Yvonne and the Giant Shark
     Yvonne looked beautiful.  She also looked scared as she steadied herself on the gently rocking boat.  The dive gear was piled around her feet and she was trying to remember how to hook the regulator to the SCUBA tank.  Today was to be her first dive into the ocean depths and you could tell by looking at her she was having second thoughts.  How had she gotten to this point?
     The year was 1972.  The Viet Nam war was in full swing.  We had landed men on the moon, brought them safely home, and become bored that they weren't doing more up there.  The pill had released women from their sexual bonds and the age of free love was upon us.  We had produced the standard two children and were approaching that hardest of all birthdays, number thirty.  I had started diving five years earlier and for awhile would blithely leave the wife and kids at home to go diving.  Then Yvonne started noticing other marriages breaking up among our diving friends.  The culprit was always that hubby had met a sweet young thing who shared the diving experience.  The stories about ship board romances are true, and it's easy to fall in love on a balmy Bahamas evening drinking rum and watching the falling stars from the deck of a seductively swaying deck.  Not that I had ever been tempted by the smooth skin, the heaving breasts, the flaxon hair and tiny bikinis of the nubile young maidens that joined us on our dives. Well maybe once or twice.
     At any rate Yvonne decided that if you can't beat 'em, you better join 'em, and for a couple of years she came along on the trips just for the ride.  She'd sunbathe, swim a little, float in a tube and look distainingly at the idiots carrying all those tons of gear to actually go under the water.  She was happy and I was happy because I was still able to go diving and no longer had to fend off the hoards of single women lusting for my body.  In my dreams.  Well this went on for quite some time .  Then surfacing from one of my dives, Yvonne's first words to me were, "Well, you idiots keep doing it so there must be something down there.  I think I'll take some lessons".  Well I practically fell back into the ocean I was so surprised.
     You have to understand that Yvonne was barely a swimmer.  She grew up in Stockholm, Sweden where it's just too damn cold to swim much.  She could do the classic European breast stroke, and believe it or not, had never put her head under water in twenty-nine years of living.  After we returned from that dive trip, we went down to the O-Club pool.  I tossed a penny into the shallow end and told her to dive down into the three foot depths and pick it up.  Well, Yvonne looked at me like I was stark raving mad and made some remark about getting her hair wet.  I instinctively knew dive training was going to be an interesting experience for both of us.
     Actually once we changed instructors (the first one thought he was a drill sergeant) she did pretty well in the pool.  Her lovely blond hair turned chlorine green for the first time in her life and she learned the fundamentals of snorkeling and SCUBA.  The class work was a different story.  First, English is a second language for Yvonne.  Second she has a long lasting aversion to anything mathematical.  At that time the geniuses that came up with the SCUBA courses thought that you should be a nuclear physicist to dive so the courses made you learn Boyle's Law, Bernoulli's Principle, Henry's Law, etc., etc.  As if when you were 150 feet under the water you were going to pull out your sliderule and perform algebraic calculations to determine that you had just taken your last breath of air out of the tank.  Needless to say, she hated the course, almost quit ten times in ten weeks and still didn't think much of this putting your head under water.  Somehow she passed both written and swimming tests.  We still think it was more because of how she filled her bikini than by the answers on the test.
     After a checkout dive in a Florida spring, she was ready for the ocean.  I got her geared up, had her spit in her mask, and we were ready to go.  Yvonne jumped in and headed for the bottom which was a long sixty feet away.  When I got down she was already waiting for me at the bottom.  It turns out that she can easily clear her ears continuously while descending.  I have to descend, stop, clear, descend and so forth, so she always beats me to the bottom.  I gave her the old thumbs up sign and she smiled and returned it.  Things were looking up.  This really was going to work.   We were going to be dive buddies.  We kicked around for a few minutes enjoying the beautiful corals, the tropical fish, and the canyon like crevices.  Then I saw a eating size grouper and became Steve the Hunter.  I fired a spear at the fish and to my dismay missed.  As I was reeling in the line between spear and gun, I glanced back at Yvonne.  She was frozen in fear with her eyes completely filling her mask.  I looked, and swimming by us no more than twenty feet away was the goddamndest biggest shark I had ever seen in my life.  Let me dispel a myth about diving.  Really, really you seldom ever see a shark while you're down there.  Much less a monster like this one.
