A Day at the Beach
It’s 7 am on a warm beach in Mazatlan, Mexico. A beachfront hotel on a placid bay. A small island two or three miles out in the bay. My destination.
I wade into the water, put the fins on and settle into an easy crawl toward the island.
For some reason, possibly a girl back home, I’m looking for unusual sea shells, and the hotel bartender says that’s the place to find them.
I figure an hour and a half to the island, rest a bit, pick up some shells, and swim back. This turned out to be a gross exaggeration of my swimming skills. And, I realized later, there was only one place to put any seashells on the return trip.
After an hour or so of swimming, much of it with the easier but slower backstroke, I paused for a rest, treading water and looking at the island. It didn’t seem any closer and I was getting tired.
Suddenly, 10 yards away, a pair of fins sliced through the water between me and the island. It was a large fin followed by a smaller one, and my mind raced to any nature documentary about sharks and dolphins.
Another pair of fins followed the first. Do dolphins have a big fin and little fin or is it the other way around?
The next fish removed all doubt as it thrust its head up out of the water to reveal the classic curved rows of teeth. I flashed on the Jaws poster and thought, these are sharks!
I looked back at the shore, tired, and now an hour and half away, and thought about hollering for help.
“Help! Help, shark!” What could anyone do? And— swear to God—I also thought, how embarrassing, if I holler for help and make it back to shore anyway!
But I’d gone into the water at an angle to the island, and if I could swim straight back to the shore a couple hundred yards up from the hotel it’d be shorter.
Without a look over my shoulder —whatever was going to happen was going to happen—I turned toward shore, all tiredness gone—and launched into a steady Australian crawl, head down in the water, only coming up for breath as needed. I wondered if the shark was doing the same.
Where was it now? Was it hungry? How many were there? I didn’t take the time to look, but as I swam to the closer shore something hit the fin on my right foot. I ‘crawled’ even faster and this time I did take a peek: it was a piece of driftwood, floating just below the surface.
I prayed. “If I make it to shore, dear God, I will fall down on my knees and thank you for bringing me to safety.”
And He did. And I did.
After a few moments on the beach, I took off my fins and walked the quarter mile back to the hotel bar where my two compadres were sipping beers and laughing.
“What the hell were you doing back there?”
I told my story. Snorts of disbelief. “You’re putting us on.”
The bartender chimed in. “No, no sharks in the bay, señor. Maybe tonina.”
“Tonina,” my compadre says, “probably a tuna.” “Yeah,” says my other compadre, “you could eat it.”
I didn’t insist. I know what I saw, and it wasn’t Charlie Tuna.
The next day, on our way home, we stopped at a Mexican household with a large Spanish dictionary and looked up the word ‘tonina’. It translated something like this: “a female shark species that not only strikes at a human swimmer but stays to finish the meal, flesh, bones, fins and all.”
Thanks again, God, for my day at the beach. dw1/8/22
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