“Stay together! It’s a big f**king one! Head
in!”
It ain’t a stretch to say that Australia’s mid-to-far
north coast, roughly Forster to Coolangatta, is crawling with Great
White sharks. They call it a Great White
Superhighway.
You might’ve even lost count of the the surfers killed by Great
Whites in Australia in the last few years.
A brief timeline.
(And it don’t include attacks that didn’t kill the surfer, like
Joe Hoffman, the twenty-five-year-old shredder whose arm was
destroyed by a Great White at Crescent Head or upcoming
pro surfer Kai Mckenzie, 23, who lost his right leg to a Great
White in
July.)
Mark Sanguinetti, 59, hit by Great White, killed, Tuncurry, NSW,
May 18, 2021.
Andrew Sharpe, 52, hit by a Great White at Kelpies in Esperance,
October 9, 2020. Never seen again.
Nick Slater, 46, hit, killed by a Great White at the Supabank,
Queensland, September 8, 2020.
Mani Hart-Deville, 15, hit, killed by a Great White, Wooli
Beach, NSW, July 11, 2020.
Rob Pedretti, 60, hit, killed, by a Great white, Salt Beach,
NSW, June 7, 2020.
In the latest encounter, Kye Wilkinson was wearing his GoPro
when he got bumped by a fifteen-foot Great White while surfing
Emerald Beach in Coffs Harbour, real close to where a surfer was
killed in 2021/
“It come up and hit the bottom of my board,” Wilkinson told
Channel Nine. “I half fell backwards. I didn’t know what it was to
start with. I looked under me, and saw pretty clearly what it
was.”
The footage is pretty wild.
“Hey guys. A Great White just went past. It came up right next
to me,” Wilkinson says.
“Stay together! It’s a big fucking one! Head in!”
“Usually you see them once, then they’re off,” he said. “But to
see one three or four times is pretty scary.”
Are there more Great Whites around now than there were thirty years ago?
It’s the simple mathematics of what happens when you protect an
apex predator for twenty-five years.
After the fourth attack on a surfer in 2018, and just before a
Gold Coast real estate agent was hit and killed at the Superbank,
Steve “Longtom” Shearer asked,
Are we at a tipping point where we say, maybe it’s time to take
the gloves off?
History proves there ain’t no tipping point.
For despite everything, despite the overwhelming evidence that
Great Whites patrol beaches in abundance and with impunity,
nothing, not the roll call of surfers dying, literally, in the
mouths of sharks, including a seventeen-year-old girl and a
fifteen-year-old boy, will shift a perception in the essential
perfection and mythology of the Great White.
