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MICH A E L SH A NNONA N O D E T O J O H N B A L D E S S A R I L E V E N R A M B I N F A L L F A S H I O N R E M E M B E R I N G N I C K G A B A L D O N

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TICK TOCK ADRENALINE JUNKIE MARK HEALEY

LIVES AND DIES BY THE OCEAN.

Mark Healey’s life/time management includes surfing 50-foot waves and riding great white sharks. Maybe it’s time to rethink our definition of “living.”

Off Guadalupe Island, Mexico, in 2011, professional big-wave surfer Mark Healey watched the great white swim predictable circles around the dive boat. It swam. He watched. It swam. He watched …

“Yes, this is the one,” he thought, and walked to the back of the vessel where a steel shark cage hung below the surface. He took a few deep breaths, secured his mask and snorkel and swam past the cage, away from the boat and into the open ocean. Exposed, he waited. He waited until the great white shark — nature’s most perfect predator and star of every beachgoer’s nightmares — turned and accelerated toward Mark at a measured pace. This is where most people’s lives would begin flashing before their eyes, but for Mark, it was exactly what he wanted. He planned to ride the black-eyed beast.

In looking at riding waves that surfers thought to be unrideable, and riding sharks that — well, let’s face it, for most of us there is no rideable variety — 31-year-old Mark Healey says that once you’ve done it, “Nothing has changed except your way of thinking.” And it’s with this philosophy, along with an unflinching dedication to seize every second he has on this earth, that Mark chooses to live his life. (Still, riding sharks? What the fuck?)

Paul: Give me the Cliff’s Notes version of your early years. Healy: Well, I was born and raised on the North Shore of Oahu. My grandfather was in the military, so that’s how my dad ended up being raised here. And my mom came on vacation from Mississippi, met my dad and never left. Growing up, I never thought pro surfing was a viable career choice. I thought I was going to continue in school, get good grades, get an athletic scholarship, go to college and be a marine biologist. Then all that went out the window as soon as I got my first sponsorship, even though that was basically just some stickers. But once I got my first free airline ticket and went to Fiji, I was like, “Yeah, this is what I want to do. I want to travel and see the world. I don’t need to be in a classroom.”

So, as cheesy as it sounds, the ocean became your classroom.Absolutely. I had my dad as a role model, and he would take me spear fishing and have me on the float with him. We were pretty poor, and we caught a lot of our meals, so I had an intimate relationship with the ocean. And when I started making a living off of the ocean and surfing big waves, I decided to use that as my education, and I took it seriously, educating myself through the ocean and my travels.

Can you talk a little about your free diving and spear fishing?Well, I was swimming before I could walk, and free diving has been a part of my life since I was 3 years old — just as long as surfing has. It’s an incredible world under water, and it just doesn’t get old. A lot of the times I’m spear fishing for food, but I can go out there for six hours and be surrounded by fish and sea life the whole time but not pull the trigger on my spear gun once. And I’m totally OK with that. I just love the fact that it’s an uncontrolled

environment, nature in its truest form. It’s very pure in that sense, and it’s that connection with nature that I think a lot of people are missing in their lives. But as humans, we need it.

Well there’s a difference though between snorkeling and surfing, and doing what you do. You push it a lot further. I’ve always been very curious by nature and expect a lot out of myself. And my competitive side motivates me to squeeze every last drop out of what I do. So, if I’m going to be a professional big-wave surfer, I’m going to put my head down and go on waves that people won’t go on; same goes with spear fishing and anything I do, really.

And so it was this curiosity that led you to riding sharks?Believe it or not, that was an educated decision. I’ve spent my entire life around sharks. I’ve swum with thousands of them. And with spear fishing, you’re essentially doing all the wrong things if you don’t want sharks around. You’re blending in and trying to make sea life comfortable enough to approach you; you want them to believe that you are a natural part of that environment. There’s blood in the water ’cause you’re dragging the dead fish around with you all day. It’s the perfect storm to attract sharks. But once I got past those first couple of knee-jerk reactions — which are just caused by this fear you’ve built up in your mind from what people have told you about sharks — that initial panic goes away, and it’s like “Oh, maybe they’re cool and I’ll check ’em out,” and then you find that they don’t want to get anywhere near you.

What about white sharks?It’s just applying the information I’ve learned from other sharks to them. The difference with white sharks, though, is that they feed on marine mammals, and marine mammals are super intelligent, so for a white shark to survive feeding off them means they’re also very intelligent, so it makes for an interesting chess match.

