I HOPE THIS HELPS!!!
The island of Mikomoto is a barren, windswept, wave-battered chunk of basalt infested with sharks and scoured by current, and looks as if it erupted from the fever dream of a malarial sea captain. Six miles offshore of Japan’s quiet port town of Minami-Izu, its waters are so treacherous that the 25-acre uninhabited island was chosen in 1870 as the site of one of the country’s first stone lighthouses, a 75-foot tower wrapped with black stripes. For Mark Healey, these are all the ingredients of a good time.
“This should be fun,” he says as the Otomaru, our 40-foot chartered fishing boat, pulls into a rocky cove.
Clad head to toe in a three-millimeter camouflage wetsuit with fins to match, he looks like he just swam out of a Special Forces unit. He has a black GoPro camera (one of his many sponsors) strapped to his head; it’s an accessory so common in his daily life that it may as well be a permanent appendage. A knife is cinched at the hip to his weight belt, along with a trio of two-pound lead weights, custom-made to reduce drag in the water. A black glove protects his left hand. In his naked right he holds a four-foot teakwood Riffe speargun.
Healey takes a giant stride off the Otomaru into the 80-degree water. After a few minutes of deliberate breathing, he bends at the waist and dives. His fins—three and a half feet long for freediving—break the water with a gentle splash, then slide beneath the surface. One, two, seven long, smooth kicks take him down to 30 feet, at which point the lead weights take over, pulling him deeper. One minute in—a point when even strong divers would head up—Healey scans the depths and glides down to 80 feet.
A 34-year-old professional big-wave surfer, Healey has built a career chasing down the dangerous and nearly impossible. He’s a perennial finalist in the World Surf League’s Big Wave Awards—the discipline’s equivalent of the Oscars—having won the top prize in the Biggest Tube category in 2009 for a barrel in Oregon and the Biggest Paddle-In Wave in 2014 for a 60-foot monster at Jaws, on Maui’s north shore. He once won the Surfer magazine poll for Worst Wipeout, crashing on a punishing wave at Teahupoo, in Tahiti, that would have vaporized most surfers. But Healey isn’t in Japan to ride waves—he’s here to swim with sharks.
As a member of a six-person scientific expedition, he has come to Japan for two weeks to tag an endangered population of scalloped hammerheads that congregate around Mikomoto. The sharks have plummeted in numbers by as much as 90 percent, largely due to overfishing and an insatiable appetite in Asia for fin soup. The scientists hope that the data they record, such as population sizes and migratory patterns, will improve conservation policies regionally and globally.
Between Austin Gallagher, the 30-year-old marine ecologist and founder of the conservation nonprofit Beneath the Waves who assembled the group, and the other scientists, there are enough degrees on board to rival a thermometer. Yet Healey, a man whose traditional schooling ended after the seventh grade, is the linchpin of the project. He’s a champion spearfisherman and freediver who can hold his breath for an astounding six minutes underwater, and the scientists can’t tag these notoriously hypersensitive sharks without him.
“Hammerheads are nearly impossible to catch on a line without killing them,” Gallagher says. “They need to be tagged on their turf, underwater. Because they’re so skittish, they stay away from the noise and bubbles created by scuba divers.”
Step-by-step explanation:
