Imagine being one of the only people to have ever survived being in the jaws of a broadnose 7 gill shark... a prehistoric shark that usually hides out on the dark and cold floor of the ocean over a thousand feet from the surface! This was Paul Romanowski's reality while spearfishing halibut in Palos Verdes, CA in 2009. Hear the never-before-told story... directly from Paul himself!
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Imagine being one of the only people to have ever survived being in the jaws of a broadnose 7 gill shark... a prehistoric shark that usually hides out on the dark and cold floor of the ocean over a thousand feet from the surface! This was Paul Romanowski's reality while spearfishing halibut in Palos Verdes, CA in 2009. Hear the never-before-told story... directly from Paul himself!
Win exclusive giveaways from us by joining the email list here:
https://www.theteethpod.com/
The best podcasts on spearfishing:
https://www.NoobSpearo.com
https://www.SpearFactor.com
OKcoin: $50 of BTC for your newly opened account (and $50 of BTC for us). $100 minimum deposit or transfer. Must pass ID verification level 2 and not withdraw within 30 days to qualify. Reward BTC is available for withdraw after 180 days. Qualify by using this link:
https://www.okcoin.com/join?channelId=600145749
7 Gill Shark Attack Survivor - Paul Romanowsky
The TEETH Podcast - Season 1, Episode 1
Note: The TEETH Podcast has been created for the ear and is meant to be heard. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotions, music and, sound effects that do not translate to print. We generate transcripts that we hope make for enjoyable reading using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please confirm the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Paul Romanowski:
This was almost a 20 lb. halibut. I mean, it was definitely a 20 lb. halibut because when I weighed what was left of it, it weighed 19 pounds… It was shredded because the thing didn’t take any real bite, it folded it over and just plowed down on it, shredded the meat off of them literally like you had laid the meat down and run a lawn mower over it.
Jeremy Carberry:
This is the Teeth podcast: wild animal attack stories firsthand from the survivors. I am Jeremy Carberry, a wilderness kayak guide, animal handler, the survivor of a few attacks myself and, your host.
A prehistoric shark that spends most of its time in cold, deep and, dark canyons a 1,000 feet under the surface of the ocean has ascended into shallower waters off the coast of Los Angeles to hunt for prey. It’s early 2009 and while spearfishing halibut, Paul Romanowski becomes one of the only people ever to find himself inside the jaws of a massive broadnose sevengill shark.
It only takes about a minute of being inside his home in Orange County to realize this guy has probably spent as much or more of his life on and in the ocean as he has on dry land. There are multiple spearfishing competition trophies in the living room. There is a very large spiny lobster mounted above the fireplace, and above the kitchen table is a beautiful Japanese Gyotaku style art, that is done by covering a freshly-caught fish in ink and then capturing the image of the fish by pressing it on rice paper. We cracked open two Pacificos and Paul began telling me about how he first got into spearfishing.
Paul: On a primitive level I was like probably walking age, 4 or 5 years old, and my uncle– I grew up in Hawaii mind you, born in Hawaii and grew up there– and my uncle literally used to do the old school thing, where they take a torch out and drag an ice chest behind them on the reef, and walk on top of the reefs at night and stab fish. He actually caught…also… a lot of small octopus doing that and so he had a couple of different spears that he would actually carry different heads with him and he’d just screw ‘em on to a spear real quick. Then what they did was towed an ice chest behind him and there's a great trade-off you got ice in the ice chest, and some water, some salt water, and a bunch of beer. And as you go and drink the beer, then once the beer was empty the ice chest was full of fish and the night was over and you go home.
But yeah, so I actually caught eels as one of the big things, was you take little pieces of shrimp and coconut oil and so you chew coconut oil or kukui nuts– which, they'll give you the runs so I didn't chew the kukui nuts, I’d chew coconuts. You spit the oil on the surface of the water and it will glass it off so you can see without a mask. You're only working in six inches to a foot of water and you reach into a hole. So you put these pieces of shrimp inside your hand, you reach in the hole, and these little eels will come up between your fingers to grab it and you just literally quickly scoop them up, throw them in the ice chest, and keep moving.
