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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Sharks
- Thread starter LeeToRainesToRoach
- Start date
One of the better shark articles I've read in the mainstream press.
Fear on Cape Cod as sharks hunt again
Fear on Cape Cod as sharks hunt again
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Three weeks ago (Saturday again) a man went missing while spearfishing on the Great Barrier Reef. His gear and clothing were found on the bottom near where his boat was stationed; police refused to say whether the gear had been shark-damaged but called off the search soon after.
Search for missing Cairns spear fisher called off, police not ruling out shark attack
Search for missing Cairns spear fisher called off, police not ruling out shark attack
I have a Pavlovian response to shark attack stories now. Click to PRE for LTRTR update.
Adds another reason not to head west.
Adds another reason not to head west.
Zombie shark still swimming despite being ‘half eaten’
A researcher has spotted a shark still hunting for its prey – despite being “half eaten”.
www.news.com.au
According to the article it was happily swimming around looking for a human to eat. It was proba ly a Saturday.
Anythings possible I guess. Reminded me of Mike the headless chook.
I really enjoy this Shark thread even though what’s posted often scares the crap out of me.
Conditions were as good as they get on the Saturday just gone. I’d surfed this place only 5 times over the 35 odd years that I have known about it……always alone except for the very first time.
I was shown this wave in my late teens by one of the guys whom “found” many of the well-known waves along a stretch of wave rich coast. He made me promise not to tell anyone else about it or its whereabouts.
He picked me up before dawn. As a wide-eyed grommet on the track in, I couldn’t believe this legend would take me surfing at his secret spot. I still can’t believe it today! It is difficult terrain and really overgrown. The deeper we went the less it resembled a track. It was more like a winter wash away or watercourse. The old landcruiser was like a tractor and just gobbled it all up. “It’s a duco destroyer” he yells out over the roar of the engine. It was still dark as he stopped the car. Now we start the walk in.
By my guestimate we were still about 2 km’s from the water. Trudging through the scrub the morning light starting to intensify we broke out into a bit of a clearing atop the coastal scarp. A short distance below was the rocky swell ravaged coastline. On this day it was relatively calm. There was small swell lines stacked to the horizon. My eyes were darting everywhere. Where is it, where is this wave?
Travelling in across the deep water just beyond the reef’s edge one of the lines jacks up and the lip lurches forward. The wave rattles along the reef edge gun barrel straight at a constant speed. “That’s it” he yells. Then another, then another. It was like a wave machine. Wave after wave behaving in an almost identical manner to its predecessor.
We surfed this wave until our arms were like jelly. Hooting and hollering as we took it in turns catching the biggest and best of the waves that kept coming through. Throughout the session as we waited for our waves, he explained to me all the required ingredients to warrant visiting this place. “If one of the ingredients is a bit off don’t bother son.” “So, what’s its name?” I ask him. “Karnt-to-get-to” he laughs hysterically.
It takes me a while to cotton on. Real important to understand that ingredient list. As a cocksure testosterone filled young man I visited this wave more times than I care to remember and never ever got in the water. There was always too much swell or it was the wrong swell direction, the wind wasn’t quiet right or the tide too high or low. The place looks nothing like a surfable wave should one element be just a fraction off. It took me nearly 10 years to get the recipe right and to have my second surf. Every failed mission I further understood why he named it such.
In a wave rich coastline there are at least a dozen options that can be surfed having barely left the bitumen. You won’t ever surf those waves alone, even on their poorest days. They are always crowded. Drawn to surfing in the late seventies it was the escapism of the act that particularly drew me in. The adventure in travelling and finding new waves to surf. Imagining that you were the first to surf there. A modern-day explorer. As the saying goes.....only a surfer knows the feeling.
On Saturday morning I headed off in the dark to our secret wave. It didn’t hoax me on this occasion. It looked as picture perfect as the first time I ever laid eyes upon it. It was as mesmerising as ever. Line after line as far as the eye could see. I watched wave after wave peel down the reef. Normally I’d be frothing. Wetsuit would be on in record time. Applying sunscreen. Check the leg rope – don’t want to lose the board out there. Fresh wax being applied to the heavily wax encrusted surfboard. Rough it all up with the wax comb to make it extra sticky. But not today.
I couldn’t stop thinking of L2R2R Saturday’s being the worst day for fatal encounters. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d been spooked by the stat at the eleventh hour! Instead of surfing I took the opportunity to sit on the scarp and reminisce about my old surfing mate, whom is many years gone and that wonderful day of discovery all those years ago.
My mind often drifted to our PRE colleague. A man I hadn’t met yet I respected. I stared at the waves for hours wanting to see the man in the grey suit swim through the line-up. Justification for my decision. It wasn’t to be. I reckon he was out there. Out of view in the deep water. Karnttogetto I'll surf you next time!
Conditions were as good as they get on the Saturday just gone. I’d surfed this place only 5 times over the 35 odd years that I have known about it……always alone except for the very first time.
I was shown this wave in my late teens by one of the guys whom “found” many of the well-known waves along a stretch of wave rich coast. He made me promise not to tell anyone else about it or its whereabouts.
He picked me up before dawn. As a wide-eyed grommet on the track in, I couldn’t believe this legend would take me surfing at his secret spot. I still can’t believe it today! It is difficult terrain and really overgrown. The deeper we went the less it resembled a track. It was more like a winter wash away or watercourse. The old landcruiser was like a tractor and just gobbled it all up. “It’s a duco destroyer” he yells out over the roar of the engine. It was still dark as he stopped the car. Now we start the walk in.
By my guestimate we were still about 2 km’s from the water. Trudging through the scrub the morning light starting to intensify we broke out into a bit of a clearing atop the coastal scarp. A short distance below was the rocky swell ravaged coastline. On this day it was relatively calm. There was small swell lines stacked to the horizon. My eyes were darting everywhere. Where is it, where is this wave?
