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Shark! by Peter Benchley
Shark! by Peter Benchley
One day in the Bahamas, the famous Peter Benchley was finning slowly along a pile of cannons, hoping to find some telltale sign of a wreck - an emerald ring, perhaps, or a gold chain!
Benchley looked up when he heard a sound from above, and saw that a friend snorkelling on the surface was slapping the water and pointing down at him - or so it appeared. He waved back.
The slapping stopped and he saw the snorkeller racing towards the boat. Benchley kept going. It was not until later than he learned that his friend had been trying to save his life.
Benchley reached the end of the pile of cannons. As did a great white shark, which had come along from the other side. Their eyes locked. Benchley was paralysed.
Fortunately the shark wasn't. It braked with its pectoral fins, spun round and vanished in a cloud of brown that had exploded from its bowels.
'I was alone,' writes Benchley,'kneeling on the bottom, stunned and breathless... and covered by a cloud of great white shark sh...'
This is just one of the gripping true stories in Shark!, from the author of Jaws.
'I have spent more than three decades studying, diving with, and writing about sharks, making documentary films about them, being involved in feature films and television movies...' Benchley writes.
'I have been threatened but never attacked, bumped and shoved but never bitten, and - many times - frightened out of my flippers.'
Some of his most dangerous encounters, and those of others, are related, yet this book is written in defence of sharks and the need to conserve them. Shark fatalities are rare, he writes. For every human death some 10 million sharks are killed by overfishing, for such items as shark-fin soup.
Others chapters deal with swimming safely in the sea, how to avoid shark attack, what to do when good dives go bad, and which sharks are dangerous. Definitely one for my bookshelf
Bernard Eaton
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Shark! by Peter Benchley (Collins, ISBN 0007154267) Paperback, 183pp, £7.99
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