Jeremy: It sounds like a pretty awesome childhood.
Paul: It was like, you know Gilligan's Island I lived in. It was kind of a neat time.
3:43
Jeremy:
When Paul was a bit older he and his family moved to Southern California where his love of the ocean continued. As a young man, he worked on commercial fishing boats. Before we get into the story, I'd like to note that overfishing sharks is a serious problem that is having a devastating negative effect on the health of the oceans. The key word is: overfishing. I personally haven't done enough research to really defend any commercial shark fishing, but I do know that what happens on commercial fishing boats in California is very closely regulated, and the species of sharks mentioned on this episode have all been sustainably caught, while following all local laws.
Paul: When I worked on sport fishing boats in another era, right? You're going way back in time, like in 1986, 1987, I’m a teenager. I was working on the California Dawn when we brought the boat down from Westport, Washington and fishing it out of Davey’s locker. We did shark trips, and we took customers out, we’d take a max of 15 people on the boat. You set up a drift and you start catching sharks. We caught lots of blue sharks and we caught a couple of threshers here and there, but we didn't fish threshers the right way…
Jeremy: This was all rod and reel?
Paul: Yeah! Yeah, so we caught a couple threshers, but we didn't fish in the right way. We didn't trawl them, we didn't drag live baits much, we were just throwing chunks of meat over the side and waiting for sharks come up. We did catch quite a few makos, and we got some bruisers! We got some big ones, and I've had several mako sharks push me off the boat.
Jeremy: Off the boat, into the water?
Paul: I was safer to go in the ocean than be on a boat with that fish! One of the first real big ones we brought up, we gaffed one. The boss said put a gaff in it in the bough and we'll drag it down to the back of the boat. This was about a 200-250 lb mako– this was a big fish.
And I'm a real fat guy back then– probably about 125 lb, 6 ft tall. A beanpole, right? I’m a stick. I'm full of piss and vinegar, and I reach over and I pop this thing with the gaff, and the boss is getting ready to shoot it. As soon as I hit it with the gaff, the shark comes out of the water– because makos will jump– and I hit it, we thought it was fairly tired and were wrong. It came up and I pulled back instinctively on the gaff I just pulled back on the gaff, and dragged that thing into the bow of that boat with me. It's an open bow rail boat, it wasn't like an enclosed bow, if you go on the Freelance or the First String, or some of the other big boats, it’s an enclosed bow with a wooden plank rail.
This is an open deck with a metal bow rail around it, and so that shark promptly broke the gaff right, and smacked the heck out of me with it, and then it was me and that thing in the bow of the boat. It basically spun around and started smashing the railing, and I mean bending the rail with its tail but just smashing into everything. It wound up with the business end of the shark pointed towards me and I was in the water. That was that. I didn’t need any more prompting, I just did a half backflip straight over the rail or something, and I was gone. I was like yep, not staying here!
Jeremy:
Paul dabbled with spearfishing smaller species in shallow water like corbina, but when he discovered people were shooting bigger fish, and faster fish than he had ever thought possible– like wahoo and yellowtail– he got into it, really into it. Joining the Los Angeles-based spearfishing group The Fathomeers plugged him into a community. Over the years, and even decades, Paul has gained a lot of experience and success diving primarily off of California and Mexico. Paul has also traveled to places like the Carolinas and Texas to pursue his passion. Through the years, he has had quite a few encounters with large sharks, including the most temperamental and territorial of them all: the bull shark.
