Shark Tales

A second white shark swims by. She’s larger than the first. Her slick tail flicks to the side, turning her submarine body on-a-dime. She wears a couple of scars from her years patrolling the Southern Ocean, but there’s still so much we don’t know about her or about any of the sharks here at the Neptune Islands, for that matter. Most people would feel terror or fear at seeing a second white shark enter their periphery, but seeing her brings me a rush of excited adrenaline! It’s going to be a good day in the office!……

In 2016 I got my dream job, working as a coxswain for Adventure Bay Charters, who were (at the time), the world’s only bait-free shark cage diving operation. I had spent the Winter studying an online shark biology course while working in a ski field, and then spent a month at Pt Lincoln Tafe studying my certificate II in Maritime Operations full time so I could achieve my Grade 1 coxswains certificate before the busy summer tourism season in Port Lincoln, South Australia. Port Lincoln is the only place in Australia where you can cage dive with Great White Sharks, and there were only 3 (now 2) operators licensed to run tours at the Neptune Islands Group (Ron and Valerie Taylor) Marine Park. Why was spending my days on the Southern Ocean’s rough seas with sharks, seals, seasick customers, long hours, dangerous sun exposure, swearing skippers, and a long list of work-place hazards my dream job?

Well, the shark obsession started in 2012. During an April uni holiday break, some friends and I were on a surf trip to the lower Yorke Peninsula. There was no swell one day, so my outdoor adventure idol (and friend), Michael, and I had decided to take out a pair of short surf kayaks for an explore at “Dolphin Beach”. I had been complaining to Michael that I didn’t read enough and I felt like I could be a lot more intelligent if only I could form a reading habit. “You learn from life though!” reassured Michael. “Learning from books isn’t the only way. You can learn from experiences! Let’s go for a paddle!”. How right he was. It’s 11 years on, and Michael’s interpretation might be different, but here’s how I remember that day….

We paddled out around the rocks at the Western end of the Bay. The clear waters, calm conditions and sunny skies made it the perfect day for a paddle, so we left our beach-swimming and free-diving friends behind us. Only 5minutes in to paddling along the cliffs, we noticed a crucifix on the land. We wondered what it was for, and decided we would go closer to investigate on our way back. A few minutes later, I was musing to Michael that it was hard to keep the short surf kayak pointing straight. “It’s so funny that if you just relax your core, these boats just spin!” I laughed, as I intentionally relaxed and let my boat turn itself. Before I could turn back around to face Michael, I hear a ripping through the water and every cell in my body tensed up. I turned to face the noise and see Michael’s kayak upside down and the huge head of a great white shark; eyes rolled back and biting down on the side of the kayak, but no Michael.

Is he dead?

Is he trapped?

Is he bitten?

Do I investigate?

Do I paddle away?

Will the shark turn for me?

Fortunately my conflicting risk assessments only had to last a split second before Michael popped up from under the water, next to his kayak, on the opposite side to the shark.

“Shark!” he yelled.

“No shit!!” I yelled back.

He swam like mad to my kayak (and I like to remember that I paddled towards him, but I doubt that I paddled in that direction very far!) while the distracted shark still tried to get a grip on Michael’s upside-down boat. Michael launched his belly onto the back of my very-short and unstable surf kayak; arms wrapped around my waist, feet up in the air as far from the water as he could manage.

“Paddle, Paddle!” he yelled.

It felt like my arms were made of lead. I looked forward to the rocks, imagining I was in an Olympic final and had to paddle as fast as I could, like my life depended on it, only to realise that maybe our lives DID depend on it! So paddle!!! I don’t remember how far or how long that paddle was, but adrenaline did the work for me and I focused on looking forward, so as not to risk off-balancing the kayak OR risk spotting the shark changing direction and heading our way and throwing me off focus.

