'Air Jaws' Makes Triumphant Return in Discovery's August Shweekend
Shark Week fans who were disappointed not to see a new installment of Air Jaws on this year’s lineup can rest easy: We’ll see more great whites breaching in South Africa during Discovery’s new shark weekend, or Shweekend, in August.
The network is set to begin running a promo for the event, which kicks off Aug. 29, during Shark Week. Yahoo TV has your exclusive first look above.
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The breathtaking breach at the end is from Air Jaws: Ring of Death (working title), the new special veteran filmmaker Jeff Kurr just finished filming with Chris Fallows. The Ring of Death is the nickname for the “kill zone” where great whites are known to hunt in South Africa. The special will explore the white sharks’ underworld, which means the return of the Kurr-designed WASP (Water Armor Shark Protection) that withstood Fallows coming under attack by a gang of great whites in New Zealand during 2014’s Air Jaws: Fin of Fury. “It’s basically a one-man walking cage. People have been to the bottom before with white sharks, but no one has been able to move around and follow the sharks wherever they’re going, and that’s the great thing about WASP, it makes Chris mobile. It’s very lightweight. It’s safe — for the most part. He did get knocked around like a bowling pin the last time he was in it,” Kurr says. “It’s also something, visually, the sharks like. It’s painted yellow, silver, and black. It’s very attractive to them. That was one I’d put on my ‘success’ list of experiments.”
The WASP in action:
Even more exciting, however: Ring of Death will debut the HORNET (Hydro Observation and Research Nautical Experimental Trailer). It’s something Dickie Chivell dreamt up inspired by the Seal Sled that Kurr and Fallows used in 2010’s Ultimate Air Jaws and 2012’s Air Jaws Apocalypse to capture the view of a great white breaching from inches above the water’s surface.
The Seal Sled in action:
“The Seal Sled rides on top of the water. Dickie goes, ‘What if we took the Seal Sled and sort of flipped it upside down, so I can see what’s going on underwater, and I’d be on Scuba?’ And that’s exactly what we did,” Kurr says. “Dickie built a craft and called it HORNET, which goes well with WASP.”
Asked to describe the craft, which you catch a tiny glimpse of in the promo above, Kurr says, “It’s basically two huge orange floats with a metal sort of cage underneath, with cameras mounted every single possible direction, and Dickie holding a camera. He’s about three-feet underwater being towed at around four knots behind the boat. And of course, he has a seal decoy trailing behind him. And the purpose of all of this is for him to be able to look down and see the shark down at the bottom shooting up towards the surface and attacking our decoy. He was able to capture that, and it’s just remarkable. We’re very excited,” Kurr says. “I’m very proud of Dickie following in my footsteps now. I don’t know how we top the HORNET. It’s pretty cool.”
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We got Kurr to reminiscence about some of his other favorite filming aides.
The Ghost Cage: It was featured in Kurr and Chivell’s 2015 Shark Week collaboration, The Island of the Mega Shark. It wasn’t the first time this type of cage had been tried — it’s reminiscent of The Shark Tube, which Fallows climbed into during 2011’s Great White Invasion to draw great whites close enough to hand-feed them through the portholes and then test whether magnets could repel them. But Kurr thought a clear acrylic cage would be ideal for bringing big sharks up from the deep. “We know that great whites are extremely curious about new things in the water, and they’re gonna come investigate. And boy did it ever work. We brought up every shark in that area. The rest of the expedition, we had maybe one or two sharks at a time; we put the ghost cage in, seven sharks just like that and big ones down below. As a curiosity, seeing Dickie there was very tantalizing for the sharks,” Kurr says, with a laugh. “They probably couldn’t quite figure out what he was doing there and why he was surrounded by this sort of invisible barrier. But it was a really interesting experiment to see not only how curious the sharks are but also what senses they use to figure things out and size things up.”
Of course, the sharks weren’t the only ones surprised during that trip: The door on the ghost cage wouldn’t stay shut. “That was unplanned. The door was working fine, but it’s a long ride from the Mexican mainland out to the islands, about 20 hours. I think during our crossing the door got some damage,” Kurr says. “So it was working fine, we put it in the water, and as soon as he’s in the water, Dickie’s head pops up, and he says, ‘The door won’t close!’ We went into a state of panic, but we managed to do a quick fix. We wanted to keep him in the water, as long as we could do it safely. As you see in the film, we threw him a bungee cord, and he made it work. He’s just so good in the water — just a natural. He’s grown up with sharks. Even with him riding Parthenope, he’s just really comfortable and a perfect guy for those kind of situations.”
Parthenope: In case you’ve forgotten, that was the 14-foot female shark decoy Chivell created — and rode in the water with great whites in the 2014 Shark Week special Air Jaws: Fin of Fury. “We put our heads together: How can we do this safely where you can ride on top of a shark decoy and be right on the surface? That was one of my favorite ones. That worked out better than planned, with a lot of modifications. The first few times we tried it, we had a really hard time keeping it afloat,” Kurr says. “You don’t want to be sinking out there surrounded by sharks.”
The Seal Sled: It’s so great, we have to go back to it. “We thought, how do we get really low, down to the water level, and see a white shark breach from where a seal might see it,” Kurr says. “We tossed around some designs, we looked at different off-the-shelf kind of things — but there’s really no off-the-shelf type of shark observation tools, if you will. You can’t just go to Target and buy Seal Sled. You have to fabricate these things and hope that they work. After some design work and a couple of missteps, we came up with the Seal Sled, which is very small and lightweight and big enough that a shark won’t mistake it for an actual seal and we won’t get shish-kabobbed while we ride it. Again, that was another one that exceeded my expectations. Chris rode it once, I rode it once. Right now it’s in semi-retirement, but you never know. We might pull it out again at some point.”
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Probably not coming out of retirement: Robo-Seal, from that same special. “I think that was the biggest disaster. It just had too many moving parts. One little leak, and the thing didn’t work well,” Kurr says. “We thought it’d swim a lot better. It did get attacked, but only after sputtering when it hit the water, which I think the sharks liked. That was a $10,000 single-bite ending to Robo-Seal, thanks to Colossus.”
Shark Week continues through July 12. Discovery and its conservation partner Oceana have teamed for the new initiative Change the Tide, which aims to create a coalition of engaged organizations and individuals to help preserve and restore our oceans.
