Our oldest daughter, Ellie, has become obsessed with sharks.
She watches shark documentaries on a daily basis. She often dresses in a shark costume, and she even goes so far as to praise and defend the actions of the apex predators.
After begging us for weeks, we finally gave in this summer and allowed her to watch Jaws.
Don’t judge.
She ended up watching all four Jaws movies, even the forgettable fourth installment.
I’ve attempted on many occasions to temper her defense of the terrible ocean dwellers by telling her about my own encounters with sharks.
It all happened during the summer of my twelfth year on earth. My uncle, a former Navy man and employee at Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, was always trying to get my dad to drive down from Yazoo City to spend the weekend fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.
That summer, my dad took the bait, with the promise of catching sharks.
Naturally, he took myself and my older brother along.
The trouble was that every time we went out in my uncle’s many boats, things always went wrong.
If we were sailing, there was no wind. If we were eight miles out to sea, the motor would quit. A couple of times, we even took on water.
What could possibly go wrong with that kind of luck mixed with shark fishing?
My uncle was living with relatives at the time, and when he informed my cousin that she could not go on the fishing expedition with us, she responded kindly by putting a healthy dose of sand in the gas tank of the boat, completely unbeknownst to us of course.
We launched the boat into the Gulf of Mexico, and it was a hot, beautiful day. My uncle gunned the motor for about eight miles until we could see no land around us.
He stopped the boat and threw out the anchor.
The plan was to chum the water with dog food in order to attract the sharks.
I was put in charge of catching the shark bait. That was tiny catfish, which I ended up being quite good at.
I pulled in several of the fish, and my dad, my brother and my uncle started to threading their larger hooks in hopes of catching the big prize.
It did not take but a few moments before my brother got a bite. We could see the seven-foot-long shark as he circled the boat angrily with the hook in his mouth.
“It’s a shark!” my dad shouted.
He grabbed the pole from my brother.
If you’re wondering if my dad and my uncle had a plan for when they actually landed the shark in the boat, I assure you that they did.
At the risk of getting myself in trouble with PETA, I’ll only say this. Plan A to get the shark under control involved a tire iron and a very sharp knife. There wasn’t a plan B.
When they pulled the first shark successfully into the boat, it was far more aggressive than they had planned for.
Nevertheless, the tire iron and knife strategy seemed to work. At least for a moment. They threw the shark into the ice chest we had brought for the day’s yield.
Everyone celebrated the human triumph and began to thread our hooks once again for shark bait and sharks.
That is when we heard a loud rumbling from the ice chest.
The tire iron and knife ended up being more temporary measures. The shark flopped and knocked the lid open and began to attack.
He eventually cornered my uncle near the boat motor. For a second, my uncle thought that his only escape would be overboard. He looked down into the water where we had been throwing dog food for the past hour, and he could see more sharks chomping at the bits for him.
Meanwhile, the shark in the boat was doing a bit of chomping himself with his disfigured mouth. In a last-ditch move, my uncle picked up his tire iron and dealt another blow to his attacker. He grabbed him just under the throat and tossed him back into the ice chest.
After gathering ourselves and celebrating once again the human triumph, my dad and uncle went back into the ice chest, this time making sure that Jaws would no longer be an issue.
And then we started fishing for sharks again.
Another fierce one we caught that day got the best of us. While awaiting his appointment with the tire iron, he decided to make a break for it with the hook still in his mouth. He escaped the boat, and we watched my uncle’s expensive fishing rod tumble end-over-end into the horizon.
We ended up with over a half dozen sharks in the ice chest that day, not to mention several big fish.
As a storm approached, we decided to make our way home.
In case you forgot, there was still the issue of sand being in the gas tank.
The motor began to sputter right about the time the storm hit.
We were fielding waves taller than we could have ever fathomed, and the motor was giving out.
My dad sat at the motor, desperately squeezing the bulb for any life it could give us.
A seasoned sailor, my uncle navigated those waves and the storm with and without the power of the motor.
After a while, the storm passed, and we sat in the middle of the ocean, wet, scared, scarred and hungry.
Eventually, another group of shark fishermen motored over to us.
They agreed to tow us back to shore.
My cousin would eventually come clean about the sand. She was probably in far more danger after that than we were with sharks in the boat.
As for my daughter, I think I’m good with her believing sharks are harmless defenseless animals.
I’d much rather that be the case than for her to get as close to the sharks as I did.
