National Geographic: The Fox and the Shark Page #3

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the sharks for his cameras.

Well, generally, after

they've had a taste,

they start really to tear into things

and really start to be active.

And then you'll let

us get into the water.

I'll push you.

The result the critically

acclaimed documentary,

"Blue Water, White Death."

I n the crew was diver

cameraman Stan Waterman.

The two men would

become lifelong friends.

There's gotta be 12!

Oh, yeah.

Rodney had already done two films

about the great white

and Rodney probably knew more about

how to chum in the great white

very important that,

chumming, the putting out

of what was called burley

in Australia to attract them.

So that Rodney was the natural

man to set up the scene for us.

Rodney didn't have a cage back then.

Gimbel had the cages.

Rodney knew where to

find the burley, the chum,

and set up the boats.

And way back then, in the beginning,

Rodney was your man in Australia

if you wanted to film the great white.

Sorry about you cage, fellah,

wait 'til you see it.

How bad is it?

What a mess.

He bent the cage, Stan?

Oh, wait 'til you see.

The carnage of earlier films

was not repeated.

"Blue Water, White Death" marks the

beginning of a new kind of relationship

between white sharks and human beings

one that allows the sharks

to survive the encounter.

For Rodney Fox, the occasional

filmmaking stint was not enough

to support his young family.

So he took up abalone diving,

a dangerous but lucrative profession.

It would put food on the

table for 18 years.

But always, the sharks

weighed heavily on his mind.

One of the hardest things

to do over that

I was abalone diving

was when I had to return

to abalone diving the week

after I'd been out filming sharks.

We had attracted maybe

around the boat during the week period.

We had them biting

on the cages and taking baits

and showing these enormous teeth.

When the film crew had left

and everything had quieted down,

I had to make my living again,

and go back in the water

only a few miles from where we'd

seen all these sharks.

I had to put on another hat

and say to myself,

Sharks don't like abalone.

They generally don't eat humans.

You'll be okay.

But the first couple of days

I imagined those sharks

were looking at me.

And sometimes when my knee

would hit a soft sponge,

I wondered whether that was

a soft shark's belly

and whether it was biting my leg off.

But I knew that it was fear in myself.

The danger to abalone divers

was genuine enough.

Some of the best abalone beds

were near seal colonies

where white sharks liked to hunt.

But instead of killing the sharks,

Rodney and his colleagues designed

a protective working cage

for the abalone divers.

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