Only hypothetically, of course…
Killing a Great White shark isn’t that hard.
These peerless, top-of-the-chain tanks are just as vulnerable as
the surfers, the swimmers and the scuba divers they’re suddenly
killing with unprecedented regularity.
Just make a rope lasso. Let the fish swim through the noose and
when the rope passes those iconic, collectable, priceless jaws and
just before it reaches the dorsal fin, pull tight.
Four, maybe five minutes, and the White is dead. Hanged.
“Get ’em on the hook and they go neanderthal,” says a shark
fisherman who wisely prefers anonymity and asks that I don’t reveal
his home port. “Use a powerhead and if you hit the wrong spot the
spot the shark’s going to take off with half its face blown off. Of
course, the lasso method ain’t perfect, either. Use the wrong
people and they can get dragged over the side.”
I’d called this particular shark fisherman for a few ideas on
why he thought Great White attacks had surged in Western Australia
in the last dozen years. Turned out he doesn’t just have a
theory on the dramatic increase in Great Whites in Western
Australia, he’s positive its due to the AFMA (the Australian
Fisheries Management Authority) shutting down vast areas of fishing
areas to gill nets because of the by-catch of Australian fur seals
and Great Whites.
What fisheries didn’t know was that skippers were under-calling
the number of Whites coming up in the nets; the skippers afraid
they’d be shut down if fisheries knew just how many Whites were
destroyed as by-catch. In the end, they were closed, anyway. The
irony is, if fisheries knew just how many Whites were coming up,
perhaps the White wouldn’t have been regarded as a threatened and
endangered species.
“Think about this,” he says. “Ten years ago, there were nine or
10 boats operating and killing 200-to-300 Pointers a year. We were
allowed to have an incidental catch of Pointers. They’d get tangled
in the nets and come up dead. Now, say, if we work with a
conservative kill figure of 200, and 50 of these Whites are mature,
and of those 50, 25 are female, they are going to have one baby
every two years. So, instead of the population growing like it was,
or sustaining at a certain level, it’s blowing out. It’s growing
faster and faster. The number of Pointers is increasing
dramatically.”
As we speak, he texts me a clip of a five-metre White attacking
his boat, taken the day before on his iPhone. “This thing was
breaking its teeth off on the boat,” he says.
As to the WA government’s pledge to ice rogue sharks, he’s
sceptical. “What’s going to happen? What sorta red tape do they
have to go through before they can kill? By the time they sort that
out, it’s in fucking Esperance.”
Stare out at the Indian Ocean, combed perfectly clean by
an offshore easterly wind. The deepest most electric blue is
affixed to the whitest sand in the world. A few swimmers
complete their morning exercise so close the beach their hands
graze the bottom.
Just like Amity Island in the movie Jaws, Western
Australia is a state with a difficult choice.
“What they need to do,” says the shark fisherman, “is to anchor
any Whites they catch near the beach. The other Great Whites won’t
go near it. When we’re fishing, we don’t throw sharks heads over
the side because it scares the fish on the bottom. Think about it.
You’re having a party and someone throws a body into it. The
party’s over.”
Or you can follow the sage advice from Surf Lifesaving WA: “To
reduce the likelihood of contact with a shark: Leave the water
immediately if a shark is sighted.”
Says the fisherman: “It’s only a matter of time before attacks
surge again. That’s if people stay in the water. If they don’t,
problem solved.”
