Shark Log When Dateline correspondent Bob Mckeown interviewed Andrew and Elizabeth Wight about their journey into the habitat of the great white shark, he encountered two people on an adventure into the unknown. The two filmmakers, whose only prior experience with sharks had been reading about them, had decided to make a different kind of shark film-- one that would use new technologies to get closer to the fish in its natural state. After months of painstaking planning they were finally ready for their first encounter with the great white shark and sailed to Dangerous Reef, Australia. It took five weeks of waiting and watching before they finally got close. After looking into the eyes, and even the jaws, of these sharks, Andrew and Elizabeth Wight found they had moved a little bit closer to understanding the fish they had read so much about. Mckeown also walked away with a better understanding of the great white shark, notably the limitations of studying this feared creature.

Bob Mckeown discusses the fascination with sharks		Why are humans fascinated by the great white shark? Bob Mckeown: I think there's a general fascination with anything that can eat us. If something can eat you alive, it's the kind of thing you're going to pay attention to just definitively-- lions, tigers, grizzly bears, 25 foot anacondas. I asked the people in Australia, which is surrounded by waters full of great white sharks, and they say that's their take on it. And in Australia, the only thing that can track you down and eat you is a great white shark. They don't have any of those other predators.
Enticing the Great White		Great whites are the most dangerous predators in the ocean, so if we're going to encounter them, it's going to be in their environment on their terms. And that makes it even scarier. Plus, here you've got something the size of a family station wagon that has a brain the size of a gumdrop and genetically programmed to do two things: to breathe and to feed. It doesn't really matter when you meet a great white shark whether you're a tuna or a ship's propeller or a person. The odds are they may try to eat you. All of that adds up to a pretty fascinating creature.
The Wights constructed a special sub so they could swim along with the sharks		Why were you interested in covering the Wights' expedition? B. McK: When the Wights went out on the expedition we covered on Dateline NBC, they had never seen a great white shark and had only made a couple films. They were setting out on this expedition to make a film about great white sharks, which might seem extraordinarily silly to the lay person, but they wanted to do something different.
Cameras capture the shark on film		There have been a lot of films about sharks. There have been a number of films about great whites. If you look at them, which we did when preparing this piece, they all have the same sequence. They've got the "putting the bait into the ocean to get the sharks to come to the boat," sequence. They've got the "shark attacking a huge bag of bait next to the boat" sequence, which means the shark has to come up out of the water. They've got the "shark attacking the metal shark cage" sequence. They are virtually all the same. It's great television, but people really haven't gone much farther than his formula.
Close encounters with one of the ocean's most successful predators		The second thing they did was design a little mobile submarine. And when I say submarine, I don't mean something that's metal-plated and fully enclosed. It's more like a screen door. There are huge holes. It's like your bathroom plumbing in the shape of a football with a big hole at the end where you go in and lots of space between the pipes. And a little motor that propels the thing 15 or 20 mph. The idea was to be able to swim with the sharks.
Face to face with the great white shark		Now there were problems with this because they didn't know if it could work. They didn't know how the sharks would react if you actually tried to move with them because no one has ever done it before. They didn't know if the sharks would react by attacking the submarine and whether the submarine could withstand that attack. These are huge, huge creatures with great pressure in their jaws. The answers to all those questions became clear to Andrew Wight the first time he went out in the sub.
The Wights' specially-designed submarine was a gamble		What surprised you most about the great white shark? B. McK: The thing that is most surprising is how little we know about these creatures. They are 400 million years old. Evolution really hasn't touched them at all, but we know virtually nothing about them. You can't see great whites in zoos. The longest one ever held in captivity has been about 21 days. They really aren't observable in the wild. They live far out in the ocean, often at depths of thousands of feet, so no one's really been able to follow them to observe their natural instincts and their natural habitat-- which is what the Wights are trying to do. They're trying to start to push that envelop to see something about the social interaction when you're in a mobile submarine moving with these creatures at least for a while.
Inside the lexan tube, a diver may feel as if there's no wall of protection		But the fact of the matter is we know little about their social interaction. We know very little about how they even reproduce, how their babies are born. The really surprising thing was how difficult it is to --and you'll see this in any of the shark films that I've watched-- how difficult it is to find a great white. It took them weeks-- even when you know where to look, even when you've got bait to put into the water to ostensibly trigger the sense of the shark and bring them to you. It takes weeks to find.