Diving the Plastic Line

Howard Hall

Whale shark  ©Howard Hall

  It was humbling to swim so hard and still fail to gain ground on a creature that moved so lethargically. Six feet beyond the tempered lens of my face mask, the tail of a twenty-foot whale shark slowly swished back and forth. The huge tail moved so slowly that the animal seemed somnolent; as if at any moment it might simply fall to the sandy ocean floor in a state of hibernation. And yet, swimming at nearly one hundred percent effort, I could not gain ground. Huffing and puffing, I felt myself beginning to slip into a near meditative state, sort of a runner's high. In a detached way I began to wonder what would happen in the next fifteen minutes; either the sun would set, the shark would turn, or my muscles would fail. In any case, it would be over soon. I listened to the sound of air rushing in and out my snorkel and tried to think about something other than the cries of protest issuing from my legs.

  I couldn't see the shark's head or even its dorsal fin. Visibility was only ten or twelve feet, hardly ideal conditions for photographing leviathans. But I've often succeeded in getting interesting images of large animals in murky water. And besides, at the moment, I had little better to do. The tail of the shark continued to swish back and forth a few feet away. If I broke pace for just a moment, the shark would disappear into the gloomy water and I'd lose my chance. Anyway, in a few minutes I would be back aboard the Rio Rita sharing a beer with wife and friends. I found myself beginning a chant to the rhythm of my breathing. "Look for the plastic line, the plastic line, the plastic line...Look for the plastic line, the plastic line, the plastic line..."

   La Paz bay is a large place, but Tim Means, owner of Baja Expeditions, knew where to look for the sharks. Three days earlier he'd led us out to the spot aboard the Rio Rita.

   "Look for the plastic line," Tim had said.

   Tim doesn’t always make sense the first time around, and questions often only succeed in enhancing the mystery. But after a few moments my curiosity generated a very simple, pointed question, perfectly designed to elicit an unavoidably descriptive answer. "What the hell's a plastic line?" I asked.

   "A line of plastic," Tim chuckled.

  Ok, I thought. Tim and I have been friends since college and I had known better than to ask. I figured I'd find out soon enough, and accepted the answer as if it were satisfying.

   An hour after leaving the dock in La Paz, the Rio Rita began to slow. With a barely noticeable lunge of his chin, Tim indicated a placid streak of water a few hundred yards away. "Should find them around here someplace," he said. I recognized the placid streak on the surface as a convergence zone between currents. As we entered the current line, Tim said, "Look for plastic bags".

   "Ah," I said. "This is the plastic line, right?"

   "First thing you'll see is the plastic bags. The sharks like to feed right where the current accumulates all this stuff".

  As we entered the current line, I began to see the plastic. There were large white plastic bags, black plastic bags, containers for motor oil, wrappers for Twinkies, and an enormous assortment of small bits and pieces of plastic packaging that had been washing back and forth in the bay for, perhaps, years.

   I was hardly surprised at the amount of garbage I saw as we passed through the plastic line. It was nothing new or unusual. In fact, this current line looked just like the current line I had filmed a week earlier near Bimini. It, too, was filled with plankton, jellyfish, and plastic. Plastic garbage is a useful identifier for current convergence zones anywhere in the world these days. And current convergence zones are excellent places to find all manner of feeding animals, from large predators to giant plankton feeders.

   In the plastic line near Bimini, I'd been following a baby loggerhead turtle as it swam among the sargassum fronds, trying to differentiate between tasty, translucent jellyfish and deadly, translucent plastic. When turtles make the wrong choice and mistake plastic for jellyfish, they wind up with clogged intestines and fatal constipation. I instantly began to wonder if the same thing happened to whale sharks. It might be hard to find out. If a turtle eats plastic, it often floats ashore where a wildlife official can determine the cause of death. If a whale shark dies after eating plastic, it will sink like a rock to the bottom of the sea.

   A few moments after entering the plastic line, we began to see whale sharks. Soon, I could see ten or more slowly moving across the surface as their enormous mouths scooped in volumes of plankton-laden sea water. Bob Cranston and I grabbed our movie cameras and jumped in followed closely by my wife, Michele, and our friend, John Dunham. Now three days later, I'd shot forty minutes of motion picture film and was on my second roll of underwater stills.
The whale shark's tail swished back and forth a few feet away. Two large remoras were dangling from the bottom lobe of the fin. They seemed to regard me with a mixture of humor and distrust.

   "Hey, Gertrude. You happen to notice that thing swimming behind us?"

   "Yeah, Heathcliff. I seen it. But I been tryin' to ignore it hopin' it'd go away. Sure is ugly!"