7:45
Paul: I’ve dealt with bulls in Texas, and I've dealt with bulls and all the others in Hatteras. That was really hard because there were lots of the smaller white tips, silkies and duskies and stuff, and swarming. Lots of swarming and so a lot of opportunities to get bit on accident. You shoot like king mackerel there and amberjack and stuff and so the king mackerel are just oily and stinky and bloody, and they draw them like nothing you've ever seen. I’ve never seen any fish draw sharks as fast as that, that was an eye-opener, that was pretty far from the boat and heavy current. I shot that fish and when I tried to put the brakes on it to stop it early because I had a hunkering that all those sharks were around me. I’ve never seen any fish turn them on like that, those were really bad. Wahoo in Texas is pretty bad, and in Texas it was a lot of bulls. The bulls ride underneath the other ones and the problem is when they show up everybody else moves out of the way they don't even think twice about it. We deal with 1-2 or 5-6 bulls, you know one or two and you put other divers in the water to try and protect you, and get your fish back if you can, and if you start to see 3,4, or 5, you're done with that area. You just pack up and leave and run, there's nothing else to do but get in the boat and bail. Just not ideal. The problem is that like when you are fighting your fish, you’re competition to them. It's very easy for them to go and clip it– I mean I’ve watched bulls rip apart other sharks– rip them apart– going after my wahoo and I watched them just rush up and tear apart a 5 ft silky just because he was annoying them. After that silky got shredded, every other silky skipped. They were like, well that's that. They were gone. I mean they were like, and it was like, great, so it's me and this guy, and this guy is a shark eater. And it’s like, wow that's cool! I'm leaving. What are you going to do? Your backup divers are like– you know that polite little tap on the shoulder… we're out of here, good bye, good luck. You're at a bar and you just picked a fight with Leroy Brown. Dude, you're on your own, goodbye. There's a song about this, good luck.
They're really, really serious. You know they're very, very serious. You can't deter them, there's not much to them. One of our trips we went on, I went with, we had a diver back out for a sinus issue, medical, he wasn't feeling it. He was sick and so he didn't go with us, so I wind up being the only guy diving on a trip where we go out to fish wahoo and red snapper and stuff. We trolled a couple wahoo and the other guys are all happy, and they're like okay, jump in and shoot your fish. I was solo and it was like the most [expletive] you ever did in your life because you know they keep throwing guns overboard at me, with new powerheads on, and I’m just plugging, like knocking big sharks off of me and off of my fish as I'm trying to deal with my fish and bungee and short line it back. You're just watching big bulls sink out after being powerheaded because they're going after you, and then you see another big shark pick them up and swim away. You’re like, I don't want to be here anymore, at all! So it took 4 wahoo to get one in the boat.
Jeremy: Wow!
Paul: It was the fourth one, you know it was just that they were all average-sized fish, it wasn't anything like special one way or another but to get to that one fish. I was laughing, I was like how many powerheads do you guys have? And they were laughing, They’re reloadable, don't worry about it, endless supply. Like my God.
Jeremy: That's normal for them, they’re used to bulls!
11:50
Jeremy:
At this point in our interview, I needed to take a break to go to the bathroom. When I came back Paul had just pulled out a tupperware from the refrigerator.
He proceeded to slam down a chunk of wahoo and opah, which he had smoked himself. He just gave me a slab of each, no fork or utensil. And then he took two slabs for himself and just started eating them with his bare hands, so of course I followed suit.
Jeremy: This fish is great. What's the more tender one?
Paul: Hold it up, let me see– that's opah. Yeah, they’re something else, yeah. For people who haven't had it, the best way to describe it is the best qualities and properties of salmon and the best qualities of properties of tuna put together.
Jeremy: Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.
13:00
The location of the 2009 sevengill attack was Palos Verdes in Los Angeles. Located between Long Beach and LAX, also known as PV.
Paul:
We used to dive kelp, and we never really saw sevengills. We heard of them and we'd see one of every once in a blue moon. I say like 50-60 active divers in the Fathomeers diving PV all the time for sea bass and stuff. One, maybe two would get seen in a whole season, and then the dynamic changes as the ocean does, and all of a sudden we started to see lots of sevengills. And they got bigger, and they got bigger. Somewhere between 7 and 10 ft long and between, say, 175 and maybe 300 lbs. Pretty big. And they look like an oaf. They look, like a, dopey, lopey, they’re a bottom shark, they don't have fancy cut hard edged shapes to them. They don’t look like something that would be rocket-ship fast.
