Free Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley

off my wrist, but the tension on it was too great and I couldn’t budge it.
    I was on my back now, upside down, my right arm over my head as
longimanus
towed me away from the safety of the boat. I could once again see blood trailing from my leg; at this depth it was dark blue, and it streamed behind me like a wake.
    Everything stopped. At once. My arm was free, and I was floating, neutrally buoyant, about thirty feet beneath the surface. I looked at the broomstick—or at what remained of it:
longimanus
had bitten through it, and the strands of mashed wood fiber looked splayed, like a flowering weed.
    Far away, at the outer limits of my sight, I saw the black scythe of a tail fin vanish into the blue.
    I sucked one final breath from my tank, opened my mouth, tipped my head back, and propelled by a couple of kicks, ascended to the kingdom of light and air.
    Not until I reached the swim step at the stern of the boat did the weakness of fear overcome me, and the shock.
    I spat out my mouthpiece, took off my mask, and gurgled something like, “Goddamn … son of a
bitch
!… mother—”
    â€œNo!” said the director. “No, no, no. You can’t use that language on network television. Go back down and surface again and tell us what you saw.”
    Makos and Blue Sharks
    The final two sharks on my personal list of species to be wary of could not be more different from each other. One, the mako, is a loner that reminds me of Jack Palance in
Shane:
sleek, silent, and vicious. The other, the blue shark, is a pack animal that rarely bothers anyone but has, on occasion, killed human beings floating in the ocean. Because it is a pelagic (open-water) shark like
longimanus,
the blue shark is vulnerable to large commercial fishing operations, and over the last ten years populations of blues all over the world have been devastated.
    The mako is one of the fastest fish in the sea—far and away the fastest shark—and is the only shark listed by the International Game Fishing Association as a true “sport fish.” The feel of most sharks on a fishing line has been likened to hauling on wet laundry or trying to lift a cow; fighting a mako has been compared to riding a bull or wrestling a pissed-off crocodile.
    Makos leap completely out of the water, turn somersaults, and “run” in any and all directions in their frenzy to escape. Hooked makos have been known to charge boats and jump
into
open cockpits, where they’ve gone berserk and destroyed the boat that has hooked them. (A mako, remember, can weigh upward of a thousand pounds.) Some fishermen have jumped overboard rather than risk being beaten to death by the flailing fish, and a few have tried to subdue maddened makos by shooting at them with high-powered rifles—a technique not recommended, because of possible unintended consequences.
    While the body of a mako is one of the most beautiful in the sea, its face is positively ugly. A mako
looks
mean. Its teeth, upper and lower, are long, pointed, sharp as needles, and snaggly. Unlike a great white’s teeth, which speak to me of quick, efficient death, a mako’s teeth warn of a nasty end, of flesh ripped into ragged chunks. A mako’s eye, too, is distinct from every other shark’s. To me, at least, it looks crazed and threatening, like a coiled snake, ready at any second to explode into unstoppable violence.
    A mako’s speed, however, is its most dazzling weapon. Especially over short distances—like the range of visibility in most water conditions—it is capable of appearing and disappearing as if by magic: a gray ghost in the distance one second, right in front of you the next, gone the next, back again the next.
    A friend of mine was snorkeling in shallow water in the Bahamas a few years ago, poking the sand bottom with a long metal rod in search of buried cannons or shipwreck wood, when he glanced up and noticed a shark cruising at the far limit