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tle while to get the tightly wrapped line free from the prop, during which
time the shark was no longer able to swim. By the time they docked,
the shark wasn't doing well and it sank to the bottom.
Ed and I walked out to the end of the wooden pier and, looking
down through the shallow water, saw the shark lying on its side on the
muddy bottom. Showing no gill movement or other signs of life, it
looked like a dead shark.
I didn't tell the Halleys I thought it was hopeless, though. They had
made such a valiant e¤ort to bring the shark in alive, and we'd driven
all the way up there, so I decided at least to go through the motions
to try and revive it. After starting up the oxygen pump in the trans-
port tank, we towed the shark alongside the pier to the shore. Ed and
I waded out and got it into the shark stretcher, then the four of us car-
ried it ashore. Hoisting it up into the truck, we found that it was a foot
longer than our six-foot tank and its tail stuck out of the top.
The shark had been just a few minutes in the highly oxygenated water
when, surprisingly, its gills began to move. We had given it up for dead,
but it was now breathing regularly and moving its tail. We couldn't
give up on it now, so we took o¤ for San Francisco and the Steinhart,
stopping a couple of times along the way to check on it. Each time we
found it was still breathing well and its muscles were going through
swimming motions despite its cramped quarters.
Back at the aquarium—which luckily was now closed for the day,
so we didn't have to deal with a crowd of curious visitors—four of us
lifted it out of the tank into a shark stretcher, and the electric hoist
took it up to the top of the Fish Roundabout. Lowered into the ex-
hibit, the shark started slowly swimming away, but after a few strokes
of the tail it stopped and sank to the bottom.
John McCosker was already suited up, and he jumped in to pick the
shark up to get it going again. It worked: the shark's tail strokes began
one more time, but with the same result. After a few beats it stopped
and sank to the bottom. Obviously the shark wasn't dead, since it could
swim, so we weren't about to give up on it. We took turns “jump start-
ing” the shark all night, but by morning its self-swimming periods were
becoming shorter and shorter; we finally admitted defeat and pulled
it out of the tank.
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