The Best American Sports Writing 2014(113)
“Ils sont timides, très, très timides, mais present,” Buyle writes in his report of the expedition. They were there all right, but very, very wary. And very bad news.
When Buyle inspected the attack sites at Boucan Canot and Roches Noires, he concluded that both sites are ideal bull-shark habitat: sand beaches fronting ravines holding fetid streams. Roches Noires has the additional attraction of nearby St. Gilles harbor, with its murk of pollution and steady supply of fish carcasses. Buyle asserted he would never enter the water at either place without a dive mask for defense against ambush.
Nevertheless, he believed that closing the beaches had been a mistake. Who would assume the authority to reopen them? Who could decide when they would be “safe” when they never would be? Réunion island didn’t have a shark problem so much as it had a people problem, peculiarly French. There was the French faith in the law, on one hand, that for every crime a criminal could be found and punished. On the other hand, just a careless plunge away, was a powerful and unpredictable species—evolving and adapting to conditions made more hostile by humans. The sea had become “a place of mass consumption,” in Buyle’s words—and at the same time primo bull-shark habitat. He called the situation “grotesque.”
The bull shark is a species with a detestable reputation. Feared worldwide under various names—Zambezi shark, Nicaragua shark—it is perhaps the most intelligent, most adaptable, and least predictable of the large, dangerous sharks. Neither fast nor graceful like the tiger, nor majestic like the white, the bull is a bulky, round-bellied, seemingly sluggish beast, though capable of quick bursts of speed in attack. Mature females, larger than the males, attain a maximum length of about 11 feet and can weigh more than 500 pounds. Small eyes hint at the relative unimportance of sight in their hunt for prey, which they are known to pursue in coordinated attacks, often in turbid, low-visibility conditions. Through an adaptation called osmoregulation, their versatile kidneys allow them to move freely between salt water and fresh water, to enter river mouths and prowl miles upstream. On Réunion , with its steep volcanic slopes scoured by deep ravines, it had long been folk wisdom to stay out of the water after heavy rains, when fresh water laden with silt and debris sent long brown plumes into the sea. Above all, bull sharks are attracted to that turbidity, to murky waters for the cloak of invisibility. That’s why bulls are rarely glimpsed until the moment of impact.
The most common explanation for why sharks attack surfers is the “mistaken identity” theory: sharks on the hunt for seals, sea lions, and turtles look up and see the silhouettes of surfers on their boards, mistake them for their natural prey, and decide to investigate with a bump or a bite. The theory helps explain both why some surfers are targeted and why so many survive their encounters with much larger, superbly evolved killing machines. As Mick Asprey points out, “We’re not on the menu, mate!”
But many Réunion surfers had come to believe something different: the bulls were learning that surfers were easy prey. So they wait, these killer sharks. Hidden. Elsewhere. You never see them when the sea is calm. Then the waves come—a symphony to their senses, the big pounding swell. The swell churns up the bottom, the sand in solution creating that murkiness through which they navigate with the ease of the blind, like great bats. Then—voilà!—the food arrives, arranged just beyond the breakers, a dangling banquet of human limbs.
On July 23, 2012, at Trois-Bassins—traditionally the safest surf break on Réunion —a third surfer was lost. Alexandre Rassiga, a handsome 21-year-old actor-bartender, took a bite below the knee—a nonfatal injury—and then suffered a second bite to the upper thigh that severed an artery. At this point, something seemed to snap in the minds of Réunion island surfers. Aubert. Schiller. And now Rassiga. The surfers were losing their friends, losing their pastime. Boucan Canot and Trois Roches remained shut down. Now the mayor of Trois-Bassins closed that venerable surf spot. Robert Boulanger, president of the Ligue Réunion aise de Surf, described the mental state of his constituents as “psychose.”
Three days after Rassiga died, some 300 surfers and fishermen marched on the capital, St. Denis. Carrying surfboards painted with slogans, they chanted “Open the Reserve now!” The protesting surfers believed that the Marine Reserve, in which commercial fishing is banned, had become like a “larder” for sharks. They were no different from criminals, these bouledogues!, as one furious surfer put it, except that they had the Reserve as a hideout and a refuge, a sanctuary like a medieval cathedral.