Riding sharks with Bob Meistrell
Bob Meistrell using a 20-foot basking shark as an underwater scooter.
Setting out from the Midwest as teenagers, Bob Meistrell and his twin brother, Bill – with whom he’d created a dive helmet out of bucket and a hose as 13-year-olds in a muddy Missouri pond – arrived in California with dreams of becoming submariners and finding sunken treasures. They achieved both dreams, revolutionizing beach culture by popularizing the neoprene wetsuit, which made diving and surfing accessible for the millions of watermen and waterwomen.
But beyond owning a small submarine and finding gold and other sunken treasures all over the watery parts of the world, Bob Meistrell always came back to shore with a treasure of another kind: his stories. As extraordinary as the life he lived was his ability to remember it all in utter detail.
Following is one of his shark stories involving himself, his twin brother Bill and Dive N’ Surf partner Bev Morgan from the early ‘50s, told over breakfast at the Portofino Inn in 2011.
“When we were lifeguards, Bev and Bill and I, we had Dive N’ Surf….we were two days each at the dive shop, and then the other five days we’d work as a lifeguard, and then I had some side jobs because I was the only one that was married and had kids. So the lifeguards called us and said, ‘There’s a shark up here in the surf. Will you come up here and spear it?’ So we got in our boat and ran up there. We didn’t know any better – we were young kids, and we speared this damn shark. Then he towed us out to sea about five miles. A boat came out and we told them to go get the lifeguards to tow us back in, he’s too strong for us. So they towed us back in, they pulled it up on the pier. It was a baby basking shark, 1,700 pounds, 17 feet long. Dave Brown came down, and says, they are absolutely harmless. They couldn’t even gum you to death. But they come up to you with their mouth wide open and they are big enough they can swallow a Volkswagen Beetle – up to 35 feet long, they get. So we dropped it back into the [Redondo] canyon, then we tried to start a program. Everyone was trying to shoot them, they all wanted to be the big hero, so we tried to get a moratorium on shooting them.
“We were on our way out to Paradise Cove one day and we spotted about 12 of them. We all jumped in and started riding ‘em. You’d see five guys in the water, [off] two boats, and a shark would be coming at you, and everyone would grab on – to the tail, or the dorsal fin. And then one guy fell off and he changed the revolution of his kicking. It scared the sharks, that’s what we think. You started to dive, and you get down to about 50 feet, and you are hanging on to just your snorkel. You think, ‘I gotta get to the surface for air.’ You bail out, and you go up and bang, you ran into something, and it wasn’t a boat. It was another shark. And that’s what they did, they kind of lined up …so every time you bailed out after that you’d always look up.
“There was a guy named Jack on the boat. He would never go out on a boat in the ocean unless there were two boats, in case one of them sank. I convinced him to slip down to his jockey shorts, to put on a mask and snorkel and get in the water and try this. He was scared to death. He jumped in the water, and I said, ‘Jack, turn around and look.’ And just as he turned around a shark’s dorsal fin went right underneath his arm and off he rides on that shark. He thought that was the best experience he’d ever had. The shark turned and came back to us and dropped him off. It was almost automatic. Unbelievable.
“I bet we rode those whales for three or four hours. Unbelievable.” ER