William Winram is a breath-hold diving world record holder and great white shark free-diver. He stars in Great White Shark 3D as one of the freedivers and conservationists tagging great white sharks, and features in some spectacular footage swimming with great whites without any protective gear. Last year, he achieved the world record in breath-hold diving, swimming 467 feet under water without any breathing equipment.
Daniel Machuca, from Melbtown, chats to him.
First off I’ll start with a story about my son. He’s five years old and his favourite animal would be a close tie between a t-rex and sharks, I don’t know why but he’s mad about sharks. He loves pretending he’s a shark, and earlier this year I was in LA and I brought him back a shark hat from the Jaws exhibit. So he’ll put it on and chasing after people pretending to bite them.
My first questions would be; with your own history of living near water all your life when did you realise that this was going to be your career, and what would you say to someone Xavier’s age who might want to follow in your footsteps?
Well I never intended for this to be my career. I started swimming by holding on to my dad’s neck while he was swimming under the pool, and so I’ve always been in the sea. It was always a recreation, never my career and my advice for kids is not to make the safe choices. Follow your heart, follow your passion. No matter what you’re doing you’re going to have successes and failures, but if you stick with it and if you persevere you will ultimately be successful. So you might as well be successful at the thing that you’re going to enjoy. I’m always being asked “What are you going to do when you retire?” For me retirement is when people stopping doing the jobs that they hate in order to then do the things that they love, so I have no intention to retire because I’m doing what I love to do.
I’d love to pass that on to him. Now obviously movies like Jaws and other fictionalised accounts like that have had an enormous negative impact on the public perception of sharks. Is there a fictional movie that does them justice, or captures what they’re actually like, for example Finding Nemo?
Well you mention Nemo, things like that are good because they engage kids to see sharks as fun. Bruce in Nemo is always telling himself that fish are friends, and then he smells a little bit of blood Now that is actually very scientifically accurate. Sharks are highly sensitive to small amounts of blood because it indicates that there’s potentially a wounded animal, which would be an easy meal. Unlike us, they don’t have supermarkets and restaurants to get their food from; they have to hunt for it. For me this film The Great White Shark 3D is probably the most honest portrayal of a great white shark that I’ve ever seen.
Is it because you’re able to swim with them and they’re friendly until a certain stage like the famous “eating frenzy”?
I’ve been in the water with 50 black-tipped sharks and the boat captain throwing chunks of tuna all around me, but they didn’t touch me. I’ve never witnessed sharks feeding to a level of craziness where they’re biting one another, and I don’t trust documentaries made in the 60’s and 70’s. There was a documentary that was award winning, but they were killing animals to make scenes work. We found a photo on Nat Geo of a woman riding a tiger shark, but the tiger shark was dead. Her hair is floating up and they’re sinking. In the early days of James Bond that they would exhaust sharks to make them manageable. Now if you exhaust an apex predator like that, even if it doesn’t die during filming, it’s probably going to die soon after because it has no stored energy with which to hunt.
Now when you mentioned you were swimming with sharks and having fish thrown around you it sounded like a nightmare I had when I was 8 years old. Is there anything you’re afraid of?
I’m afraid of heights. In Sydney I went up to the tower that’s there and a friend was saying I should do a selfie. So there’s I am, moving to the edge slowly, then snap and I run away. Five years ago I would never have been able to go up there.
So baby steps I guess?
Yes, but then I get people coming up after conferences and saying they could never do what I do because they’re terrified of sharks. I was too, and I didn’t even know it. Speaking to your son’s fascination with sharks, I was fascinated with sharks since I was very little. I’d be in school doing reports on them in science, I’d seen the film Jaws. Everything I’d ever read about tiger sharks, for example, was that they were man-eaters and extremely dangerous. Now my first encounter was a four and a half meter tiger shark. I thought I was going to be eaten alive. In reality the animal did not aggress me, but instead it was very shy and curious. That fractured my paradigm because it didn’t make sense. Was this the only vegan shark? Then over the years, diving over and over with sharks and seeing their behavioral patterns, learning about them, you replace fear with knowledge. So you get in the water with the great whites and it’s not that we’re overcoming fear, we’re actually excited about going into the water and being able to interact with them.
Now you mention curiosity, do you find individual sharks have individual personalities?
Yes. In Guadeloupe there was a well known shark but he’s a pain in the butt. He’s really aggressive. If you were going to assign him a human personality, which I try to avoid with sharks, he’s just a dick. You always know he’s going to be a pain in the ass so we always get rid of him. We’ll give him a smack on the lateral line, which is like their funny bone, and then he won’t come back.
Now this might be from a misguided childhood but I always thought it was their nose that was sensitive?
