What It’s Like to Encounter a Shark When You’re Sailing Alone on the Open Ocean

One day early in my trans-Atlantic crossing I was leaning over the stern to clear some seaweed off the self-steering gear with a boat hook when I saw a large dorsal fin speeding up to the stern. I hustled down below to the cabin. This was partly to get my camera, but I was also half-imagining that Jaws himself was going to leap out of the water into the cockpit and eat me up.

I look at my photographs now and can barely see the fin. In retrospect, I don’t even know confidently that it was a shark. Maybe it was a killer whale or a Risso’s dolphin or some other medium-sized whale with a tall falcate fin. Regardless, I was terrified of the real or imagined shark.

The hull of Fox was low in the water. When sailing hard and sitting on the leeward side, I could reach over and touch the sea with my fingers, so I could not help imagining an enormous shark surging right onto the boat and bursting across like a truck with teeth plowing through a wicker fence. I clutched my little retractable boat hook as if I could some- how beat the monster off—or poke it in the eye.

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Solo sailors have demonized sharks from the first voyages. Their stories and behaviors have perpetuated fears of the man-eating cruelty of sharks, well before Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws (1974) and Steven Spielberg’s iconic film that followed the year after.

The newspaper account of Alfred “Centennial” Johnson’s 1876 crossing devoted a full section titled “Peril from a Shark,” even though nothing really happened. One night in the summer of 1891, while Si Lawlor was sailing alone, racing William Andrews across the Atlantic for the first time, a shark woke Lawlor by chewing and crunching at the bow of his tiny open boat. Lawlor yarned that he wrapped an exploding flare in paper, lit the bundle, and threw the flare at the shark’s head. He claimed the shark snatched it up just before the flare exploded in its mouth. The animal sank and disappeared into the dark.

Joshua Slocum had a particular hatred of sharks throughout his life. For family sport, his first wife Virginia would lean over the rail to kill sharks with a revolver as their son Benjamin attracted them over with a shiny can on a string.

In Voyage of the Liberdade, Slocum wrote of how these “monsters” are the sea’s greatest terror, and how he knew the story of a second mate who went for a swim off the coast of Cuba and was torn in half by a shark, who then swallowed the two parts and when later captured still had some of the body’s remains in his gullet. In Voyage of the Destroyer, Slocum told more stories of men swimming off the ship and being nearly torn apart by twenty-foot sharks, one of which ate instead a plank of wood. (The longest carnivorous shark ever reliably recorded in Western records, by the way, was 19.5 feet long.)

In Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum described the shark as both the wolf and the tiger of the sea: “nothing is more dreadful to the mind of a sailor” than the hungry shark. When sharks approached the Spray at anchor, he shot at them. Off the coast of Chile he harpooned a shark, killed it, and removed its “ugly jaws,” presumably as a keepsake or an object to sell.

“I had not till then felt inclined to take the life of any animal,” Slocum wrote, explaining that the Strait of Magellan was so desolate and lonely that he could not bear to kill even a duck for food, “but when John Shark hove in sight my sympathy flew to the winds.”

Later in Australia, Slocum caught a twelve-and-a-half-foot shark and charged sixpence for people to see the dead animal, as well as her twenty-six babies that he kept alive and swimming in a canoe. Slocum had found these fetal sharks, each about two feet long, when he slit open the mother shark’s belly. Later he stuffed the adult shark with hay and brought it with him to his next port at Tasmania where he exhibited the carcass before he gave it to the local museum.

When Harry Pidgeon was first sailing by himself on his boat Islander in the South Pacific toward Tahiti in 1921, he went over the side one flat calm day to swim laps around the boat. At the start of his second lap, he had a “sudden apprehension” and turned back, clambering back aboard just as a shark slalomed over toward the hull. The shark had pilot fish swimming around its mouth and remoras attached. It rubbed its back on the hull of Islander.

“He followed the boat all day,” Pidgeon wrote, “and only left off after I had wounded him twice with the boat hook.”

Thus, Pidgeon continued to strike fear in every sailor-reader who thought they might want to take a dip over the side.

A generation later, in addition to her description of sinister, menacing sharks in formation as the representation of the loveless, dangerous sea, Ann Davison wrote of them again when sailing alone in the Bahamas. Here she said sharks, at first appearing like dark shadows rising up toward the surface, rubbed up against the hull of Felicity Ann and turned to look directly at her with their “cold, calculating, pig-like eyes.”

In 1962 a young Japanese sailor named Kenichi Horie described dozens of sharks six to ten feet long bumping into his tiny boat’s wooden hull during his solo crossing of the North Pacific. He wrote: “They looked more like some kind of ominous weapon than fish—steely colored with cold, heartless faces. Eyes half-closed, dorsal fin protruding into the sunshine, they cut through the water giving me and the Mermaid cold, dirty looks.” Horie tried to take photographs, with inevitably unimpressive results when they were later developed.

Perhaps the scariest of single-hander shark stories was that of Bill King, a former World War II submarine commander. King was on his second attempt to sail alone around the world in 1971 when off the southwest coast of Australia, a few days out of port in the Southern Ocean, he was down below in his cabin when he saw the timbers of his hull punched in by some enormous beast, the planking split and hammered inwards.

The sea flooded in as he leaped out on deck and saw blood in the water and the swimming animal astern, later identified by experts ashore, due to the behavior, region, and shape of the impact on the boat, as a Great White shark (Carcharodon carcharias). King was able to tack his boat around and keep the busted hole enough out of the water to stay afloat. He endured a couple of horrific days trying to patch it up and sail back to port, which he managed to do without sinking because of a nearly miraculous shift in the wind that allowed him to keep the hole tilted mostly out of the water.

Every single-handed sailing story, it seems, needs to have some yarn about a shark, second only to at least one storm, one ecstasy-so-pure moment of sailing, one clever repair, and one near miss by a passing ship. If the solo mariner did not see a shark directly, they will talk about how they imagined sharks when they had to dive into the water to fix something or when they dared to indulge in a mid-ocean swim.

Today nearly every boat, from the tiniest cruising craft to the largest naval destroyers, posts some sort of “shark watch” when crew are going over the side for a swim mid- ocean. Swimmers and surfers occasionally get gashed by curious sharks along the coast, and even occasionally killed from loss of blood—but this rarely if ever happens out at sea if the person isn’t already bleeding or wounded.

For example, in 2022 an Australian single-hander named John Deer fell off his stern while setting his fishing gear. He watched his boat sail away. Treading water about ten miles off the coast of Panama, the closest town being Cabo Tiburon, meaning Cape Shark, he felt some nibbling at his legs at dusk from something, but to his amazement nothing ever broke the skin.

He managed to swim the whole way, aided by adrenalin and the current, to an isolated shore. From here he was rescued by a passing boat within a day.

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Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea by Richard J. King is available via Viking.