THE SLEEPING SHARK FIASCO

BY

PAUL JOHNSTON

In 1975, I and two of my friends, Doug Comer and Juan Deneke, decided to take a three week trip to Mexico and Belize and do some diving and underwater photography. Previously in 1969, I had worked as a diving instructor for the Field School of Mayan Archaeology at Akumal and at the El Canon dive shop owned by Pepe Maganya on the island of Isla de Mujeres.  While working in Mexico, I fell in love with the region, its history and its people.  Doug and Juan were former diving students of mine.  Doug was an iron worker in Austin at that time and had served many years at sea in the merchant marines.  Juan was a citizen of Mexico.  He was a college roommate of mine and was studying philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

An article in National Geographic by Jacques Cousteau had just come out about the "sleeping sharks" of Isla de Mujeres. These sharks were to be found in certain caves lying there motionless.  Divers could come right up next to them and not be harmed.  This was very exciting diving news at the time and I knew that I had to go and photograph them.  It seems that one of Pepe's relatives had discovered the sleeping sharks and was Cousteau's team's guide for this discovery. Having worked for Pepe, I thought that I would have no problem in making arrangements to see and photograph these sharks.

The article mentioned that at only certain times of the year were the sharks there in the caves.  We decided that Doug and Juan would be my shark body guards while I photographed them.  I was very nervous about being side by side with a shark with just a camera and strobe between me and Mr. Man-eater.  What I had imagined was that at the bottom of some cave lay these sharks.  We three divers would be between them and the cave entrance.  The article gave no information on these caves.

Doug and Juan got busy building " shark billies ."   These were round stick about three feet long with nails driven through the ends so that the sharp nail points projected out the end of the stick.  Theory has it if you poke a shark in the nose with these sticks, they will turn away and loose interest in eating you if they get too close.

Our travels plans were these:  Fly into Cozumel and spend a week diving there;  Go to Isla de Mujeres and spend time photographing the sleeping sharks;  then travel to Belize City and make arrangements to spend the remainder of the three weeks there diving Belize. We took off in the summer of 1975 and arrived at Cozumel as planned.  This was  to be Juan's first ocean dive.   Diving went smoothly at Cozumel and all of us had a good time.  Then it was off to Isla de Mujeres.

We had to take a ferry from Cozumel over to Playa del Carmen and bus to Puerto Juarez ;  then take another ferry over to Isla de Mujeres.  I told Doug and Juan all of my experiences in 1969.  Upon arriving, we got a room in a small hotel and then headed for the El Canon dive shop.  There I had a reunion with Pepe. I showed Juan and Doug the small room that I had slept in when I was working there.  Pepe now had added a upper story above his shop where he was now staying.  We were told that seeing the sharks  was a rare event and  that we had a less than 5% chance of seeing them. Pepe told me that Cousteau's team went out many days.  Only on a few sleeping sharks were seen. The ocean currents were very strong;  weather would have to be just right or it would be too dangerous.  Arrangements were made to have the same guide, Carlos Garcia Castilla known locally as “Valvula”, Cousteau had and a date was set.

Several days came and went, but the weather was too bad to go out, so we toured the island and had a good time doing so.  The hope for day arrived and off we went.  Rub-a-dub-dub, three divers ( plus guide) in a tub. Yes folks, diving was going to be harder than we expected.  Our boat was only 10 feet long, like a small fishing boat with an outboard motor on it.  The water was choppy and rough and the current strong.  El Sol was blazing hot.  The area we were looking for was called " El Cadena ," Spanish for "the chain." This was an area that had patches of coral, one after another, when viewed from above, looked like an anchor chain.

Eventually the area was found and anchor dropped.  Everyone struggled getting into full diving ger plus wet suit top.  It felt like trying to gear up while on some wild carnival ride. From experience, I have learned, while in the hot sun and a wildly rocking boat, to first assemble you equipment; then quickly put your top on and get in the water and wait a few feet down to avoid getting sea sick. Juan did not have the benefit of this experience, and got sea sick; one shark body guard ,down for the count ,remained in the boat.  Doug and I and the guide managed to get in and head for the bottom.

