Shark

Shark is a recurring creature in Not Without Hope, where it moves between catch, rumor, reassurance, and threat. The men encounter sharks as part of the Gulf of Mexico’s rich fishing environment, but after the boat capsizes, the animal becomes a measure of their fear: blood, bait, darkness, and uncertainty transform a familiar marine predator into one of the dangers that might decide whether the survivors live through the night.

A Creature of the Gulf Fishery

Sharks appear first within the ordinary abundance of offshore fishing. The Gulf of Mexico is presented as one of the world’s most productive fisheries, supporting recreational finfish as well as fish, shrimp, and squid drawn toward cooler, plankton-rich waters along Florida’s continental shelf. Against that ecological scale, sharks are not supernatural intruders. They belong to the same living system that makes the fishing trip attractive in the first place.

During the earlier outing on Marquis Cooper’s boat, the men traveled more than seventy miles offshore and caught red snapper, grouper, lemon sharks, and amberjacks. Nick Schuyler and Corey Smith were inexperienced with deep-sea fishing, while Marquis treated the work as an enjoyable physical challenge and laughed at their uncertainty about handling poles, bait, hooks, and fish. On the later trip, they again caught small lemon sharks. Marquis cut two open to preserve them for the journey home, and baby sharks spilled out both times. The scene makes the animal’s reproductive life briefly visible, even as the fish is treated as a practical part of the catch.

Sharks as an Imagined Danger

Nick Schuyler’s fear of sharks becomes explicit after the boat has overturned. At about eight o’clock, he asks whether sharks could get them. Will Bleakley dismisses the danger by saying that sharks are too stupid, while Marquis reassures Nick that the animals would be afraid of the boat because they would mistake the large white hull for another animal. Their words calm him, and he stops thinking about sharks for the moment. Yet the reassurance does not remove the fear; it only pushes it below the more immediate problems of darkness, cold, sickness, and the unstable boat.

The question returns when Nick and Will are considering the possibility of swimming. Their legs are bleeding from being thrown against the motor, and Nick can see blood on the boat. Will is wearing only a T-shirt and swimsuit beneath his life jacket, making his exposed, injured legs especially vulnerable in Nick’s imagination. Nick knows that sharks have been caught during their trip, even if the animals were small, and worries that blood or loose bait might attract them. Will answers that the sea is too rough for sharks to come up that high. The explanation temporarily restores order: the waves themselves are treated as a barrier, and the possibility of swimming remains a problem of staying together rather than an immediate encounter with a predator.

Fins Beside the Overturned Boat

The imagined shark finally becomes a visible possibility during the survivors’ second day at sea. Will is weakening, asking repeatedly for the time and saying earlier that he would not make it through another night. As dusk approaches and the air grows colder, Nick sees a gray rectangular fin roughly eight feet from the boat. He does not immediately speak. Twenty seconds later the fin appears again, confirming to him that it was not a hallucination. Its movement is unlike a dolphin’s rolling motion: it travels in a straighter line, rising for several seconds before disappearing.

Nick then warns Will to remain on the boat because he thinks there are sharks. He sees two animals and estimates that they are perhaps five feet long. They resemble the lemon sharks caught on Saturday, although he cannot identify them with certainty. He assumes that blood leaking from the boat or bait released when it flipped has drawn them near. The uncertainty is crucial. The narrative does not convert the sighting into a fully confirmed species identification or an attack. Instead, the sharks occupy the unstable boundary between observation and interpretation, where a fin, injury, and remembered catch become enough to produce a credible threat.

Ecology, Materiality, and Survival

Sharks are only one part of a larger nonhuman world surrounding the men. The Gulf contains whale sharks, fish, shrimp, and squid, and during the ordeal Nick also sees what he thinks is a squid with long pale, purplish-gray tentacles extending beneath the boat. These encounters interrupt any simple division between the men and an empty sea. The water is inhabited, productive, and active, but that abundance becomes dangerous when the men are no longer visitors who can leave at will.

The overturned boat intensifies this transformation. Loose bait beneath the hull, blood from injured legs, waves arriving from changing directions, and a white object floating amid foam all become part of a shifting ecological and perceptual field. Searchers later face the reverse problem: a capsized twenty-one-foot boat can resemble whitecaps, while floating debris can resemble a possible target. The same sea that conceals the hull from the Coast Guard can bring sharks close enough to be noticed by exhausted survivors. In this setting, visibility is never neutral; it determines whether an animal is a distant fact, an uncertain sign, or an immediate threat.

Fear After the Rescue

Sharks do not need to attack anyone to shape the book’s aftermath. Nick later returns to the beach but will not enter the water. At Indian Rocks Beach, near St. Pete Beach, he puts one foot into the water and tells Kristen Schuyler that it is about thirty degrees warmer than the last water he felt. He still refuses to go in, choosing a public shower to remove sand instead of rinsing off in the surf. When he and Paula Oliveira sit at the beach at sunset, Nick remains outside for an hour and a half, staring at the water while the others return to the beach house.

The animal therefore persists less as a documented killer than as part of the sea’s remembered menace. Each look at the water brings back brief images of the accident, the men’s struggle, and the words spoken before two of them died in Nick’s arms. Sharks condense several forms of vulnerability at once: the body’s exposure, the unpredictability of the environment, the possibility that injury will attract further danger, and the inability to know what moves beneath the surface. Their recurring presence gives the Gulf an agency that is neither wholly hostile nor safely controllable, while making visible how a natural creature can become permanently entangled with trauma.