Shark Week:
Take a bite

'It's a surreal scene when the great whites
come out of the murk'

By Greg Ambrose
Star-Bulletin

AS wildlife photographer Jeff Kurr watched the Australian divers happily wake boarding through a slick of animal blood and guts that trailed behind their boat to attract great white sharks, he knew the blokes were more than a bit odd.

The Aussies didn't give a bloody rip if any of the big carnivores lurked below while they performed aerials and loops and encouraged Kurr to join them.

Not being deranged by nature or suicidal by inclination, Kurr declined the invitation. After all, he was certain his first cage dive among the ocean's top fish predators would provide all the excitement he could stand. "Once you get down there, you never want to come out," he says.

"It's a surreal scene when the great whites come out of the murk. Your heart kicks into gear when they come right for you and check you out with those black, dead eyes.

"But they are skittish at first. They sense that you are looking at them, and back off. It takes hours and hours to build up that confidence to check out that cage. They hang out at the edge of visibility, disappear, then come back from a direction you weren't looking, as if to sneak up on you, like muggers.

"When you're in there by yourself, you're constantly turning and turning, looking down and up. It's hard to relax in the cage when a 2,000-pound animal is coming at you. There is no film or video that captures just how big these things are.

"I'm sure they are around surfers all the time, looking up at them, but it takes a great deal of time for them to work up to an attack. They aren't there thrashing and tearing into the cages all the time like the movies show, they are mostly calm."

It is Kurr's great happiness that he is able to roam the planet to bring vivid images of the world's most impressive animals right into your living room.

After a career in television journalism that was both profitable and soul numbing, Kurr finally gave in to his passion for wildlife and the great outdoors.

For the past seven years he has worked with Thomas Horton & Associates and Discovery Channel to help people understand why it is important to keep endangered animals from extinction. His most recent work and the best of his vintage photography, editing and writing will be shown in Hawaii Aug. 10-17 as Discovery Channel celebrates a decade of "Shark Week," its most popular program.

Over the past decade, "Shark Week" episodes have urged with increasing passion that sharks be protected and preserved. "If we can help promote the groups that work to protect animals, that's good," says Kurr. "I'm concerned about shrinking habitat, overdevelopment, overfishing.

"It's a problem everywhere. We were trying to get shots of sharks in Mozambique, and one evening while we were eating dinner we saw the lights of big fishing boats out there with nets three miles from shore.

"When we went out the next day to film, there was nothing out there, no sharks, no fish, nothing. They had scooped up everything from the ocean.

"That is part of the message of a lot of our films, that the ocean should be enjoyed by people, but not exploited. Pollution and overfishing are taking their toll, and if the ocean is killed, where are we?"

Kurr, 36, finds himself in venerable company in this anniversary edition of "Shark Week." His work is shown alongside startling and beautiful footage from such outstanding shark chasers as Al Giddings, Marty Snyderman and Stan Waterman.

The lure of the islands has proved irresistible to Kurr, so he has always managed to schedule filming assignments to Hawaii over the years.

Local viewers will be especially interested in the work he did this year in Hawaii, interviewing shark attack survivors in a premier "Shark Week" episode called "Shark Attack Files II."

Kurr weaves a visual tapestry, combining chilling interviews with men and women who were attacked while surfing in Hawaii with scientific insight from shark researchers Jack Randall, John Naughton, Gerry Crow and others.

"There are a lot of interesting shark stories going on in Hawaii," Kurr says, then proves it by hanging out with University of Hawaii shark researchers Brad Wetherbee and Kim Holland for a week as they tag and track tiger sharks. The result is "Tales of the Tiger," the most popular film of "Shark Week" when it first aired last summer.

In another "Shark Week" premier, "Sharks of the Wild Coast," Kurr and assistant Laura Seitz followed a South African husband and wife across the Indian Ocean. Their unique goal was to attract sharks without using the bloody bait that results in frenzied feeding behavior, which convinces viewers that sharks are in a constant state of ferocious agitation.

The baitless technique is much more difficult, but their patience is rewarded splendidly as they film a variety of sharks performing more-natural behavior. "If you can get past the grotesqueness of their bloody jaws from teeth falling out and eating, and the mating scars, they are incredibly beautiful," Kurr says.

Meeting the sharks camera to face isn't even the most dangerous part of his job. "I drove right through Rodney King riots while heading for a shoot and was amazed to see fire and smoke and looters.We did a shoot that night in a warehouse in South Central L.A. with machine gun fire in the background, and none of the sound was usable. The next morning when I drove out of there it looked like Beirut. That is the kind of filming where I would rather be in the water with sharks."

Kurr's work is admired worldwide, but he returns home from an exhausting assignment, he gets no recognition at home. "When the neighbors say 'Hey, I haven't seen you much lately, what have you been doing?' I tell them 'I've been three months in Africa shooting great white sharks.' They pause, give me a skeptical look and say, 'Yeah, right.' "