Before I knew it, we were on the rocks. Michael climbed off, pulled the kayak up and euphorically jumped and laughed while I collapsed into tears. “I thought you were dead!” I cried. Luckily for Michael, he hadn’t actually seen the shark’s head. He had been looking back at my spinning kayak when the shark had bit the left side of his boat, knocking him out to the right. Getting knocked out of your kayak on a calm day is pretty confusing when you can’t see what hit you. Michael’s thought process had gone to thinking it might have been a dolphin, but as he saved his sunglasses underwater and emerged at the surface, he saw that shark’s tail flick around the back of his kayak, and he realised that was no dolphin.

We debriefed on the rocks, in awe of what had just happened. There was no shark in sight now, just Michael’s abandoned kayak, upside down and floating off (the shark must have decided that plastic didn’t taste much like seal). With steep cliffs behind us and no desire to swim or paddle back to the beach, we waved out to a fishing boat, who eventually started heading in our direction. They pulled up and we explained the story. They went to collect the casualty kayak, spotting the shark in the clear waters on their way. “F*** it’s a truck down there!!” called out the fisherman. They helped us on board. “We thought it was weird seeing you guys kayaking here! It’s a deep drop-off right here! Plenty of sharks come through”. We knew that now! “Dolphin Beach”, they said. “It will be fun”, they said.

We got a lift back to the beach, telling our free-diving friends to get out of the water on our way past. It felt surreal, but the bite marks in the kayak were plenty of evidence to our friends that it really happened. The mood on the trip changed, but we felt like we had just witnessed a real-life David Attenborough moment! An apex predator doing what it does best! We went for a surf the next day. Gotta get back on the horse.

Of course this story made headlines, with the feminist angle of “woman saves man”. I got a bravery medal at Government House (which Michael and I still laugh about) thanks to an anonymous nomination. While that might have been a win for women in the media, it wasn’t a win for sharks. Every time a shark-human interaction happens, it’s a feeding frenzy for the media. Exaggerated journalism instills fear in the reader, making it seem that sharks are man-eating machines, always ready to attack. In reality, they are very intelligent and calculated; spending most of their time cruising and only making investigatory bites when they belief the cost-benefit analysis of an “attack’s” energy expenditure will come out in their favour.

A year later I was training with a group of women to kayak across Bass Strait (more on that later in another blog). The only reason I was head-hunted for the team was because the coach, Malcolm Hamilton, had heard about the shark story. We were doing a long-distance training paddle, which would help test our stamina, navigation, and teamwork. Setting off from Henley Beach at sunrise, our goal was to paddle across Gulf St Vincent to get to Port Vincent before the day’s end. After 4 hours of annoying Northerly cross-winds and side-bracing into the seas, it finally calmed off. Moods lifted, and the singalongs started! I believe the particular song we were singing at the time was What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes, which mustn’t have sounded very good, or perhaps it sounded too much like a dying seal (very plausible). A shark grabbed my rudder and started shaking my boat around.

I looked straight forward once again, keeping my body upright and using my paddle to brace myself. We started rafting up (connecting our kayaks together side by side to avoid a capsize). Donna, one of our team of 5, was behind me, and saw the jouvenile white shark trying to grip my seal-fin-shaped rudder. My mind was so focused on staying upright, but there were doubts. “Not again. This must be my time now. I’m gonna be in the water any second”. Before I knew it, the shaking stopped! Donna said the shark had just frozen, opened its eyes, let go and swam away! Apparently jouvenile white sharks (under 2metres) do often use the top of Gulf St Vincent as a nursery. We laughed gathered our courage, took a selfie video to record the moment, then had to break up our raft and paddle on for another 7 hours to make it to land!

Post-encounter euphoria with Emily & Gayle in the middle of Gulf St Vincent.

To be at ease paddling across gulfs and between islands again, I needed to uncover what was the chance of it happening again and how I could reduce the risk. I painted my sea kayak with bio-mimicry black and white stripes, I added reflective tape to mimic eyes on my rudder so it wouldn’t be mistaken for a seal fin, I finally got ambulance cover, and I weighed up the option of a shark shield (but decided the weight/ drag/ cost wasn’t worth the potential benefit). So far, I’ve had a 100% success rate with no further shark encounters!

