Spending Time with Sharks

It is June of 2003, hundreds of miles off the coast of southern California in the gleaming, tuna-packed waters of the equatorial Pacific. About twelve feet below the surface, 21 year-old Jordan Siliker sits alone in a cage about the size of his old dorm room, swaying calmly to the ocean's gentle currents. Rhythmically taking breaths from his oxygen tank, he remains oblivious to the occasional elephant seal that meanders peacefully by, his shaggy mop-top hair floating tenderly to and fro like a clump of dirty-blonde seaweed. He is asleep. Not only is he asleep; he's also waiting on one of the fiercest and most deadly killers in the world.

"I was a sharkwrangler," says Siliker, happily reminiscing on those four summer months he spent in situations like the one above, "and one of my jobs was to sit in the cages and wait until they came, no matter how long it took, then hop out and yell up to everyone on board."

The "they" he is referring to-Great White Sharks-are the main attraction of the regular five-day shark-chasing trips offered by Horizon Charters of San Diego, for which Siliker formerly was employed. On this June day, Siliker (pronounced Sil-uh-kur) was so exhausted from spending the day fishing that when he finally got a moment to himself, he decided to grab forty winks. He very nearly received about 3000 teeth instead.

"I realized I had left my arm hanging out of the cage and after a while it got pretty uncomfortable. I woke up briefly to shift around and there was a Great [White], about ten feet away, staring me in the face." With a cool chuckle Siliker recalls, "that was my first week on the job."

Sleeping on the job is generally frowned upon, especially during the first week. But only in select cases does it increase the risk of being eaten. To drift off knowing-expecting-that a Great White Shark, every beach-goer's worst nightmare, will eventually pay a visit speaks volumes about Siliker, an ever-relaxed example of the modern human knack for defying logic. The Stoics would have championed Siliker: "Do not be pained by external things, accept what befalls you-even if it's a Great White Shark approaching one of your limbs; sleep through it." Carefree yet hard-working, amiable and fearless, this otherwise normal college drop-out found himself in the summer of 2003 escorting hordes of photographers, journalists, academics, tourists, thrill-seekers and anyone else willing to pay the price out to sea to come face to face with the ocean's largest and most feared predator.

While Siliker, now 23, has never been the stereotypical, Discovery Channel-esque shark fanatic, the water has always been part of his life. As a highschool student in New Haven, CT, Jordan would spend his summers in the Caribbean and the Bahamas, teaching scuba-diving and leading scuba-diving trips, often-times for groups of highschoolers like himself. One night in the spring of his senior year, he had a dream that he put his college plans on hold and moved to the Caribbean to dive, dive, dive.

"That dream was just too real to push aside," says Siliker, who, upon graduating, boldly chased his vision to the sweltering beaches and wildlife-heavy waters of the Caribbean. During that year Siliker had his first encounters with bull sharks, hammerheads and tiger sharks, but those meetings were rare and never up close. Mostly he spent the year diving, working and enjoying about as many responsibilities as the fish with which he swam.

After his year in the Caribbean, Jordan decided it was time to towel off and return to the more conventional life of a then-19 year old. For the next two years he attended Kenyon College in the no-stoplight town of Gambier, Ohio, hundreds of miles away from the nearest coral reef.

"For two years I had all A's and F's," says Siliker proudly. Experts say that when a Great White Shark attacks a human, in almost every case it breaks off contact after the first bite, both because it doesn't like the taste of people and because humans are hard on the shark's digestive system. Siliker took this approach to his classes; attending them and devouring them if the teacher and material pleased him, test-biting them and never returning if they didn't.

After two years of this chew-and-choose approach at Kenyon, Siliker was once again overwhelmed by the need to submerge himself in caprice. This time, he switched oceans and moved to San Diego, having set up a job with Horizon Charters. Within a week of relocating he was back in the water, only this time under a much less familiar set of circumstances.

As one of three deckhands on the boat, he was given all the grunt work. He was obligated to fish all day, everyday-supplying himself with his own meals, which consisted almost entirely of fresh, yellow-fin tuna. At least one of the deckhands was required to be awake at all points of the day, so they often slept odd schedules and had to take naps, which at least partially explains his nightmarish decision to opt for a quick snooze in the Great White's backyard. "The deckhands, of which I was one, did everything. Cleaning, fishing, everything. But we also did everything that involved making the Greats visible for the customers."

And what, exactly, is involved in attracting a Great White Shark? Aside from personally catching the fish for/concocting the chum (a malodorous mixture of mashed up tuna and squid used to lure sharks), Siliker also was responsible for helping the photographers who frequently made the trip get the best photo opportunity possible.

"I would sit on the end of the boat and dangle these huge fish carcasses off the edge with a rod," recounts Siliker nonchalantly, "and when I saw the Great coming I would have to yank the fish away at the last second, giving the photographers a brief moment when the shark was up, out of the water, showing all its teeth." Siliker went on to describe how this job needed physical strength; if the Great White was quick enough to grab the fish, a tug-of-war was necessary in order to conserve bait. "If [the Great Whites] get the fish you gotta' fight 'em because obviously we only had a limited amount of bait. Sometimes you could get it back if the shark wanted to re-grip its bite. Other times you could tell you were about to get pulled overboard and you just had to give up.

For all the trouble and danger Siliker would go through on a daily basis just to attract sharks, getting rid of them was no easy task either. As a deckhand, he had the unusual and dangerous responsibility of "unsticking" the Great Whites.

"The cages we used-they're about 10' x 4' x 4', with spaces between the bars about 2' x 3'-every once in a while the Greats would become frustrated with us and charge the cages, trying to bite us," says Siliker with a discomforting degree of casualness. "Sometimes they would ram the cage so hard that they're noses would get wedged in between the bars." Whenever this happened, a deckhand-many times Jordan-would be called on to enter the cage (were they not already inside) and release the shark as quickly as possible before its powerful thrashing broke the bars of the cage. Siliker speaks of the process like it's as easy and enjoyable as cleaning out your ears:"You just hop in, pry their mouth open and karate chop 'em in the face until they wriggle free."

Perhaps the shark is not the only one inside the cage who felt the need to wriggle free. After spending nearly four consecutive months on a boat-many times he and his crewmembers would return from a five-day trip and have no time to do anything other than wash the boat before heading back out with new customers-Jordan's daily face-to-face meetings with one of nature's most frightening creatures are now a thing of the past. Siliker now works at a job some would still call extreme; he's a snowboarding instructor at Squaw Valley Ski Resort in Tahoe, California. The danger inherent in his old job, however, played no role in his decision to retire as a sharkwrangler. "Nobody should have to eat tuna every day for four months," says Siliker with a shudder. Hopefully he realizes that every good worker also deserves a carnivore-free bed.