   "You can say that again. Hey, I dare you to go suck on to it 'n see what it does."

   "No way, Gertrude! You do it. I bet you get ick from the thing. I bet your sucker rots right off the top of your head." Heathcliff wrapped his pectoral fins around his stomach and shuddered violently with disgust.

   "Well, I sure as hell ain't gonna suck on to it. It's too ugly and it swims like it's already sick. I hope it sucks a plastic bag and dies."

   "Yeah, me neither. I hope it sucks down one of those really big black trash can bags." Both remoras roared with laughter at the thought.

   I shook my head and tried to fill my mind with more constructive thoughts. I tried to concentrate on the dark shadow ahead of the shark's massive tail. When and if the shark turned, the shadow would elongate and that would be my cue to change direction in an attempt to head the shark off and maybe get a shot or two as it passed through the emerald light of sunset.

   As I watched the shadow ahead of the swishing tail, constellations of flotsam materialized and hurtled toward me. There were jellyfish, salp chains, siphonophores, ctenophores, plastic bags, plastic wrappers, and swarms of generic plastic bits that materialized, rushed by, and were gone. I couldn't believe how much plastic there was. Some of the plastic pieces were shredded and faded. They looked like they'd been circulating in these waters for years. I wondered how much of the plastic was being accidentally consumed by the leviathan that swam before me. It was a horrifying thought.

   Millions of tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean each year. It doesn't corrode or dissolve. It just floats around. Some of it gets concentrated in lines by ocean currents and is eaten by wildlife. And then the wildlife dies. Who's to blame? I recalled a breakfast I'd had during my Bimini trip a week earlier. We ate cereal from one of those cereal variety packs that contain six ounces of packaging for every ounce of cereal. The variety pack was shrink-wrapped in plastic and it took two boxes of cereal to fill a disposable plastic bowl. Each tiny cereal box had a plastic bag inside. We poured milk from a plastic carton. We put the resulting trash into a large plastic garbage bag which hung on the boat's refrigerator handle. Two meals later the bag was full of trash generated by those on board, and it was moved up on the boat's bow with a dozen other large plastic garbage bags.

   I remember when "disposable" was an important sales slogan for food containers. "And it's disposable!" the TV ads used to say. Well, today "disposable" should be considered a dirty word. The ethic it represents is killing our wilderness, our wildlife, and is choking us to death with mountains of garbage. Today all that disposable stuff is turning up beneath the foundations of our homes, our parks, leaching into our fresh water supplies and washing around in the ocean. I've recently begun to feel really terrible about all the stuff I throw away every day.

   As the plastic debris washed down the back of the whale shark and was thrown at me by the huge caudal fin, I began to think how easy it would be to change. If I had tons of money, maybe I'd open a chain of supermarkets. All the food would be either sold in bulk or sold in reusable containers. When you purchased cereal, milk, meat, sugar, Twinkies, or anything at my store, you'd receive the food in a container that was loaned to you against a healthy deposit. When you returned to the store, you'd return containers for credit. If you were too bothered to bring the containers back, you could just leave them where they could be collected by people who are happy for the income. When containers became too worn to be reused, they could be melted down and recycled into new containers. Why not? Remember when soft drinks and milk came only in returnable bottles?

   Suddenly the water ahead darkened and I realized the shark was turning to the right. I immediately turned right also, expecting the shark to continue its turn and make another pass through the current line. As I turned, I smashed into Bob. The surprise almost caused me to swallow my snorkel! I hadn't known he was there. Then we both struggled to get into position for our shot, kicking each other half to death in the process. I set my strobe on low power, checked my aperture to make sure it read F5.6, and dived. A moment later the shark's head passed through the sunburst and I fired off two quick shots. As I advanced the film for a third shot, something hit me from behind. When I turned, all I could see were spots. While photographing one whale shark, another had collided with me from behind! I tried to move back for a shot, but I was too close. Then I saw a third whale shark swimming below me, just above the sand. For a brief instant I could see three whale sharks at the same time with water visibility less than twenty feet! That had to be some kind of record. A moment later they were gone.

   I hit the surface, cleared my snorkel, and sucked in great lung-fulls of dry desert air. The sun was just descending below the Baja mountains. I took out my snorkel, and called to Bob a few yards away.

   "Hey Bob. Seen any whale sharks?"

   "Not a one," he called back with a laugh.

   The sun dropped below the horizon and the magic light faded. Bob and I swam back to the Rio Rita where Michele and John greeted us with a pair of cold beers. I dried off my hair, took a long pull on the cold Corona, opened a plastic bag of potato chips, and sat down to watch whale sharks feeding as sunset poured across the Sea of Cortez.