“From Fowler’s Bay to Port Lincoln it’s the worst
place in the world to go surfing. And it’s getting
worse.”
For the past fifteen years the Streaky Bay fisherman and
surfer Jeff Schmucker has been trying to get a pretty simple
message across – the population of Great Whites on South
Australia’s west coast has blown out and there’ll come a point in
the real near future when surfing will become unsustainable for
anyone who isn’t thrilled with the idea of being disappeared by a
Great White.
Well, that time is now.
After
Streaky Bay local Lance Appleby was killed by a Great White
shark, the fourth fatal attack on a surfer by a White in South
Australia in less than two years, Schmucker told the
Australian Associated Press the population of Great White sharks
had “exploded” to such an extent surfing there was now a risk no
one should take unless you had a jetski patrolling alongside.
What happened?
In 1999, Australia declared
the Great White “vulnerable”and made it illegal to hunt or harass
the fish
Since then,
RIP surfers Peter Edmonds, Tadashi Nakahara, Rob Pedretti, Mani
Hart-Deville, Mark Sanguinetti, Tim Thompson, Nick Slater, Cameron
Bayes, Jean Wright, Nick Peterson, Simon Baccanello, Todd Gendle,
Khai Cowley, Lance Appleby, Brad Smith, Nick Edwards, Kyle Burden,
Ben Linden, Chris Boy, Ben Gerring, Laeticia Brouwer and Andrew
Sharpe.
I got a call from Schmucker yesterday ‘cause he wanted to get it
out there that surfing on the South Australian west coast was now
“unsustainable. It’s fucking over,”
he told me.
I’d written a similar piece shortly after the attack but
Schmucker would be real grateful if I could get it out there that,
if you want to surf on South Australia’s west coast, your odds of
being killed are going to be dramatically shortened.
Schmucker knows these waters.
He first started fishing out of Streaky Bay with his Daddy back
in the early seventies when he was eight. He knew how to gut a
shark by the time he was nine and before he was in double figures
he was sitting on the stern of the family trawler pulling in bronze
whalers.
shark.
He adores his coastline, calls it one of the most unique in the
world with its six estuaries, dodge tides, shallow
water sea grasses, its wild offshore fishing. He says pole-fishing
for tuna in the raw as hell Great Australian Bight is “one of the
most electrifying methods for excitement and action.”
Schmucker says the latest attack has left Streaky Bay even more
traumatised than usual.
“The kids are reeling, there’s all sorts of emotional stuff
going on. Everyone’s fucking upset and not sleeping. And fair
enough. I didn’t sleep for the first few days. I was waking up in
the night with the logistics of it, the reality of it. It’s fucking
brutal. The kids who were there are thinking of it. They can see
the blood splashing in the water. It’s firmly in their
minds.”
He says every time there’s a new shark attack he gets a text
from Jevan Wright’s mum, Katrina. Jevan
was seventeen when he was killed by a Great White at Blacks, there
on the Eyre Peninsula.
“I lay awake at night wondering whether his bones are still
inside the shark
and where is the shark,” Katrina told the Port Lincoln Times in
2001. “If only we could get that shark and get the body. It sounds
gross, but it’s no more gross than getting than
getting a body out of a wrecked car.”
The day before Jevan was killed, New Zealander Cameron Bayes was
dragged off his board and killed by a Great White at Cactus, a
couple of hundred k’s away along the same coast.
“And she tells me, ‘Jeff you got do something about it.’ It’s
fucked. It’s still raw.”
Schmucker says, “I don’t want people to be hurt. It’s not the
people who are eaten, they’re gone, it’s the impact on the
communities in the surfing world. It really hits people
hard.”
Still, surfers continue to roll the dice. A few days ago,
surfers were chased out of the water by a Great White at Caves, a
surf spot a couple of hundred k’s west of Streaky Bay.
“These people think they can surf Cactus with twenty people and
be safe. They’re fucking dreaming. From Fowler’s Bay to Port
Lincoln it’s the worst place in the world to go surfing. And it’s
getting worse.”
Schmucker says he doesn’t want to be the boy that cried wolf,
but at the same time he’s a realist. He hears what the government,
what surf lifesaving has to say, that it’s all anecdotal, no hard
evidence, but he has almost fifty years in the water down there, in
the surf and on boats.
If you didn’t know, all longline and gill net commercial
fishermen have had a HD camera on their boats for the last fifteen
years.
“And it’s all kept on a hard drive. Fifteen years of data,” says
Schmucker. “Every time there’s an interaction with a threatened
species you have to put it in the log book. All that data is there
and that data will be conclusive in the growth of the (Great White)
population, all these Whites from three footers to twenty footers
entailed in the fishing gear.”
He says the roll call of surfers dying is hard to
take.
“I feel a little responsible for surfing in South Australia. If
I don’t say what I think, there’s going to be so much tragedy in
people’s lives. In the late nineties, we were down to seeing one or
two Pointers a year.”
So, what can you do about it?
“Two things. Section 79 of the Fisheries Act allows for the
destruction of a shark that has killed someone. If it was the same
shark, and it’s a possibility, that ate Todd last year and got
Lance this year, and they’ve got both boards so they get the DNA,
the shark needs to be killed on the same day. You need to kill a
rogue shark. Second, look into monitoring all sharks over ten foot.
The little ones are eating fish. Tagging is easy. Maneaters come to
you. But you gotta burley up. Give us a sea lion, shoot one of em
between the eyes or electrocute it, and you’ll have more Pointers
than you can point a stick at.”
“Listen,” says, Schmucker,
“This about saving lives, saving people from lifetime traumatic
experiences. You don’t go to a game park and get out of the car and
walk around. People put the blinkers on with surfing. I was
addicted to surfing like no other cunt on the planet, surfing from
when the surf came up to when it went down. But if you’re surfing
here on the Eyre Peninsula, be a fucking realist. You shouldn’t be
going in the water until there’s some strong mitigation in
place.”
