THEY call it the humpback highway and it’s not hard to see why.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
An image on the cover of Tuesday’s Newcastle Herald shot by photographer Peter Stoop summed our attraction to whales with beautiful simplicity.
The graceful flattened Y-shape of a massive tail fluke disappearing into the water as a lone paddle boarder stands upright on a calm sea, a short distance away, absorbed in one of nature’s most awe-inspiring spectacles.
But as events later in the week have reminded us, whales are not the only big creatures cruising our coastal oceans.
At Lighthouse Beach, Ballina, on Thursday, 32-year-old body-boarder Matt Lee was airlifted to hospital in a critical condition after being savaged by a four-metre shark.
There’s no good time for a shark attack but with 270 young surfers at nearby Lennox Head for the Skullcandy Oz Grom Open – billed as the richest junior pro contest in Australia – everyone was crossing their fingers that lightning would not strike twice.
And then it did, although not at the contest.
On Friday morning a 51-year-old Gold Coast surfer, Mike Holle,was out at Lennox, with some solid waves running along the point, when what he described as a ‘‘huge’’ shark nudged him off his board.
The Gold Coast Bulletin had photos of his board with at least five tooth-shaped cuts on the bottom between the two front fins.
One of the five (yes! five) fins was missing but it was impossible to tell whether that was part of the attack.
Holle was one lucky man. Given what had happened 10kilometres away at Ballina the day before, the TV crews that descended on Lennox wanted to know what he was doing in the water in the first place.
‘‘I felt confident going out there because I thought the odds are limited because only six people died in the world last year from shark attacks,’’ Holle said.
That’s what he says. Me, I’m not so sure. Wikipedia quotes Florida University sources to put the number of global attacks at 75 a year, with about one in five being fatal.
Colleague Jim Kellar points out that North and South Carolina, on the United States east coast, have had 10 shark attacks this year.
Actually, make that 10 since May 15. And make five of them just last week!
The two Carolinas have about 700kilometres of coast between them – roughly the distance from Newcastle to the Gold Coast – and a map on CNN shows a series of red dots spread evenly from a place called Waves in the north to Hunting Island in the south.
Three Sundays ago, a 13-year-old girl lost her arm below the elbow when attacked at a North Carolina beach called Oak Island.
Less than two-hours later a 16-year-old boy about two miles up the same beach was attacked, and lost his arm at the shoulder.
All of the victims survived, but I’ve found records of at least two fatalities in the Carolinas in recent years.
USA Today says there’s been 23 attacks across the US this year, with one fatal, in Hawaii. It quotes experts as saying the number of attacks is on the rise, something that makes sense, in a general way, given the range of environmental improvements and social changes that mean sharks are no longer hunted, in the West at least, the way they were.
According to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the 107 different whales it spotted from Botany Bay during May is part of a population expansion rising at 10per cent or more a year for the past 10years.
Outspoken Newcastle helicopter pilot Steve Bazic says if whale numbers are rising, so is the shark population. Look at the ‘‘Steve in the news’’ section of the Heliservices website and you’ll see his continuing efforts to publicise what he is absolutely certain is a growing risk.
As protected species, Bazic says the great whites are peak predators with no real enemies, now that humans are taking much less of a toll. Each shark attack brings another round of argument about the preservation of sharks versus the preservation of people.
In February this year, Australian Geographic counted 979 Australian shark attacks since 1791, with 231 – or more than one in four – being fatal. And whether it’s more sharks, or more people in the water – or a combination of both – the attack graph is only going one way. And it’s not down.