Jeremy: Prehistoric.
Paul: Prehistoric, mud dweller, kind of bottom sharks. Every once in a while, somebody shoots a sea bass and it would wrap up real deep and you’d go down and there would be one kind of milling around but we weren't having to fight them for our fish.
Jeremy: The broadnose sevengill shark get their name from the shape of their snout and the extra two gills that they have compared to most other sharks which have five. They also do not have a distinctive dorsal fin that most other shark species have on their backs. Instead, the sevengill has a very small dorsal fin just before the tail. Broadnose sevengills have been seen swimming off of every continent except Europe. Its teeth are also unique. You're probably familiar with white shark’s jaws and teeth. Its teeth generally go straight down from the top jaw and from the bottom jaw they go straight up. A sevengill shark's teeth are crooked and angled toward the outside corners of the mouth, which makes it hard to believe that they aren't from England. The reason for this is when it shakes its head from left to right, the angled teeth can more effectively tear through whatever flesh it has latched onto. They are a really bizarre creature that looks like it crawled out of a prehistoric biology textbook. Accounts of sevengills attacking humans are very rare, which makes this story all the more interesting…
Paul:
So there is a pretty good halibut season going on, and we've been knocking them out. Then a buddy of mine called me up, and he laughs and he says, you know I got two in the dirty water and I spooked three fish over 20(lbs)! …and I was like, when was this? and he's like, last night! like 4 hours ago I got out of water at 2:00 in the morning. I stayed until I turned purple but I'm just letting you know because the morning high tide is in, the viz will be there, and it's all yours. I’ve got to go to work, so, have at it.”
16:18
Jeremy:
On the morning of the attack in early 2009, the water temperature was around 60 degrees Fahrenheit and the visibility was only 6 ft. If you are tall that means you can't even see the tip of your own fins clearly. Imagine walking through a forest where the fog is so intense you can only see slightly further than you can reach. I'm pretty comfortable in the ocean but these kinds of conditions freak me out even when sharks are not around. Paul on the other hand…
Paul:
No! For halibut diving it’s really comfortable. There’s enough vis in shallow water that you can see them. You can just get above the bottom and you drop in, you're not sinking, it's shallow diving. It's very nice, a little bit cold but. But they're there and you just, and you know there's a good amount of current goofing around, because you're almost, like you said, almost in the surfline. There's a little bit of surge and so it's easy, it uncovers them and it covers them up. It's a good game to play! You know it makes for good diving and it makes good for skill building. You can do, relatively speaking, long dives and if you're training or something, you know you can do these really long swimming dives and you're not in a lot of–in general– risk. You know you just when you go to get air you just pretty much stick your head up and you're on the surface in one second flat. So it's comfortable in that respect, and it's a good way to train, and it's like lobster diving– a lot of lobster diving in shallow water is very cardiovascular– you can actually get a workout doing it. I like it. It's fun diving.
So we roll down there and my dive partner at the time– I was diving with Kelsey a lot…
Jeremy: That's Kelsey Albert, the Kelsey Albert who is a multiple world record holder for trophy fish she has speared all around the world.
Paul: She's got an absolute thing for hunting halibut–it's a huge part of her diving. So we got in and we started looking and we're having a great time and we started smacking halibut and we were getting some pretty good fish. We had seen a lot of sharks… the leopard sharks were in there breeding. So there were leopards up to 6 feet long in like 5 ft of vis, and they were bumping into you but they're not a threat. I don't really ever feel threatened in any way by them.
Jeremy: They don’t even have teeth right?
Paul: They’ve got teeth!
Jeremy: They just have those molars right?
