.

  With a final thumbs-up, Chambers pushed off as the air hose and haul net rope uncoiled beside Keefe on deck. Almost as quickly as he jumped, he disappeared from view, leaving a steady stream of bubbles boiling on the surface. Diver’s respiration rates often accelerate when first shocked by the cold ocean, and bubbles rose in a constant stream before the water inside Chamber’s wet suit warmed to body temperature. Today, tension from poor visibility and unspoken danger surrounding the Farallons contributed to higher anxiety. The compressor could handle Tim’s excessive air usage. Brock instinctively maintained vigilance, watching around the boat for any sign of danger, but the Great Whites don’t swim on the surface. Attacks come from below.

  The crimson-streaked eastern sky had not yet provided any usable light in the ocean. Tim sank, surrounded by darkness all around. He was descending in a forest of tall kelp trunks and his only sight references were the tethers in his hands and the faint shadow of the boat above. After about a minute descending into the increasing darkness, vague seafloor contours appeared to his right while blackness remained to his left. His feet hit an uneven outcropping, covered with sea grass and barnacles.

  It was difficult to balance without visible references. After stabilizing, he bent close to the bottom and saw the floor surrounding him covered with dark spiny urchins. Excitement replaced anxiety as he filled the net in just two minutes without moving his feet. He was careful to measure each one for legal size, but most of them were so large it wasn’t necessary. He couldn’t see more than six feet. It didn’t matter. He had never seen so many urchins waiting to be plucked from the rocks. After the second basket was sent to the surface, sea lions began swimming nearby and he enjoyed breaking an urchin open to feed them. If he thought about it, this was a stupid thing to do. Sharks ate the seals.

  Time went by quickly when Brock pulled on the air hose, signaling Tim to come up. The holding tank on the boat was already a third full of urchins and sea water. Tim unclipped and lifted his fourteen-pound belt into the haul net with some urchins and floated slowly to the surface as Brock pulled on the air hose and rope together. Breaking the surface, Tim yelled, “Man, you’ve never seen it like this before. There’s gold on the bottom!”

  Brock had been dumping the haul net, imagining what it must be like. “Well get aboard, and let me see!”

  Tim lifted his ten-pound belt over the side and tossed his mask and regulator into the boat, making it easier to climb over the swim platform at the stern. “Brock! You should see it down there! We could be rich, man! I never seen so many urchins and abalone. It’s like no one has ever been here before. Red abs (abalone) is crawlin’ on top of each other.”

  Brock was equally excited and half suited up when Tim got fully aboard. “Tim, empty the net, I wanna get down there. We’ve never had a haul like this so fast.”

  Tim helped him with his weight belts and coiled the lines for a smooth descent. “Okay pal, we could be heading in by noon if this keeps up. It’s pretty dirty down their (poor visibility), but I didn’t see any end to it. Just start a little south of the boat, and keep working toward deeper water. I was at about fifty feet, moving around the kelp stalks. It’s dark, but you don’t need to see far to find ‘em.”

  Brock’s excitement raged, and he was already sitting on the edge. “Hand me the basket, and hold my lines.” He jumped in and started his descent as Tim managed the lines. Like Tim, he saw the bottom only a moment before impact. Even without moving to deeper water he was still finding urchins that Tim had missed. They could come back to this spot for years and never deplete the supply.

  The kelp forest was all around him, casting dark shadows as the sun rose and fog thinned above. Visibility improved to about ten feet with more light, and the ethereal shapes of the kelp growing from their roots on the bottom to the surface created a broad ceiling above, punctuated by sparkling rays of light. It was like working in a huge smoke-filled forest at dawn. He looked up briefly to find the boat for reference and saw the vague shaded shape of the hull. He was reluctant to move deeper.

  Brock sent the first nets to the surface working from the same area as Tim earlier. Like someone running through an orchard that was partially picked, he was anxious to see the un-harvested part. The descending slope was leading to increasingly darker depths, but Brock wanted to find the boundaries of the urchin field, working slowly down the ledge. He just couldn’t believe how plentiful their prize really was. Then he saw it, a uniformly-shaped structure in the monochromatic blackness ahead of him. He knew what it was before he could see even a third of it at this depth.

  He was five feet from the back of a car concealed under a layer of algae. It sat upright on its wheels, with its nose pointed toward deeper water, like someone parked on one of San Francisco’s steep hills near the bay. Unlike San Francisco, this car had not simply slipped gear and rolled into the harbor. Not twenty-five miles at sea. He rubbed the rear of the trunk lid with his gloved hand and recognized the brand. There was a license plate still attached to the bumper with a registration sticker that was valid only a year earlier. As he investigated, sea lions started darting nervously around him before disappearing into the forest. Then all light was eclipsed by a huge mass moving silently overhead.

  On the surface, between the boat and shore rocks, the seals and sea lions seemed agitated and nervous. They were barking at the water and jumping out as fast as they could swim. On the bottom, Brock knew what it was. A huge shark, about twenty feet long was above. It brushed against his yellow air hose, nearly causing him to panic. He could hide safely near the car and possibly even under it if the monster came too close. He’d seen blue sharks before, but never anything over six feet long. This thing was big as a school bus and would eat a diver as quickly as the sea lions that were disappearing.

  On the surface, Tim tugged on the lines, figuring that a shark was nearby. Brock responded with a sharp tug that Tim mistook as a signal to come up. He thought Brock meant to hurry, so pulled hard, lifting Brock off the bottom, leaving him with no choice. He was ascending as shark bait. He panicked, dropping both weight belts and inflating his buoyancy compensator (life vest) accelerating his rise at a dangerous rate. He was risking the bends (nitrogen poisoning) against being eaten. He was rising too fast and trying to breathe normally, but fear overtook him as the eye and mouth of the beast filled his peripheral vision passing only a foot away. It swam past him close enough to touch, showing a girth almost five feet thick, covered in tough gritty hide. As it passed, the massive tail swished Brock aside. He was momentarily disoriented, but
Tim’s tugging pulled him upright. Then the shark appeared again, his head only inches from Brock’s torso as it swam past again. Its mouth was agape, wider than Brock’s upper body with teeth inches long. He saw the jagged razors embedded in massive red jaws. Terror had overtaken him as he reached for the boat hull only feet above. Tim had seen none of it. The shark made another pass charging from the depths below, and Brock jerked his legs to his chest. The beast missed by inches and broke the surface sending water toward the boat like a nuclear submarine shooting ten feet in the air. Brock broke the surface alongside and Tim grabbed both arms helping pull him upward.

  That was the only time Tim saw the massive shark’s full length, longer than the boat, as it charged directly toward Brock’s dangling lower body. Adrenalin in both men catapulted Brock onto the deck with Tim falling beside him. Brock was unhurt but shaking uncontrollably. They lay motionless without speaking, afraid to show themselves above the side of the boat. It felt safe lying flat, hoping the big shark wouldn’t attack the boat.

  The Lobbyist

  The Washington DC Metro system (WMATA) is