Yes, their nose is highly sensitive. Now we choose to be mostly around big females since they’re generally more mellow than the young males. Young males in whatever species are problematic. During the shoot we had a couple of hyper aggressive young male sharks around and at one stage I just punched him in the lateral line to get rid of him.
And it works?
Oh yeah, you’ll never see them again. It’s the same as if a sea lion comes in. Sometimes we have problems when we’re tagging and a sea lion shows up and bites the tail of a great white. That’s it, you will not see that animal again and if you haven’t tagged it it’s gone.
Now you mentioned Guadeloupe before and in this documentary you visit New Zealand, South Africa then back up to the States. Did you find public perception of sharks in those places changes from place to place or was there general consensus?
No, I think that public perception is different everywhere you go. I remember the first time I was in South Africa and this woman had been doing ocean swims every morning for forty five years. She was taken by a great white shark and the community response was sadness that she was taken, but that’s the risk you accept there. In other places there’s more of an outcry, but people need to consider the facts: half of the oxygen that we breathe comes from the sea. The sea is a finely balanced ecosystem and sharks are crucial to maintaining its balance, just as any apex predator is. We think we own the sea. I was at an International Conference for marine protected areas and there was a lot of discussion about stakeholders but never once did anyone discuss the actual species that live and have every right to exist there. So when you talk about problems between humans and sharks it’s humans entering the shark’s territory. You either accept the risk or you don’t get in the water.
Well just recently we had two shark attacks in Australia and already there’s talk of culls.
With the most recent one I heard the father in a radio interview and you could feel his emotions, but he said that he didn’t want a cull. So who’s calling for the cull? Is it the politicians? Well they’re looking for votes, trying to engage people on some emotional level and frankly, it’s stupid. Within 24 hours of that incident the shark was long gone. So what happens? Let’s go out to that beach and kill every shark we find and just kill that ecosystem. Now one of the draws for tourists to come to Australia is nature. It’s just beautiful! I’m a little bummed because I’m not going to have the opportunity to dive while I’m here but you have an incredible natural world here and it’s worth protecting.
Now you’ve mentioned a few shark species so far, is there one that you have a particular interest in?
Well they’re all different. Some of my most endearing interactions have been with tiger sharks but great white sharks, there’s nothing like them. With tiger sharks you can relax, but you still need to respect them as predators. Now there was a guy in Hollywood who works as an animal trainer and we’re talking about tigers. He’s working with the animal, lining it up for a photo shoot and his phone rings and he turns around and … it’s a predator… it might not hop up right away but if he keeps talking with his back turned, it’s going to come at him. Great whites, we don’t have to worry about them attacking us but you have to understand how they work. They don’t know what you are. So they want to check you out but they don’t want to get hurt. They’re very cautious, they’re going to come from behind and, if they get close enough to bump you then they can tell something about you, or they’ll try to taste you. Now when you talk about shark attacks, I prefer the term shark accident or shark mistake. The only way they can tell what we are is to taste us.
Well it’s not like they have fingers…
And unfortunately the tasting is a little grave for us. In the closing scene of the documentary there’s me with a camera swimming slightly back from a big great white and I have two guys I’m working with who will signal if there’s something I need to pay attention to. With this film it’s the closest that you will come to being face to face with a great white shark without getting wet.
Now obviously when you’re making documentaries you’re telling a story as well, in this case the story of the shark. How much of your documentary making is that story telling factor versus the informative side.
Well in 2009 we were involved in a French-German co-production where they filmed us for five different one hour documentaries for five different animals. Now the great white shoot, well, it was a comedy. In South Africa there’s five to ten meters of depth in the sea, so the shark doesn’t have the room to get speed on you. In Guadeloupe where we were shooting this doco its 70 meters deep. As a joke we brought a big bottle of Jack Daniels and a big bottle of vodka, and if someone was nailed and if he didn’t make it we’d celebrate his life, but if he did survive we’d keep filling him up with alcohol until he did die because no one would have survived until evacuation. It was meant to be a joke and we brought them to be symbolic. Now I think it was the third morning and I’m sitting with the crew and I ask them ‘So guys, are you partying every night without me?’ I show them the bottle and there was this much left of the Jack Daniels. That’s when the chef comes over and tells us the director has been dumping it in his coffee all day. It turned out the director and a French journalist who was there were drunk the whole trip. Three weeks later I got an email from the executive producer asking if I had time to go to Germany and work on the edit. Now I’m not an editor but he wanted me there to help the editor with the story. I pointed out that was the director’s job. It turned out he doesn’t remember anything at all about the trip. Now when I see documentary I’m think ‘Well that’s me, but that’s not the story’. Now they have beautiful images, images we can’t get with IMAX due to the size of the cameras but… if you don’t have a story you can’t engage people. You need to have a real and a human story. One of the things I like about this documentary is that with Mike Rutzen, with Doctor Chris Lowe and the rest of the crew is that you don’t get a sense that it’s a super-human ego driven thing. I’m interested in people. The Everest story fascinates met. The statistics show that 1 in 7 who attempt Everest and 3 in 7 who attempt K2 will die, but you don’t hear in the news how someone died there unless it’s a large group, and there’s no talk of closing the mountain. Now as I understand it in Perth in Western Australia a few years ago there wasn’t a big seal population, but now there is. This leads to more sharks. About four years we were stuck in Guadeloupe due to a big storm brewing, and on the tail end of it see a big triple head wave coming in the point of the bay and all I wanted to do was surf it. I went to the boat captain and I asked if he had a surf board and he said “You are NOT surfing here. I am drawing a line. You can do all the free diving stuff you want”. But the sharks are there to feed, so go surf somewhere else.