Paul: Let one bite you and call me back. They have teeth, they will- they're fish eaters. No they don’t have molars, they've got smaller teeth but their teeth are maybe 3/16 or ⅛ inch long but they will saw you. If one grabs you and he starts rolling and twisting he's taking material with him.
Oh yeah and their jaws are plenty strong enough to do the job. But in general, they want nothing to do with you, they don't want to fight at all. These ones are breeding so it doesn't matter, that's not what they're there for at all. These sharks would let you come up and rub up against them, they'd rub up against you and so it's unnerving because it's dirty water but it's beautiful because it's gorgeous big, big females in there and then five six foot leopard sharks, really really big. Six foot female leopard is like 60 lbs, I mean it's not a heavy shark, you know. But gorgeous, right? And the viz just didn't do it any justice.
Jeremy:
If it sounds like Paul knows firsthand that leopard sharks have sharp teeth, it's because he does. I found this out later when I asked him if the sevengill was the first time a shark had actually clamped on to you.
20:05
Paul:
Other than dumb stuff.
Jeremy: What’s dumb stuff?
Paul: You know, like somebody says, you know ‘we don't have any fish but we’ve got a big party coming and the fish tacos sucked we’ve only got like 3 calicos. So you go down and pop like a big 5 foot leopard shark on purpose, and then when you bring it up all hot and green and everything and you hand it to somebody the thing grabs onto you! That's a different story, that's dumb stuff!
Jeremy: I don't really know too many people that would consider getting bit by a 5-ft leopard shark ‘dumb stuff’, but Paul's kind of guy that that's not really a big deal to him.
So back to Palos Verdes on the morning of the attack.
Paul and his dive partner Kelsey are swimming in very crappy visibility of about five to six feet.
Paul: In one of the dives, you see this thing that goes by and it’s like, woah, that was big. That was big! I got a look at one of them and
you do wonder if that one’s got bad intentions, what is it? Then I got a glimpse of it, and then I told Kelsey there’s a bigger shark here, a much bigger shark in here. She goes yeah so I’ve just seen like two of them! One of them is absolutely huge, so that means there's multiples in there. So they're not in there breeding, they’re in there feeding they are in there and they can locate halibut and other fish off the bottom. That's what they do.
22:02 pause
So we're diving around, I shot another halibut and it went pretty berserk.
I think it was like the fourth one out of a five fish limit. I was laughing, I'm going to limit, and my five fish limit’s going to be pushing like 80 lbs– it's going to be a good day! I had a bunch of big halibut on me and I was like this is really turning into a mess. So while I was dealing with this fish, this shark came through and smacked into my legs and literally, like basically bowled me over, and then it turned around and came back and it definitely went towards my halibut.
Jeremy:
The sevengill that came after you was pushing…
Paul: That fish there was like seven feet and probably let’s say 14-16 inches in diameter– fairly heavy fish.
Jeremy: It bumped you and you felt it?
Paul: Yeah, I mean all I can and it made itself real visible because I was dealing with the halibut and it came right between my feet, like up from underneath me and I'm only in 10 ft of water and shallow, shallow water. As far as we’re sitting apart was as far as you can see and the shark was half the distance. It was all over my fish, so I pull my fish away and I literally kick it a couple of times– you know, put my feet up in its face. And it left me alone.
So the fish you know was roughhousing with me and that wasn't so great and then Kelsey had said she was having them on her and so I killed this halibut finally, I put it on me and I load the gun. Four out of five ain't bad, right? I'm going to pass on a limit, I’m going to get out of here and I turned around and I said, you know, I think it's probably time we cut our losses.
Jeremy: The dive partner wanted to get her limit of five fish before getting out of the water. The two of them reach a compromise when Kelsey tells Paul…
Paul: Ok, I'm going to do a couple more dives and find a fish and I'll just get another one to match you and then we're gone.