Travelling in across the deep water just beyond the reef’s edge one of the lines jacks up and the lip lurches forward. The wave rattles along the reef edge gun barrel straight at a constant speed. “That’s it” he yells. Then another, then another. It was like a wave machine. Wave after wave behaving in an almost identical manner to its predecessor.
We surfed this wave until our arms were like jelly. Hooting and hollering as we took it in turns catching the biggest and best of the waves that kept coming through. Throughout the session as we waited for our waves, he explained to me all the required ingredients to warrant visiting this place. “If one of the ingredients is a bit off don’t bother son.” “So, what’s its name?” I ask him. “Karnt-to-get-to” he laughs hysterically.
It takes me a while to cotton on. Real important to understand that ingredient list. As a cocksure testosterone filled young man I visited this wave more times than I care to remember and never ever got in the water. There was always too much swell or it was the wrong swell direction, the wind wasn’t quiet right or the tide too high or low. The place looks nothing like a surfable wave should one element be just a fraction off. It took me nearly 10 years to get the recipe right and to have my second surf. Every failed mission I further understood why he named it such.
In a wave rich coastline there are at least a dozen options that can be surfed having barely left the bitumen. You won’t ever surf those waves alone, even on their poorest days. They are always crowded. Drawn to surfing in the late seventies it was the escapism of the act that particularly drew me in. The adventure in travelling and finding new waves to surf. Imagining that you were the first to surf there. A modern-day explorer. As the saying goes.....only a surfer knows the feeling.
On Saturday morning I headed off in the dark to our secret wave. It didn’t hoax me on this occasion. It looked as picture perfect as the first time I ever laid eyes upon it. It was as mesmerising as ever. Line after line as far as the eye could see. I watched wave after wave peel down the reef. Normally I’d be frothing. Wetsuit would be on in record time. Applying sunscreen. Check the leg rope – don’t want to lose the board out there. Fresh wax being applied to the heavily wax encrusted surfboard. Rough it all up with the wax comb to make it extra sticky. But not today.
I couldn’t stop thinking of L2R2R Saturday’s being the worst day for fatal encounters. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d been spooked by the stat at the eleventh hour! Instead of surfing I took the opportunity to sit on the scarp and reminisce about my old surfing mate, whom is many years gone and that wonderful day of discovery all those years ago.
My mind often drifted to our PRE colleague. A man I hadn’t met yet I respected. I stared at the waves for hours wanting to see the man in the grey suit swim through the line-up. Justification for my decision. It wasn’t to be. I reckon he was out there. Out of view in the deep water. Karnttogetto I'll surf you next time!
Generally, most injuries (and deaths) from sharks recorded in Sydney's history are people getting a limb mauled by bull sharks in the harbour or Botany Bay (or tributaries to these). Then dying from blood loss. That was how the last death occured in the 1960s. Makes sense with how much more common bull shark sightings are in the estuaries than great whites are off Sydney's beaches. Rowing on Iron Cove and the Lane Cove River it wasn't unheard of to see them about.
This one was far more dramatic and spectacular than that though.
Sounded pretty horrific. 4-5m animal hit the swimmmer so hard from the deep it got airborne (like they do in South Africa when grabbing seals). The recreational fisherman on the rocks probably still can't believe what they saw.
there's some very confronting phone footage taken from about 20m away.
its a graphic reminder,
that we are lumps of meat.
I was reading a really interesting article interviewing shark researchers on their latest school of thought.
Generally the debate seems to be dominated by, "Sharks are evil man eaters that must be culled" and "The shark was just doing what it does, it probably mistook him for prey - like a seal." What is now becoming apparent is that neither view is strictly true, it is kind of somewhere in between.
Firstly, there is no such thing as a rogue shark specifically targeting humans or with a vendetta against humans etc. That inference is ridiculous. It has been proven to happen with lions, tigers, leopards who have got too old to hunt and humans make easy prey, so they start specifically targeting humans. But there is no evidence great white sharks display this behaviour.
However the hypothesis that they mistake us for other prey like seals is now being thought as also being false. Their eyesight has been discovered to be a bit better than had previously been thought. And they are likely more intelligent with a capacity for learning beyond what was previously thought. They can very much make the distinction that humans are different to seals (or any other prey). Also the intelligence links into their curiosity where they bite things to work out what it is.
We are clearly not their preferred prey. And hence we are well down the list of prey they would seek out. But are certainly on the menu if they were having an unsuccessful period of seeking out more suitable prey and one of us happens to find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which obviously this particular swimmer did.
It is thought then that shark attacks (the article was focusing more on Great Whites) fall into two categories. Some attacks are an exploratory bite (or two or three), trying to work out exactly what we are. Given we have no shell like a turtle to protect us, it will obviously result in serious injury or death. It appears that the shark that attempted to bite Mick Fanning off South Africa is an example of this kind of approach by a shark. And 13 YO Hannah Mighall, who got bitten on the leg several times by a large great white, while surfing off Binalong Bay in Tasmania about a decade ago. The other is where a shark is obviously just really hungry through lack of preferable prey, so is beyond being choosy. This then can lead to them opportunistically targeting a human as genuine prey, if that person finds themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this case the attack characteristics are quite different. They stealthily sneak up, and hit the person from no where with brute force, probably near biting them in two. There is not much recovered of the victim. Clearly the swimmer in Sydney seems to fall into this latter category.
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yeah, this person was eaten.
hell of a way to go.
Im fully expecting Morrison and Dutton to call Albonese a shark lover this week.
Albonese could wedge them with a bowl of shark fin soup?
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