Doug was having too much trouble clearing his ears in the current.  It was not 'til I reached the bottom and look around did I see that he was missing.  Later I found out he was busy being swept out to sea and losing his shark billy.  So, it was me and the guide.  The guide was madly swimming about the reef pointing here and there places for me to check out.  It was then that I realized these " caves " were just overhangs in the coral reef ranging form 3 to 10 feet back.  All this still way nerve racking for me as I had no experience with sharks.  Then the guide started wildly pointing straight ahead into the limits of visibility, and there sure enough was a tail of a shark disappearing into the blue haze.  At this point the guide was low on air and went back to the boat.

Now alone, I just knew that as I would be peering under one of the over hangs with feet extending out into the open water;  Mr. Big would come up and suck me up like a piece of spaghetti!  I did see numerous spiny lobsters, and some queen angel fish.  However, with the surge and current stirring the white sand up, the remainder of the dive was spent on just surviving.  I feared not finding the tiny boat.  However I had swam upstream, so I floated back and to my relief found the anchor line and surfaced.

At the surface, I had to take my equipment off and hand it and my camera equipment to those on board.  I had to heave myself over the side of the small craft and slither into the boat like a seal.  There were both of my dive partners safely back, now both sea sick.  The ride back was uneventful.  Even though we may have had an all day pass on this joy ride, we were not standing in line for a second ride!

Having given the old college try to photograph the sleeping sharks, we decided to move on down the Yucatan coast by bus on our way to Belize.  We stopped and stayed a day or so at Chetumal, the capitol city of the state of Quintana Roo. In Cozumel, a vendor told me that many of the sea shells that he had for sale came from the remote area called Chinchorro Bank off the extreme southern end of the Yucatan peninsula.  There were no dive shop in Chetumal, so we walked the streets looking in people's yard to see who might have a boat stored there.  We wanted to make arrangements to see if someone would take us to Chinchorro Bank.  We eventually contacted a dentist who said he would take us to this remote area.  However, there was one hitch.  He would drop us off at a remote nearby coastal site to Chinchorro Bank and then come back to get us in 3 to 5 days. Common sense prevailed and we decided we were not that trusting. We did not want to be the first Texans whose sun-bleached bones would be found in this no-man's land.

At the border of Belize, we found an American business man that allowed us to ride in the back of his pickup down to Belize City.  We started out in the late afternoon and continued into the night.  As we came to a small wooden bridge, a small group of armed men stopped our truck and demanded to be paid for crossing the bridge.  When I realized that the men were armed, I thought that if Chinchorro Bank did not get us, these bandits would!  It did not take us long to pony up the bribe and we were allowed to proceed. Upon arriving at Belize City, our driver took us to the Golden Dragon Restaurant operated by Chinese.  There are quite a few Chinese in this area.  Our room was located off to the side of the restaurant.  We got to our room by walking through a large open air chicken coop.  That's class!

Belize is a mixture of cultures.  At that time, it was a British colony that wanted its independence from England, but needed the British Army occupation so that it could be defended from an invasion from Guatemala . We had come from the Spanish speaking country of Mexico to the English speaking country of Belize, and now being waited on by people speaking Chinese at the Golden Dragon Restaurant.

Our goal was to dive the nice waters off of Belize.  However, at that time there were almost no boats to do so.  There was one live-aboard that was scheduled to be back in a week.  Rumors of other boats that never materialized.  We spent 5 days trying to locate a diving boat, but had no luck.  This was very frustrating to be in the heart of diving country, but get no diving transportation.  We decided to give up and head back for Cozumel and spend the rest of our diving vacation on a sure thing.

So, we headed back to Cozumel.  While in Belize, Doug had come down with some type of tropical skin disease that was eating him alive.  He had to get back to Texas so he could get well.  Juan and I bid him farewell and would see him in a week or so.  Juan and I had a wonderful time finishing out our vacation diving the waters of Cozumel.  We flew back to Houston and I picked up my car at the airport and started to drive back to Austin.

On the way home, I began to feel this slight ear pain.  By the time I got home, my ear was pounding in pain.  All the diving had presented me with a severe case of swimmer's ear. After arriving home on Sunday night, I made two phone calls on Monday morning.  One was to my doctor to get me in on an emergency basis.  The other was to my boss to report to him that even though he had been kind enough to give me three weeks off, I was sick and could not come to work.  It was a couple of days before the medicine got everything in control for me to return back to work.  None-the-less, it just reinforces what we traveling divers already know; we need to have another vacation after our vacation in order to rest up to go back to the real world!