Jeremy:
This might sound crazy to somebody who doesn't fish or hunt, but what but what you have to realize is: you don't get conditions every day that produce fish… like this. Whenever they are in close water and you know where they are, and you're getting them, it's very exciting and you want to get your limit because you don't know when the next time you're going to get these kinds of conditions. It might not be for months or maybe even a year.
Soon after they reach a compromise of Kelsey getting one more fish and calling it a day:
Paul:
She pops up and I see her and she’s obviously tangling with a fish and so I turn and I start to swim towards her and suddenly, I was moving sideways in the water in a– the only way I can describe it as hydraulic. It's like– imagine trying to push against a car while it's just driving against you– and I was going sideways, and I realized that that was way not normal. I looked down and there is the head of a humongous sevengill on my right thigh and the entire big halibut, the big– you know there's several halibut on my stringer– this
25:08
giant halibut is wrapped around my leg, completely folded around it like a taco shell, and this thing bears down on it and he crushes down into it and he starts shaking. So fast. I mean pushed and there's nothing I can do about it. Absolutely nothing. I mean I'm stuck in this thing's mouth, it ain't letting go and I can feel, like, the pressure of it but I’m not feeling the teeth just yet. I did the first thing which comes to mind which is start pounding on that thing. You might as well be hitting a rock, because that's what a shark's head feels like when you're punching it as hard as you can underwater. And the thing is, I was breathing. I was very lucky– I'm on the surface…so it didn’t happen down 50 ft.
It happened while I was on the surface swimming. At least I had a good breathe up or whatever– I didn't feel that kind of a compromise. In the end I just started like, when I realized I could see its eye, and then I recognized sticking my face into the water to look at the shark that was on me, and recognizing that it was a really, really big sevengill, I started punching it right in the eye and trying to push. The push thing didn't work too much– the halibut was really slimy so it actually did have a little bit of effect, but I think I instinctively probably curled my leg up or something which kind of helped lock the damn thing in place.
27:00
Jeremy:
When it clamped down on your leg, you felt the pressure of him biting the halibut, him biting through the halibut and then your leg was like in the middle of the halibut?
Paul:
Imagine like putting your leg in a vise and just start tightening it, it was that much kind of pressure. It was like the amount of pressure the thing drove in, and what was weird was, you know okay, you’ve got a wetsuit on and then you got this fish wrapped around and it’s a couple of inches thick, you couldn't feel the shark's teeth, just this immense amount of pressure. Then when the thing started sawing back and forth, you could actually feel the sawing action which wasn't reaching to your leg just yet.
So that part was interesting because he did shake his head like that…
27:48
Your brain fast forwards all those things, it feels like it takes forever but, I’d say about
grand total he was on that fish for about four or five seconds. Grand total. I hit him and it didn't phase them and he quit pushing me. At the end he quit pushing me. He was driving me when he hit it, now right at the end, just a few seconds, and then he stopped. He couldn't figure out what the hell else to do or something.
I was hitting it, and it just let go. It wasn't like I beat the thing and it let go. It didn’t phase it. It didn't phase that fish at all.
But that one was that one was the really big one that we had both seen. And that shark was– I'd say that fish is probably 18 inches thick or something. Maybe like, yeah 18 to 20 inches thick or something, and the smaller ones we see in general are 10 inches thick. This thing was double the girth, and the jaw width… the bite on my leg, as you're looking down on that thing, probably is like, looked like it was about 9 or 10 inches wide, solid. So thankfully the halibut was so wide– it was an almost 20 pound halibut– I mean it was definitely a 20lb halibut because when I weighed what was left of it, it weighed 19 lbs.
Jeremy: With a bite taken out of it?
