My swimming group stays about 100m offshore. Most fatalities occur where the waves are breaking. It's all about education.
"Cull 'em all", as some commenters put it overnight, is a common response. A softer response was, "Just cull bull sharks."Every time there's an incident this debate erupts and, consequently, state governments have been engaged over the past few years in a closer study of how to manage the shark risk.
The shark-detection buoys and drumlines off the coast are a result. The backdown on the removal of shark nets indicates how cautious these studies are. I usually swim with my group at Main Beach, Forster - not that far from Kylies Beach, scene of the latest attack in which Swiss tourist Lukas Schindler, 26, was unable to save the life of his 25-year-old girlfriend, Livia Mühlheim, just after 6am on Thursday.At Forster, there's a detection buoy 350 metres off the beach. It goes off all the time. Government contractors regularly catch predatory sharks - whites, bulls - on drumlines spaced for several kilometres along our coast. It's not uncommon for our swim group, the Turtles, to watch the contractor release and tag a "predator" from the drumline even closer in than the detection buoy.We see quite a few sharks, mainly grey nurses , but also occasionally whites and, less often, bulls. But - and I know this is tempting fate - over the years we've had no nasty encounters, although certainly a few interesting ones, such as the morning when a three-metre bull cruised beneath us in three metres of water, fifty metres off the beach. It was monumentally uninterested in us.Despite the activity just off Forster, Tuncurry Beach, a kilometre away, has seen two fatalities in the last couple of years, both board riders.A key difference is that Forster is a swimming beach while Tuncurry is a board beach. Our morning swims go through the break, then up and back along the beach, about 100 metres out. At Tuncurry, all water activity is in the break: surfboard riders, boogie boarders and the like. Of the incidents along the NSW coast over the past 20 years or so, all but a very few have involved surfers in the break. We swimmers are much farther out to sea, although you might think we'd be more at risk. I've been ocean swimming for 40 years and have developed a sense of where and when to swim and where and when not to swim. Early mornings and evenings require caution - "shark feeding times". It doesn't mean you shouldn't go out, but you have to know how to manage the risk. And times of reduced light make it harder to spot dangers, and harder for sharks to tell the difference between us and actual prey.Sharks are chancers. "Predatory" sharks also feed opportunistically. That's why they hang around break areas. Schools of bait fish hang around the breaks, perhaps because the waves stir up the bottom and make it easier for them to do their own hunting. Sharks prey on schooling fish. My sense is that board riders, in the break, unwittingly get in the way when a shark is chasing a bait ball. Escalating the risk, most board riders wear wetsuits year-round. To a shark in a hurry, they look like seals, for example. Fair game. As swimmers, we will not swim where we see diving sea birds. We will not swim where we see the water surface disrupted. We will not swim where a bunch of fisher folk are throwing fish food into the water. The birds diving and the water surface broken, often in a frenzy of activity, suggests the presence of bait balls, of schooling fish. Thus there's a greater chance of lurking predators. I am not aware of the circumstances of the incident at Kylies Beach when those unfortunate tourists swam at 6:30am. It would have been a setting from paradise to them. It's unlikely they had all this awareness in their minds. But it's fair to say that tourists, latter-day arrivals, people from, say, inland regional areas, do not have the same sense about these things as people who spend their time hanging around our beaches. The issue comes down to education. One thing that could be done is to set up a system of signage at beaches, especially at beaches in remote areas - such as the campground where these tourists were said to be staying - advising of the risks and how to manage them. In one way, country beaches should be safer. The water is clearer. Hunting sharks can see us more clearly and - this is supposition - they have a better idea of whether swimmers are actually what they're looking for. Often, a shark will take a bite to find out. A little bite for it; a big one for us.Paul Ellercamp is the founder and former operator of
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