In the pitch-black darkness of five o’clock on a Friday morning, I decided that a Hawaii vacation definitely should not include bobbing in a small fishing boat five miles from shore with sharks coming in from all directions.

But that’s where I was.

Worse, for the previous half hour, oily chicken blood had been spreading in the water behind the boat to attract any sharks that didn’t already know about the four of us humans dumb enough to be here, protected from mile-deep ocean only by a thin fiber glass hull.

Beep. Beep. Beep. I was so nervous, I clutched my boat seat at the slight sound. Then I realized the noise was only a global positioning system at the front of the boat. I tried to relax.

Beep. Beep. Beep. A GPS bounced signals off a satellite and could give our location anywhere on earth, accurate to within ten feet. Helpful, maybe, but I wasn’t sure it was necessary to know exactly where I’d be when the sharks got me.

“Amazing.” Dad’s voice broke into the quiet of a warm breeze that rustled a flag on the boat. Although he sat less than five feet away with his hand on a fishing pole, it was so dark I barely saw the outline of his body. “From what I’ve read, all it takes is about one blood particle in a million for sharks to smell blood. If you cut yourself and fell in the water, all sharks within two miles would know about it and zoom in as if they had radar.”

I didn’t need to hear that.

“That’s really good to know, Mr. Kidd,” Mike Andrews answered my dad. Mike sat beside me. He had red hair that he barely covered with a New York Yankees baseball cap. He was my best friend. Nearly thirteen like me. Most of the time he spoke with a grin that could earn cookies from the grumpiest of old ladies. With our boat dropping and rising with the waves, this was not one of those times. I didn’t hear any grin in his voice as he continued to speak. “I was about to put one of these giant fishing hooks in my arm and throw myself overboard, but now I’ve changed my mind.”

“Chopped up chicken guts should be good enough for now,” Dad said. “We’ll save you for later if that doesn’t bring in the sharks.”

“Ha, ha.” Mike said to him. Then Mike leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Your dad’s not serious, right?”

I didn’t answer. All I could think about was how dumb this was.

Earlier, Joseph Norbert, Dad’s college buddy, had thrown out the chopped up chicken pieces to attract the sharks. The hearts and lungs of the chickens were in a small net dragging behind the boat.

While the guts—Norbert called them chum—began to seep blood in all directions, he had run giant fishing hooks through baitfish. Big baitfish. Back at home, we would be happy to catch fish the size of this bait. Norbert had hooked one baitfish for each of our four deep-sea fishing rods. He’d tossed the bait into the water, running line from the rods that rested by their handles in brackets mounted on the side of the boat. Attached to the fishing line, floating on the surface thirty feet above the bait, were hollow plastic buoys for markers, each about the size of a basketball. Each buoy had a bell that would tinkle when something moved it by pulling on the bait.

I squinted past the edge of the boat, trying to see those buoys. Still too dark. Not even the first rays of dawn were peeking over the mountains of the big island of Hawaii to the east of us. The only light came from stars and from the masts of a fishing trawler as it slid past us about a half mile away.

“We wouldn’t get hit by a big boat like that, right?” Although it was too dark for Norbert to see my arm, I pointed at the trawler. It seemed to be getting closer.

Norbert laughed. “It’s got radar. Just like my small boat. The pilot of that vessel knows we’re here.”

I relaxed. But only a little.

“Mr. Norbert, exactly how long is your boat?” I asked, unable to shake my worries.

“It’s a twenty-six-footer,” he said. Norbert and Dad had been roommates back in their college days fifteen years before. Norbert was short and barrel shaped. He had shaved his head bald, and it was deeply tanned because he lived in Hawaii all year long. Seeing Norbert beside my Dad was a big contrast. Dad was slimmer and taller with medium-length brown hair and a trimmed beard—with not much of a suntan. Norbert lived on the Big Island year round; we lived in Jamesville, thousands of miles away. A small, safe town. With no ocean or circling sharks. Which was where I wished I were right now. Or at least back at Norbert’s beach house, safe on the shore of Hawaii.

“And some sharks can grow to thirty feet long, right?” I asked. “Like the one in the movie Jaws.”

“Occasionally,” Norbert said, his voice rumbling from his powerful chest. Any taller, and he could have been a professional wrestler. “And they can weigh over a thousand pounds.”

I’d seen the movie Jaws. And now I wished I hadn’t.

I could picture a shark longer than this boat. A thousand pounds. Maybe closing in on us as we spoke. If it tried to knock us out of the boat ...

“So what happens if we hook a monster like that?” Mike asked, almost squeaking. He knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Relax,” Norbert said. “In all my years of shark fishing, the biggest I’ve ever caught was a six-footer. It—”

He stopped abruptly as a bell tinkled. Behind the boat. In the dark, deep water.

I knew what that tinkling meant. Out there in the darkness of the night and the deepness of the black ocean, something big had just arrived.

Something so big it could pull the bait hard enough to shake the bell on the buoy.

The bell tinkled again.