Paul: No, it was shredded! The thing didn’t take really any bite, it folded it over and just plowed down on it, so it shredded the meat off of them literally like you had laid the halibut down and run a lawn mower over it. On the top and bottom, so the section right in the middle that was okay, and then the section towards the tail, and the section by the head that were both destroyed, completely destroyed. It went straight through all of that, and broke the spine at the head, and not at the tail, but at the head, it broke the spine and went right through it and so that was what left a couple of scratches in my leg and a pretty good series of little holes in my wetsuit. It didn't cut through the wetsuit, it left holes through the wetsuit, and so I wound up with like little pencil marks scratches on my leg
29:57
on the inside of my thigh, well, on the top of my thigh I should say, towards the inside– where he just beared down and started shaking. That was that one time where it made it through.
Kelsey's like, I'm having trouble with my fish, I was like, yeah so am I! Yeah, I just got hit by one of these things, so let's get out of here. She's like, you got hit? I'm like, oh yeah! I really got hit and we need to go!
We swam straight into the breakers there, and just like, you know, okay, I'm going to take a beating on the rocks, I don’t care!
Straight in past the rocks, and you know, get rolled over by six or seven waves and not even care, just motor and don’t even stop ‘til you’re standing on dry land. Yeah, I wanted out pretty good.
So we swam in and there’s some kid down there. Somebody else had told him that there was halibut in, and he's like, I'm going out to get them! I say, you just watch out for the sharks, and he laughs and says ha ha, scare somebody off the spot. And I said, no there’re sevengills in there– there’s a lot of leopard sharks but there’s sevengills in there and they're very aggressive. Really aggressive. I said, you need to watch that. So we didn't even make it a quarter way up the hill and this kid is screaming, “There's a great white after me!”
Jeremy: What?! There was a white out there too?
Paul: No, no it was a sevengill. Believe me, if you've never seen a good-sized shark, like, I looked out, I didn't know what shark it was for a good hard second. The only thing that goes through your mind is that fishzilla has come to eat you. That thing came right on him, I mean, right on him!
33:11
I told my buddy who turned me on to the spot, and he says alright we'll go finish that one off. 2 days later they dove that zone... that fish came in and they killed it. They got done with it. They just bent a bunch of gear up and killed it and stopped it. That fish was very, very big. It was damn near– you know, the body's 10 ft long.
Jeremy: Did you get a picture of it?
Paul: I don't know that they got out pictures of it. They gave it to the neighbors. They cut it up into like three or four– to get it up the hill, they had to cut it in three or four pieces because there was no way that two guys were carrying it up.
Jeremy:
The massive shark that attacked Paul was almost certainly a female, and was between 40 and 50 years old. The female sevengills, like many large sharks that live birth their young, grow bigger so they can carry their multiple babies to term, which takes 12 months! Female sevengills
grow to about 7 ft while a male typically grows to about 5 ft. While uncommon, other very large sevengills have been reported up to just under 10 feet long or exactly three meters.
Right around the time we did this interview, on December 19th, 2020, there was a 9.5 ft long sevengill, estimated to weigh over 350 pounds caught off the Ocean Beach pier in San Diego. It was photographed, but not weighed on an official scale. If it was actually over 350 pounds, it would be the heaviest sevengill ever caught. I sent Paul a photo of what was probably the world record sevengill shark as a reference to get an idea of just how big his shark was. He said the one that got him was slightly thinner, but similar-sized. Either way, the shark that attacked Paul in 2009 was likely one of the biggest sevengill sharks that anyone has ever been in the mouth of, and more impressively, escaped from!
It's unfortunate that they killed Paul's big sevengill friend, but given the circumstances the options were pretty limited.
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Paul: They're not easy to deal with because they become accustomed to divers, and become accustomed to taking your fish. They are fish eaters, and they're scavengers of sorts, but they're still hunters very much. There's no easy way to convince them to leave you alone. There have been a couple that divers get to recognize by the scars on them and such, and their mannerism, you can't mistake it after a while. You're not the only one to see– if 3,4, or 5 of your friends see the same fish, the same problem. All that thing would have to do is get hold of my leg without that fish there and I'd be hospital-bound, for sure!
