It’s no secret that sharks aren’t the blood-thirsty human-slaughterers we made them look like. The slightest appeal for the ocean would have led you to come across a video / article that tries to desacralise this image, and restore some truth. Yet, they are piss-your-wetsuits scary creatures. How do surfers deal with this inconvenient duality ?
Tips and tricks to stay away
If you’re in a sharky country and can’t help considering them when you paddle out, there are a couple of things you can watch out for.
1) Crowds, or rather the absence of a crowd.
Sharks are shy and opportunistic creatures - it’s a lot easier for them to investigate* a solo, weird-looking, gesticulating thing than a crowd of surfers. Also, if there is a curious shark hanging out where you are surfing, better be someone else than you that greets it, right?
* Regrettably, due to lack of better communication means, they may investigate by taking “test bites” that will rip a hand / foot off.
2) Turn on your animal instinct.
There’s no app for that. Pay attention to anything fishy (figuratively and literally) that could suggests shark presence. If someone told you a dead whale washed up a nearby beach a couple of days ago, take it into account. If the birds are having a feast behind the surf, think about it. If you are gonna have a shark encounter, you’ll have a better experience if its hunter-mode is turned off. Take the hints.
3) Actually, there’s an app for that.
A friend kept it away from me during our 6 months in Australia because he knew I’d freak out. It enables users to report shark sightings with precise GPS coordinates. He only showed it to me at the airport when we were already on our way back to shark-free France. I guess he didn’t want to surf alone.
4) Water conditions.
This (very) cool Ted Talk shows the research process for the “don’t eat me wetsuit”. Sharks use more senses than us to identify things, and they only rely on vision in the last 2-3 meters. When surfing in murky waters, you are making it harder for the shark to realise that he does not want a bite of your leg. Same goes with going surfing at dawn and dusk, which (by the way) are their feeding hours.
Necessary comments on the above.
It’s worth noting that some guys will paddle out on a stormy day with birds shooting in the water out the back, an empty lineup, the day after a shark attack, and come out fine. I once worried about potentially seeing a fin pop out at winkipop (Australia) and started telling the guys around me about it. I stopped after one of them answered:
“Mate… It’s the ocean, what do you expect?!”
I got out. He did not. He’s probably right that you shouldn’t enter the ocean if you’re not comfortable with what’s in it. In some places, surfing is always somewhat of a leap of faith.
A bit of Surfer-shark culture
The year is 2015 and it is the final heat of the Jeffreys bay event, one of the prettiest wave on tour. Mick Fanning (3x world Champion) is surfing like a god, until the most dramatic moment in pro-surfing came :
The live audience for a heat like this one is counted in hundreds of thousands, live on facebook and national television. Right after the attack, a wave blocks the scene for 10 agonising seconds. That might have been long enough to bore a couple of Gen zers with 7-8 seconds attention spans, but it was just short of giving Mick’s mum a heart attack. Let’s have Mick explain what happened during that eternity.
He came out unscratched but the emotional shock must have been nasty. As he climbs on the boat back to shore, the live streaming turns into an interview to capture the moment. The WSL interviewer jokingly asks “land a few punch?!”. Retrospectively, it’s pretty shocking that things unfolded that way but Mick, high on adrenaline, kept his natural good spirits. Moments later though, his figure started to changed. His head fell in his hands, his eyes closed and he was struggling to process how and why he had escaped the worse. It took him a week to go back surfing and, funnily enough, on his very first surf after the incident he was forced out by the scary sight of a dorsal fin, in murky waters.
Personal feelings
I’ve spent 6 months in Australia and another 6 months in South Africa. I don’t think I ever came close to being mistaken for shark food, but I had a few days where spooky thoughts of “what if” took serious bites off my confidence.
Most memorably, there was that one time at bells beach when I was paddling back out from a (good) wave. Just as the white water was clearing up after a duck dive, I remember seeing a massive head of sea weed slowly float up to the surface in front of me. I freaked my balls out and sat down with my feet on my board for no reason. I couldn’t look down in the water anymore, although I knew 100% that it was sea weed.
I had a panic attack, not a shark attack.
No wave came and I was in a very real and very conscious nightmare for the next 10 minutes. I paddled towards the shore looking at the sky, not paying attention to shoulder cramps because I was too focused picturing a shark jump out of the water with me in its mouth. While it’s a ridiculous thing I like think back to, these were potentially the worst minutes of my life. It was a thought that took control of my consciousness entirely, and I remember not being able to fight it off while I was still in the water. Since that one big time, less intense, more manageable moments of stress about sharks have creeped in randomly in my sessions, and it’s always a bummer to fight them off without going back to land.
A year after I left Australia, a (french) guy actually got attacked at the very same, legendary Bells beach. His reaction : “I really wanna go back soon. Juss when my leg it’s ok, I gonna go back surf”. Let’s hope he doesn’t paddle into floating sea weed next time he goes.
Insta of the week
That’s the closest you and I will get to a barrel this deep. Thank me later.
Song of the week
Warning: listening to the banger below includes severe risks of catching 4-6 weeks addiction for this song. Specifically around the second verse. Please listen responsibly.
What's the banger? I can't see/open it