The Best American Sports Writing 2014(112)

Mickey—Mick Asprey—is a white-haired 64-year-old Australian shaper who owns a shop in town. Ten years ago, he was blinded in one eye in a collision with his surfboard; that and his irascible demeanor remind me of an Aussie Rooster Cogburn. Mostly I’m watching him surf. He’s catching four waves to my every one, and whenever he disappears behind a glassy wall, I’m left alone in the lineup, wondering if at any moment my on-site reporting, and indeed my life, will be brought to an abrupt and bloody conclusion by a streaking gray blur.

For what it’s worth—and I don’t suppose it’s worth much in terms of safety—I have some experience with sharks. When I was field editor for a scuba-diving magazine, I sought out sharks around the world. In the lagoons of Bora-Bora, I dove with lemon sharks the size of small submarines. In Micronesia I hung out in reef passes, kicking hard against the current to watch feeding blue and whitetip sharks. And once in the Galápagos, I ascended through a veritable tornado of hundreds of circling hammerheads. I was never afraid. Always the sharks seemed oblivious to us divers, as if we existed in separate dimensions. Awesome and silent, gray against the blue, they paraded past like disciplined thespians observing the fourth wall. Yet here in the waters off Réunion  , it seems that the sharks have broken through that barrier. They see the surfers. They seek them out.

Certainly, on that day three weeks ago here at St. Leu, a shark sought out Fabien Bujon. It was late afternoon, getting close to sundown, a bad time to be in the water, as everyone knew. The first bite took off one of Bujon’s feet, and the shark—a bull shark—came at him for more. As Bujon punched at its head, the shark latched onto his hand, severing it above the wrist. He crammed his other hand into its gill slits and the shark backed off. One tough hombre, Bujon somehow managed to make the 100-yard paddle to shore unassisted.

Now the sun finally crests the 10,000-foot-tall volcano in the near distance, turning the sea a glimmering silver. I squint through the translucent water at my gloriously intact feet, wiggling my toes, and recall the warning I received from a St. Leu local. Wild-haired, eyes red-rimmed from a hard night’s partying, looking like the dockside prophet Elijah in Moby-Dick, the man fixed me with his stare and said, “The sharks, they taste the men, and they learn to eat them.”

If this is hysteria, it’s highly contagious.

Surfing Réunion   has never been safe—the International Shark Attack File lists 14 attacks on surfers, of which eight were fatalities, between 1989 and 2010—but the island has never experienced anything like the current spike: 10 attacks in the past two years. In February 2011, a shark tore off a surfer’s lower leg at Roches Noires, a surf break near the harbor of St. Gilles, the island’s busiest resort town. A few months later, a surfer at the same break escaped with just a chomped surfboard. Sharks also pursued a waveski and a canoe, neither incident resulting in injury, though in the case of the canoe, a closed-hull outrigger, the shark came out of the water and bashed in the upper deck—an act of unprecedented aggression, or desperation. These incidents, plus the Aubert and Schiller fatalities, all occurred within or nearby the Marine Reserve, a 12-mile-long protected zone established on the west coast to try to save the threatened coral of the barrier reef.

Was the Reserve itself to blame for the eightfold increase in attacks? Some surfers and fishermen believed that it endangered one group (the surfers) by excluding the other (the fishermen). They felt that la présence humaine was needed to restore the old balance, with man at the top. Or were the attacks just a cascade of coincidences? Or were they due to some changes in the sea at large, or in shark numbers or shark behavior? To begin to answer those questions, in October 2011 the government of Réunion   island launched CHARC, an ambitious water-safety and shark-monitoring program, the main thrust of which would be the tagging of 80 sharks by 2014. In the meantime, the popular beaches of Boucan Canot and Roches Noires were closed to surfing and swimming for the indefinite future.

As the CHARC scientists pursued their tagging program—catch each shark with rod and reel, immobilize it alongside the boat, surgically implant an acoustic beacon—France’s biggest dive-training and certification organization took a more submersive approach: they hired the world-famous Belgian breath-hold diver, Frédéric Buyle, a kind of eco–Van Helsing of the monster-shark world, to swim down and have a look around. A passionate shark advocate, Buyle had won fame swimming with great whites—sans cage—and looking at them eye to eye. Here in Réunion  , Buyle was amazed by what he saw, or failed to see. There were no sharks at all, at least none of the smaller reef sharks found everywhere else in the tropical world. Eventually, using baits, Buyle coaxed his wary quarry from the shadows. Moving in slo-mo and hugging close to the bottom, gray against gray, were specimens of Carcharhinus leucas. Requins bouledogues. Bull sharks.