Walk me through that first time. How did you get to the point where you’re grabbing onto the fin of a great white and going for a ride?That’s the nerve-racking part. It’s not like the shark was coming right up to the cage and I could just grab on as it was swimming by. I had to swim far off the back of the boat and make it comfortable enough to swim up to me. That first shark, it was doing these even-mannered, reliable swimming patterns for 15 minutes before I got in the water. And then as soon as it saw me, it did a 180 and beelined it straight for me. And that’s a very intimate moment, because you know that shark is coming only to see you. That’s when your heart is in your throat because, at that point, if it wants to take you, it can take you. So, I let the shark swim right up, and as soon as it started veering to the side of me, I swam down and grabbed on to its dorsal fin. You have to swim along with it at first and ease off on your kicks so you’re not just dead weight and startle it. And what surprised me the most: The shark loved it. I couldn’t believe how comfortable it was having me on its back. And I’ve done a ton of dorsal rides

Written by TAYLOR PAULPortrait by CHRIS SHONTING

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“YOU HAVE A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF TIME ON EARTH, AND THE SECONDS TICK AWAY, AND YOU’RE NOT GETTING THEM BACK. YOU DON’T KNOW WHEN IT’S GONNA HAPPEN, BUT YOU WILL DIE. YOU CAN COME DOWN WITH A DISEASE OR GET HIT BY A DRUNK DRIVER. THERE ARE SO MANY FACTORS THAT YOU JUST CAN’T CONTROL. BUT YOU CAN CONTROL HOW YOU SPEND YOUR TIME WHILE YOU’RE HERE, AND THAT’S LIFE’S GREATEST ASSET.”

since, and it’s the same thing: They seem to calm down more. It’s really an awesome experience. Because there are certain details that are never translated on television, like the muscle tone and definition in them, seeing all of that move in one fluid motion is pretty intense. But I could actually feel them relax the same way horses do when you sit on them, with all that muscle under you, and you can tell when it relaxes. With that being said, there’s definitely a certain character of shark that will let you do this. There were plenty that I didn’t want anything to do with. It’s not like I’m jumping in the water and shark whispering every one that comes by. You’ll get yourself killed doing that.

I’ve tried to explain to people what you do, and why you can do this, and I always go back to the surfing analogy. When you take someone surfing who has never seen the ocean, they have no clue which wave is going to break in front of them or past them, which one is going to taper left or right. They’re blind because they don’t have the experience. But as surfers, we’ve seen enough waves to know what’s going to happen. And so it’s similar with what you do with sharks — you’ve spent so much time with marine animals that you see things that nobody else sees and know when it’s safe. Or at least safe-ish. Exactly. And you can tell when people know what they’re doing because they know when to fold ’em. I’ve taken people out and introduced them and gotten them onto the backs of sharks, and I notice a common theme. They’re really scared at first, and then I explain to them what’s going on, and they start getting really comfortable really fast — because it’s really intoxicating interacting with these sharks — and next thing you know they’re taking a lot of chances that I definitely wouldn’t take. And then I warn them, and they’ve even told me I’m paranoid. And it’s like, you might be able to do it a couple of times and get away with it, but you can’t get away with it forever.

Is that something you enjoy, introducing people to these crazy things you do? Well, if I can, I really want to give back and show people why I appreciate these things and why we shouldn’t be afraid of the unknown, to show people why we need to push ourselves beyond our understanding of the ocean — because everything is impossible until it’s done. It all comes down to perception: Like, why do people think how they do about sharks? How many people are afraid of sharks because they’ve had a bad experience with them? Very few. It’s usually from information that they got from someone else. We build up these opinions in our minds that we think are set in stone when really they’re figments of our imaginations, and we build up walls in our minds. It’s trying to get past those barriers and taking a realistic look based on experience.

So do you think the ocean is safer than people think?It depends which people, but there are just so many factors. Whether you’re dealing with wild animals or big waves or anything in the ocean, it’s not predictable, and that’s the allure of it all. It’s so unpredictable that you know one day you’re gonna get that one shark that’s pissed off and turns around and grabs your leg. The friends that we lose in big waves, it’s never on their biggest or worse wipeout ever — it’s just on a wipeout they’ve done 100 times — but there’s such a chaos element to all of this that you will have a bad one eventually. You just have to be prepared to deal with it on the fly when it happens.

How do you prepare for big waves?I take my preparation very seriously. It’s really becoming apparent to me, being in this game for so long, that those numbers are coming up right around me. I should’ve been dead a lot of times already, but I don’t expect anymore get out of jail free cards. I’ve got to take safety measures, and I mitigate the risks. Flotation. Safety crews. Fitness. But there are so many factors to longevity besides the odds of something bad happening and surviving it. There’s also the mental aspect of it. Once you’ve been bitten and almost died, can you come back? Once you’ve seen one of your friends die, can you keep going? Once you’ve helped their families and have seen the grief it causes, do you still want to do it? There are a lot of things working against the people who’ve been in my line of work for a long time. You really have to be born with a certain personality type to keep coming back. But it will never be safe, and the day that it is I won’t want to do it anymore.

What is your philosophy on death?Well, everybody dies. That’s the one guarantee we have in life, and we can’t control it. So I look at what I can control, which is something I learned by being in the ocean. During a really bad wipeout, you lose control over everything but your mind and body, so that’s what I focus on. I can’t control what the wave is doing, so I accept it. That’s life. So to me, taking these chances is a logical decision. I’m looking at managing my time the way I would manage my bank account. You have a certain amount of time on Earth, and the seconds tick away, and you’re not getting them back. You don’t know when it’s gonna happen, but you will die. You can come down with a disease or get hit by a drunk driver. There are so many factors that you just can’t control. But you can control how you spend your time while you’re here, and that’s life’s greatest asset.

Photos: HEALEY'S INSTAGRAM @DONKEYSHOW