Issue 06
Swimming with Sharks
By Caroline RyderPhotos By Dean Karr
Illustration By Mike GIANT
If Great Whites knew how to use iPods, you know what they’d be playing: heavy metal, without a doubt. Dean Karr, one of America’s biggest rock music photographers and video directors, knows it to be true. In fact, one of his favorite pastimes involves diving into shark-infested waters with water proof speakers and blasting them fishes with classic Slayer and Iron Maiden. His verdict? Sharks are total metal heads. “We were playing (Iron Maiden’ s) ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ and this18-foot female swam right up to us,” recounts Karr, 40. “Then she turned around and swallowed one of the speakers. It was totally wild.”
The news that sharks prefer heavy metal over,say, Simon and Garfunkel comes as no surprise. Classic metal theme s—darkness , evil, and power—easily translate into the murky, cold-blooded world of the ocean’s greatest predators. And like heavy metal fans,sharks are hardcore creatures: they don’t sleep (if they stop swimming, they die); they like blood and death; they secrete urine through their skin, and if brought above water would probably, like many of our friends at Ozzfest, emanate the stench of piss . Hell, it’s probably time the word “shark” got its own umlaut.
And it seems the shark/metal affinity goes both ways, if Karr is any indication. On the face of it, Karr pretty much has it all. Asa music photographer and video director, he’s at the top of his game, having hit the big time after directing Marilyn Manson’s Sweet Dreams video. Now he’s got the rock-star friends(Ozzy Osbourne, Tommy Lee, Queens of the Stone Age, Iron Maiden, to name a few), the plush pad in the Hollywood Hills, and the fat bank account to match. But for much of his life, what Karr craved the most was the one thing he couldn’t get close to:sharks, and Great Whites in particular. They’ve been an obsession since childhood, dating back to the first time he saw the movie Jaws, upon which he started fanatically collecting books and magazines about sharks. “They had all these great pictures in them of some guy with his face chewed off or just a pair of feet. That’s pretty much the coolest thing when you’re a young boy.”
His childhood hero was Rodney Fox, the famous Australian shark hunter. Karr’s fifth-grade class project was inspired by a photo of Fox with his intestines hanging out following an encounter with a Great White (incidentally, Karr’s essay now hangs in Fox’s shark museum in Australia). More than 30 years later, Karr was able to hire Fox to take him and 11 friends on a shark-hunting expedition off the southernmost tip of Australia. It was a moment Karr had waited for since childhood: the opportunity to come face-to-face with a Great White. But there wasn’t a fin insight. “I came back with my tail between my legs,”says Karr. “ I was so deflated.”
He tried again a year later, visiting another well-known Australian shark hot spot, but was disappointed again. Then he heard about a tiny island called Isla de Guadalupe, about 150 miles off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. Tuna fishermen had been reporting unusually heavy shark activity, and it turned out the craggy island, pretty much deserted apart from seals and a tiny indigenous community,sits in some of the world’s most shark-infested waters. It’s also one of the last pristine locations for Great Whites in the Pacific Ocean, a place where divers can view sharks up to 100 feet below the surface. Divers had started calling it “Great White Heaven.” Karr tracked down a group called Absolute Adventures based out of Los Angeles that was running cage-diving expeditions there, and signed up straight away.
When he arrived, he met some of the natives on the island and soaked up their gruesome tales. “One time, this guy was out in the boat drinking and fell overboard. His friends found him the next morning – well, his top half,”says Karr. “He was totally chewed from the gut down.”
So that’s where Karr goes once a year, four times so far. He calls it his sanctuary. He always takes his underwater video and photography equipment, and plans on putting out a book of his shots in the near future. “The sharks are so beautiful,” he sighs. “They come by so slow and they are really graceful. It’s amazing to see.”
The fact that sharks have been known to ram and destroy dive cages doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. Karr just loves to get submerged in crystal-clear waters with the world’s mightiest eating machines and play them the heaviest metal known to mankind. And sometimes he likes to go down in the cage at night. “They just come out of the black,” he says. “Talk about shitting your pants.” Speaking of which, he recently scored rare footage of a 17-foot female taking a crap. “She was swimming by, and all of a sudden started making this grimacing face. Then there was this enormous cloud of shark shit. I don’t even think the Discovery Channel has footage of that. It’s pretty cool stuff.”
Shark Facts
• If you turn a shark upside down, it will enter a natural state of paralysis. That’s ho w shark experts manage to handle them.
• More people in the U.S. Are killed by dogs each year than have been killed by sharks in the last century.
• A group of sharks is called a shiver.
•“ Jaws” is based on a book about the Jersey Shore shark attacks o f1 916 , when a Great White killed four swimmers and mauled one along an 80-mile stretch of New Jersey shoreline.
• Sharks have a sixth sense: they can detect electromagnetic currents , including the nervous systems of all living creatures.