Make the smart choice.
Yes, exactly.
What would you change about public perception of sharks and of the ocean?
First things first, if you’re viewing this film and you think were adrenaline junkies or you think were thrill seekers then that perception is coming from the wrong perception of sharks. We have a tendency to put human emotions to animals, whether they’re panda bears, tigers, lions etc, and we do this to keep them cute and cuddly. Sharks are not human. They are not ill-willed. They are simply apex predators trying to survive in the oceans. The second thing is the oceans are not ours, and we rely heavily on them for our survival. 25% of the protein we eat comes from the sea and it covers 7/10ths of the planet. I think it’ll be a good time for us as humans to start thinking about the global community which is … Well it used to be when I was growing up typewriters. I remember when cordless phones came out we were like wow, that’s alien technology and now it’s just amazing.
Like the technology I brought with me.
Exactly. Like this phone that’s recording our conversation. You can probably film with it. And now your neighbour is no longer the guy in the house or apartment next to you. Effectively you and I are neighbours even though I live in Geneva, Switzerland. What you do with your ocean here will affect the climate where I live in Geneva, we’re all interconnected. We need to shirt our paradigm and take responsibility for our footprint on the planet, our impact on the sea. One of the simple things we can do is not use plastic bags. Just stop. They’ve found now that fish in the sea have microscopic particles of plastic on a cellular level. And it’s easy; just carry a backpack around with you. I was watching a documentary about noise in the sea and at one point in the documentary they ramped up the noise that they had recorded. You can’t turn it off and you can’t get away from it. This year in March I was in the Bahamas doing some research and they had recording equipment in the Gulf of Mexico and they were picking up this really violent sound. It turned out to be fracking in the arctic sea hear Norway and it was showing up in the Gulf of Mexico loud and clear. Now whales and other inhabitants are hearing that all the time.
And this would be having effects on their migration patterns and other things.
Yeah, exactly.
Final question. Where to next? Are you already planning your next documentary or planning on a break?
Yes to all the above, I’m heading back back to Geneva on December 18 then I fly out on January 1st to do some tagging of hammerhead sharks in the Bahamas. Then we’ll be doing 2 expeditions, one in January and one in February where we are filming, then editing a short documentary, but we’re not sure where that is going. The last short documentary we did ended up as in-flight entertainment. We’ll see if they’re interested again, or we’ll see if we can pitch it to television. Nowadays it’s difficult pitching to television. Every market is different, but we’re just too educational, especially in the US.
I read this article where a big news station got taken over and they want to do less journalism and more ‘in your face’ programming.
Well exactly! Journalism is a dying art. In 2011 there was this producer/ camera man for the Discovery Channel and they were looking for something new for the 10th anniversary of Shark Week and he wanted to pitch me. I said sure, and I knew they don’t like to focus on individuals but they weren’t so interested in the science. This was The Discovery Channel and they weren’t interested in science? So as a joke I jumped up on my chair and said ‘So you’ve got a camera up on top of a boat, and I’m on the railing of the boat. And I say ‘ok! Folks! Take a look at this great big white shark’ and we’ll cut to a big shark. ‘And after the commercial I’m going to strip down to my skivvies, then I’m going to dive off here and wrestle me a great white shark’ And his response was ‘oh they would go nuts for that! That’s insane’ and I said I wanted half a million. He asked if it was really dangerous. No it’s not dangerous at all. I’m going to scare the crap out of the shark, it’s going to take off but I’m going to look like a moron and I want to be paid well for it. With half a million I could do so much conservation work with that for years and years.
Thank you so much for your time, it’s been fantastic.
