If you can put yourself as a surfer or beach goer in the initial scenario below, you may find it very hard to ignore the knowledge that is realistically at your fingertips.
It’s a spring Saturday morning and upon arriving at the headland carpark just after sunrise you open your car door and can barely believe your eyes. Without barely a breath of the predicted strong northerlies, the pandanus palms stand stiff, as if frozen in the completely still morning air. You cast your gaze to the ocean to see the glassy conditions working in with a narrow sandbar that begins against the rocks on the northern side of the headland and runs out around 50 metres to a drop off on all sides. It couldn’t be positioned any better if it were located by wave pool engineers and the 1.5 metre swell is pulsing some clean walls from the eastern side of the deep drop off to create a near perfect right hand steep wall to work at speed before nearly sucking dry on the last section and bombing onto the bank. Just watching it gives you a quick surge of butterflies in the stomach and you can almost feel the sensation of the cold water and sand that you imagine will be thrust down between your back and your wetsuit after committing to end the speedy ride inside the close out section. Aside from the water having a greenish appearance to it, this looks like a solo dream session about to be had, a wave you’ve gotten used to reading about rather than finding for yourself. That sudden rush of adrenaline moves through your body, you begin moving in fast forward trying to take your shirt off and get your wetsuit off the back seat of the car and on at the same time. There is no other thought other than getting down those rocks and out to the front edge of the sandbar. You carefully place your board on the short moist headland grass and top up with wax where you will need to plant your feet on the board with the visions of epic speed into hard turns. You scramble down the grass hill and glide across the rocks barefoot and launch into the ocean with perfect timing between crashing white water surges. The first and only thing to disrupt your drive is the burst of surprisingly cold water with the initial plunge under water. It is near perfect conditions..
When you first arrived in the carpark with your vision and focus directed to the surprisingly perfect waves taking turns to stand up on the sand bank, you did not notice the gathering of fishermen on the southern side of the headland carpark, they have been there well before the sun came up and for good reason. The fish are on. Just like surfers when the waves are good, it doesn’t take long for the word to get out and the crowds to gather, when the fish are biting it is no different for the fishermen. The fishermen began catching fish on the southern side of the headland in good numbers on Friday afternoon and this morning the bite had not slowed. There were baitfish schools moving just off the coast and with the sand from the southern side of the headland shifting to the northern side, there was plenty of depth and the swell that pounded against the rocks created a covering of foam ideal for baitfish to shelter from predators lurking in the low visibility of the deep green coloured water. As baitfish were exposed during the lull between sets, they were forced to spray across the surface in the race back to the security of cover provided by the layer of foam. It was near perfect conditions.
For marine life below the surface, it was more than business as usual. There had been a large offshore upwelling rotating for 3 days in up to 4km deep that had been working its way onto the continental shelf break and now drifted shoreward and spanned from beyond the edge of the shelf break all the way to the coastline. Bringing with it marine life from the very bottom of the food chain to the top apex predators of the ocean. Phytoplankton fed the zoo plankton, while zoo plankton fed the baitfish, pelagics and other demersals fed on the baitfish while sharks were drawn in with the ever-present scent of fish blood and fish distress vibrations. The nutrient rich green water dredged from the depths beyond the shelf were slopping against the rocks provided shelter for the feeding baitfish but also formed an edge for larger fish to gather bait for ambush. While larger ambush predators are afforded a deep edge to remain out of site in preparation for ambushing their own larger prey. It was near perfect conditions.
As these three scenarios unfold on the coastline, the beachgoers, or in this case the lone surfer is about to paddle out into a very dangerous situation with nothing on his mind other than getting to the front edge of a sandbar to begin his epic session. It would not be unusual in this instance for a larger adult white shark to be present, following the action all the way from the shelf break and patrolling the edge of the drop off in search of larger prey. However, in this imaginary, but very possible scenario, the surfer paddling out is sending out the distress signals of large prey while paddling hard to reach the deeper front edge of the sandbar.
As shark-human interactions are on the rise in Australia, there must come a time when responsibility falls on the individual who chooses to enter the ocean and understand this is the marine predator domain.