There's no disputing it– they’ve got big teeth. There's no saying that, oh, you just slough that one off. There would be no be sloughing that fish off. If that thing grabbed your arm, no more than your whole hand would go down his throat like nothing and it’d be chewing up your forearm at the very least. He could grab your basically anywhere he wanted to and it would do some damage. It would do some real damage. The bite strength was– you know, you think that you understand how hard something can bite, but not too many people get bit by a dog where the dog bites you and just stays hung onto you like that. The dog’s bite radius is small, and so this thing fit a lot of leg in its mouth… which was really surprising to me at the time.
Jeremy: Paul acknowledges that a lot of factors worked together that morning to contribute to him being okay. He was at the surface and had oxygen in his lungs, the 20 pound halibut that functioned as a buffer between the shark's teeth and his leg, and the thickness of his wetsuit.
Paul:
It was a true quarter mm, or a 6 mil. It just tore up the nylon, the top of the suit was just shredded. Going in, there was only little puncture holes through the bottom of it. He just barely got into the suit, and only on the top. On the bottom there were two or three holes which would be like the bottom of my thigh.
Jeremy:
The wetsuit didn't really protect you very much, it was more the halibut?
Paul: It was the halibut being sacrificed. The thing is, the halibut being able to slide along the wetsuit, that’s what saved my leg from getting really torn up. In a 3/2, I’d have been in much worse shape, the suit wouldn’t have held up. Had that halibut been a 10 pounder instead of a 20 pounder, he’d have gone right through that thing because it was a thinner fish. I got lucky in that respect that there was a whole bunch more fish for him to deal with, probably messed up his bite and everything else.
Jeremy: Up until that point you said you hadn't really seen sevengills regularly.
Paul: They were starting, that was when we really started to see them. Nowadays they are very common and there's actually an expansion in their range in the areas where divers see them where we never saw them before. The numbers are increasing, they are coming up out of the canyons more. It's just one in nature’s cycles.
.
We don't know when it'll fall off or whatever…or how it'll change, but no, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, you know, 1995, we weren't seeing them like that. One, two, three a year. Now if you're diving sea bass on the north face of PV, or you’re diving sea bass at Point Loma or La Jolla, you're going to see them. You’re going to see them.
Jeremy: After multiple encounters with multiple different sharks in multiple different oceans, I really wanted to know how Paul thought of sharks, how he viewed them, what his relationship was to them, especially after being helplessly locked inside the jaws of one.
Paul: They're cool, I don't mind being in the water with them. Even the hard players, the tigers and bulls, you know I got obviously a real healthy respect for them and for oceanic white tips. I've seen how they work and once you're stalked by a couple of them and you see like a real big shark sizing up on you, it'll make you think twice about wanting to get back in the water for the whole rest of the day or the rest of the trip. In general, I realize that they vanish as quick as they show up and for the most part, they really don't want anything to do with you and they're just doing their thing and so I don't feel bad about it and I'm very at ease with most of them. I don't have a problem if I’m diving in Hawaii and shooting fish outside the Moi Pan and having three or four tigers around that are in the 5 to 10 ft range and not really having any kind of a problem with those. They get more numerous and they come in and get more curious, but they are not looking for you and they’re really not even that interested in your fish, so it's okay. You and them are going to interact because if you're driving on the highway and you don't like driving around big rigs, well, you're going to drive around big rigs. It doesn't matter. You just get used to it
Jeremy: I've got more than I need– I really appreciate that.
Paul: No sweat, brother.
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Jeremy: The TEETH podcast is dedicated to Jim Giganti. Music is by Davey Chegwidden and Joshua Lopez. Our self described entertainment expert is Scot Nery and I am Jeremy Carberry. The reason you are listening to this right now is because of all the friends and family members who have encouraged and contributed…you know who you are, Thank YOU so much!
I hope you make time to get outside today even if it’s a short walk around your neighborhood to investigate the squirrels. Someone needs to keep them accountable! But as always… be sure to give the wildlife the space and respect that it deserves. Thanks again for listening and supporting. Have a great day