SWIMMING WITH SHARKS


When I lived in South Florida, my friend Richard and I loved to sail on the weekends. Anchored at Coconut Grove Sailing Club was his 40-foot sailboat, which gave us easy access to Biscayne Bay. After sailing all day in Biscayne National Park, our favorite place to anchor for a couple of days was Elliot Key, the northernmost part of the Florida Keys. Many years ago, it was a thriving pineapple farming and sponging community. Elliot Key is now uninhabited.

There's nothing quite as sublime as the warm, clear, turquoise waters of Biscayne National Park. Sailing and swimming are perfect antidotes after a stressful week at work. The direction of the wind always determined our arrival time at Elliot Key. We could sail there within a few hours if the wind was advantageous. If not, it would take until after sundown. Even if it was dark when we arrived, I didn't wait for dinner and jumped in the water as soon as we lowered the anchor. Richard was okay with waiting to start dinner after I had gotten my fill of swimming. The water was crystal clear, with glimpses of coral reefs, starfish, tiny sea horses, and multi-colored fish. Sometimes dolphins joined me, although their curiosity never overrode their cautiousness by staying 30 feet away. I didn't care about their shyness because watching them play in the water was magical. Night swimming was often rewarded with a phosphorescence light show that occurs when algae scatter in the water from motion, looking like fireflies in the backyard on warm summer nights. At first, I thought the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Generating Station, located in Homestead, was discharging radiation into the water, but I was quickly corrected.

We always found a spot to anchor far enough away from other boats not to hear conversations and sufficiently close to Elliot Key to row a boat to shore and hike during the day.

I recently caught about 10 minutes of a TV show about sharks while channel surfing. I couldn't watch most of it because of the gruesomeness of severed arms and legs. Not all shark encounters result in missing limbs. One of the times when I was swimming near the boat off of Elliot Key, I kept hearing people yelling, but I couldn't quite understand the words. Finally, I heard someone scream, "SHARK!" At that point, I was about 20 feet from the boat. I swam to the sailboat faster than Michael Phelps could have done it. As I stepped on the ladder's second rung, the shark passed by within a foot of me. Richard was quietly watching the entire scene from the stern of our vessel. When I told him how frightened I had been, he replied, "Oh, nurse sharks are harmless." Old sailors only worry about the wind and the weather.

Many years before this episode, I encountered Pacific angel sharks while scuba diving off the coast of California. Angel sharks look more like stingrays and stay hidden amongst the kelp forest. My focus at the time was navigating the kelp forest and watching whales crest several hundred yards away, so I learned that I had been swimming with sharks only after I finished the dive and was ashore.

Once we returned home from the shark encounter trip to Elliot Key, I researched nurse sharks. Richard was only half right. Nurse sharks are usually harmless and mostly dwell on the bottom of the ocean. They have thousands of tiny, serrated teeth and will attack if disturbed. Ouch!

May we all live to tell our shark tales with all appendages intact! Happy Shark Week!

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