Two summers ago, on a trip to the Cape, I worried about sharks.
I was afraid I wouldn’t get to see one.
That summer, I was lucky enough to accompany Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries shark biologist Greg Skomal, in order to document his study of some of the Cape’s latest newcomers: great white sharks.
But the sharks were not cooperating.
Drawn by a rebounding population of gray seals, who come to these shores to birth their pups, these most feared and powerful of all sharks show up at the Cape each summer — right about the time human beachgoers get there. What could go wrong?
To hear some people tell it, big, scary, great whites are lurking everywhere, waiting to snatch swimmers. “Nothing could be further from the truth,’’ says Skomal. “They don’t want to eat people,’’ he explains. “They want to eat seals.’’
“Great whites are not at all what people say about them,’’ Skomal told me. “They’re not all curmudgeonly and angry and wanting to kill something.’’ In fact, great whites can be surprisingly shy — as I discovered on my first shark sortie with Greg.
To find the sharks in the Cape’s pea-green waters, Skomal and his fellow researchers perform a delicate ballet on sea and air. Flying at 1,200 feet in his Citabria airplane, pilot Wayne Davis searches for the torpedo shape of a great white in the water. When he finds one, he directs Skomal’s boat to film it.
Skomal wants to identify as many individual great white sharks as possible to find out how many there are. Along the shark’s sides, the meeting of the shark’s steely gray upper surface and its white underbelly forms a distinctive, individual pattern.
Filming this sounds like a tall order — and by the end of our second, unsuccessful sortie together, searching sharkless, bucking waves cloaked in glaring sun, I was worried we’d never get the chance to try.
But on our third sortie, everything changed. As our captain pulled alongside one huge, silvery shadow after another, Greg’s delight was infectious. “Sweet!’’ he cried, recognizing Chex, a male shark he’d already tagged. “Big shark — big boy!’’ he shouted, as he filmed an impressive 14-footer.
The thrill of that day made me long for closer contact. Later that fall, I got my chance. I found myself in an underwater cage, breathing through a tube connected to an air tank on deck, off the coast of Guadalupe Island, Mexico. Its clear blue waters afford exceptional views of this storied predator.
Inside the cage, I knew I’d be safe. But what would it feel like to be just yards away from a 1,500-pound fish whose 300 serrated teeth were capable of severing the head of a 20-foot bull elephant seal?
As I donned my scuba gear, my heart pounded.
But then, literally out of the blue, from about 100 feet away, the ocean seemed to gather itself into the shape of a shark, and swam toward us. Sleek and sinuous, silver above and cream below, the shark was as elegant as a knight in white satin. His dark eye swiveled in its socket to glance at me, and then flicked away. There was no menace in his glance.
In that moment, I shared Skomal’s devotion to a fish many people fear.
Mysterious and misunderstood, as apex predators, for millions of years, great whites controlled the balance of the ocean ecosystem. On humans’ watch, we have decimated shark populations: We kill 100 million yearly. By 2050, we will have filled the sea with more plastic than fish. No wonder, then, that when that great white approached me in the shark cage, instead of fear, a great sense of calm swept over me. With him in charge, the ocean would be in good hands.
Sy Montgomery is the author of 20 books on animals for adults and children. Her newest, “The Great White Shark Scientist,’’ with photographer Keith Ellenbogen, highlights Greg Skomal’s work on Cape Cod.