These encounters spurred on so much curiosity in me. What were these animals? Why the kayaks? I decided I wanted to learn more. A well-targeted facebook advertisement grabbed my interest; “Explore. Discover. Understand. Conserve”. Oceans Research, South Africa, was recruiting for their marine and terrestrial research programs, promising interns the experience of data collection on their white shark research boat. Despite the disapproval of my boyfriend at the time, I applied, won a position, and even convinced my university to allow me to count the internship towards my geography minor. With my passport in one hand and federal-government-funded-overseas-study cash in the other, I boarded my first international flight since I was 1yr old.

5am wake ups, data analysis, trawling through hundreds of field photos, bucketing chum, defrosting tuna heads, tagging hammerheads, freediving to clean aquarium tanks, and seeing countless breaching great white sharks made for a pretty wild month. While seeing white shark behaviour up-close and over-and-over again was fascinating, what fascinated me even more were the surfers catching waves just a few hundred metres away. On the Adelaide coast, if a shark is spotted, the helicopter sirens are sounded and everyone leaves the water, but there at Mosselbaai, if that was the case, the sirens would be playing all day! It amazed me how in this dynamic bay, humans and apex predators were living relatively harmoniously. I say relatively as there was a local legend who paddled his surf ski across the bay every morning, and had already been attacked twice, but still kept his morning routine. Resilience?Stupidity? Maybe just a great understanding of odds.

Me on the bait line, luring a white shark in for photo ID of its dorsal fin. I have mixed feelings about baiting sharks, even in the name of research.

As humans, the odds are well in our favour when it comes to sharks. According to the University of Florida (2022), The chance of getting killed by a shark is one in 4.33 million. On the other hand it is estimated that up to 273 million sharks are killed by human causes every year (international fund for animal welfare, 2023). When put into perspective like this, not only are sharks no threat to humans, we actually depend on them. Why?

Sharks help to keep complex ocean ecosystems and food webs in balance (The Australian Museum, 2023), which not only helps the environment, but it also helps humans from an economic perspective ( think fishing/ tourism/ etc). I wanted to draw the connection that fewer sharks = disruption to lower trophic levels = less phytoplankton and photosynthetic bacteria = less oxygen for humans…. buuuuut apparently there’s no scientific evidence to draw on my pseudo-science claim here, so let’s put that one to bed…..But you get my point! We need sharks!

After many days on the stinky chum-filled boat in South Africa, and many evenings scrolling through huge data sets, I realised that a career in ocean research wasn’t for me, but a career in activism and NGO’s and always having to fight against policy makers also wasn’t for me. Cue eco-tourism! Sir David Attenborough once said “no one will protect what they don’t care about, and no one will care about what they haven’t experienced”. Experiences it is! If I could just help to connect people to sharks and to have positive experiences with sharks, then perhaps they will want to protect them like I do!

This lead to the most challenging, fulfilling and exciting job I’ve ever had with Adventure Bay Charters. Seeing customers emerge from the cage with a huge grin and with sheer joy and excitement and love for the sharks they were witnessing was so rewarding. Instead of leaving terrified, guests would leave saying the sharks were “beautiful”, “moving”, “graceful”, “awe-inspiring”, and it was easy to tell that captive audience about the importance of shark conservation and ways they could help.

My favourite animal, Carcharodon carcharias. Taken at work in the Neptune Islands.

White sharks are still my favourite animal. I understand and respect the fear and hurt people feel towards them, especially in communities like the Lower Eyre Peninsula where locals have lost loved ones to shark attacks. I understand and respect the fear the general public holds against sharks due to the media drum-up of every encounter. I can even understand and respect my OWN irrational fears that “lightning could strike THREE times” and I might have an unpleasant encounter with a shark again. So I listen to that fear-filled voice, thank it for trying to keep me safe, then put it to the side and hop in my black-and-white-striped, reflective-ruddered sea kayak for another coastal paddle. Maybe I will buy that shark shield though….

Want to help sharks?