     This big fella was a hammerhead.  I have no idea how big it really was, but underwater with the natural magnification from the dive mask, it looked to be at least fifteen feet long.  The most impressive thing about this fish was that it was as wide as a fifty gallon drum with a big belly.  It looked like it could swallow a diver without even chewing him up first.  Never in my previous five years of diving had I ever seen it's equal.
 About this time Yvonne came out of her frozen state and decided that she'd had just about enough diving for that day or for that life.  Remember "The Deep"  where the heroine suddenly goes clawing for the surface.  That was how Yvonne reacted.  Suddenly she was racing upward, anything to get away from the monster.  I reached up as she swam by me and grabbed her by the ankle and yanked her back down into the crevice where I was cowering.  I signaled that we were a lot safer down in this hole than floating up on the surface where we'd be easy prey.
     The shark continued to drift past us.  I am convinced it had one eye turned toward us deciding if we were going to be its next meal.  As it went by I started to relax a little thinking we were out of the woods (perhaps a poor analogy).  Then suddenly the monster turned and glared at us.  I'd like to say my life passed in front of my eyes, but actually I think I just peed.  My spear gun was unloaded, not that it would have affected this big fish.  It would have been like shooting a grizzly with a peashooter.  We were defenseless.  Finally after an eternity of playing stare down the shark, it whisked it tail and disappeared into the gloom.
     Now I had a decision to make. I knew I was mildly frightened so Yvonne had to be terrified.  I figured that if she  surfaced now that would be the end of her fledgling life as a mermaid.  She was frantically making signals to go up and I was trying to calm her and continue the dive.  The next thirty minutes passed uneventfully, although, I spent a lot of time twisting my neck looking for that shark.  Finally I allowed her to return to the boat.
     What thanks did I get for first saving her life from a girl-eating shark and then touring the reef with her?  None, and that's putting it mildly.  I got the tongue lashing of our previously happy nine years of wedded bliss, and was told in no uncertain terms that she had wasted time, money and almost lost her life, and was absolutely never going to do anything so stupid again, ever!
     A couple of hours later after satisfying our required surface interval so we wouldn't get the bends, I built up the nerve to speak to her again and politely inquired if she was ready for her second ocean dive.  To my surprise, she declined.  There is just no understanding women.  I judged that discretion was the better part of valor and said I'd just take a short dive by myself and report back on what I saw.  And, that one almost never sees sharks.  I had my dive and darned if I didn't see another shark.  This was a small one, nothing like Moby Shark.  When I surfaced, Yvonne asked how it was and did I see any sharks.  Sometimes a little white lie is justified so I said, "Darling, there's not another shark in the whole darn ocean.  It was a beautiful dive with glorious  little fish and colorful corals and that Cousteau would give his left flipper for a chance to dive this place."  She was unimpressed by my enthusiasm.
     The next day I geared up and was ready to dive alone when Yvonne said, "Hey, wait for me, I guess I'll try it again".  There really is no understanding women.

Steve Coester 2001

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Jerry Thornton who read the above account and who was on this trip with us sent the following:
        I certainly can verify this story. I have told it many times myself, although not as eloquently as you. I would like to add that I had been down with you two with two cameras and had just run out of film with one of the cameras and was on my way back up to the boat when the shark appeared. I did not see it at first until the absence of divers caught my attention. Then I saw the air bubbles coming out ot the trenches in the reef. All the divers were hiding. One of  the divers stuck his head out when he saw me and made "chomping" motions with his hand. I turned and saw the shark circling you and Yvonne with her cowering behind you. I suddenly thought of myself as shark bait halfway up to the boat and all by myself. I raced on up to the boat, told the divemaster what was happening and asked for the bang stick. He gave it to me and I headed for the back of the boat. I never made it to the water! All the divers were clambering aboard over each others backs like a Keystone! Cops movie. I also remember that we were missing one diver. One of the guys had wandered off by himself as usual. About 20 minutes later he showed up and could not understand what the excitement was about. Ah, the good old days!! Life is so boring now.
Jerry T.