The surfer Ben Gerring, who was twenty nine, has died
in a Perth hospital overnight. According to Gerring's family, he
had just found out his girlfriend was pregnant and was
“particularly nervous about the threat of sharks and and would not
have entered the water on Tuesday if he had known about a shark
sighting nearby earlier that day.” | Photo: Facebook
Ben Gerring, the surfer attacked by a Great White
on Tuesday, has died in a Perth hospital…
The Western Australian surfer, Ben
Gerring, who lost part of a leg in a Great White
attack on Tuesday, died in a Perth hospital overnight.
Gerring, who was twenty nine, was attacked at Gearies
Beach, an hour-and-a-half south of Perth.
The ABC reports,
The WA Department of Fisheries said during the week that the
damage to Mr Gerring’s surfboard indicated he was attacked by a
great white shark.
Mandurah Boardriders Club President Brian Williams said he
arrived at the scene as fellow surfers dragged Mr Gerring onto the
beach.
“By the time they got him to the beach somebody had already
applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding and they were just trying
to do CPR to get him back breathing,” he said on
Wednesday.
Mr Williams helped stretcher Mr Gerring up to the
ambulance.
“It’s pretty harrowing seeing somebody you know lying there
motionless, hoping that everything’s going to be OK,” he
said.
Mr Williams said Mr Gerring had lived in the area all his
life and his mother had travelled in the ambulance with him to
hospital.
“He grew up as a Mandurah boardrider, he’s been here all his
life, so he’s well-known, he’s a very good surfer,” he
said.
Earlier, the Gerring family had appeared on Channel seven news
and revealed the surfer had just found out his girlfriend
was pregnant and was “particularly nervous about the threat of
sharks and and would not have entered the water on Tuesday if
he had known about a shark sighting nearby earlier that day.”
Gerring’s death is the first fatality in Western Australia since
December 2014 when a spear fisherman was killed by a fifteen-foot
Great White in the south coast town of Albany.
Maybe! To teach private surf lessons at new
boutique hotel!
It is truly amazing what a person can learn
from an inflight magazine. Did you know, for example, that you can
spend three prefect days in New Zealand? Or that the longest tunnel
in the world stretches 57 km? Or that (ex?) pro surfer Joel
Parkinson can be hired to give private surf lessons at a new beach
hotel in Australia?
A write-up featuring some of the best hotels in the world
discusses the glamorous Halcyon House. Let’s read:
Opened last May in a converted 1960s seaside motel, the
21-room Halcyon House is bringing high style to the scruffy
surfers’ paradise of Cabarita Beach, an hour and a half south of
Brisbane. The property, set back from the sand behind a grove of
palm-like pandanus trees, brims with eclectic flea-market finds,
boldly patterned upholstered walls, and a palette that skews toward
mariniere-style navies and whites. Work up an appetite by taking a
private lesson with pro surfer Joel Parkinson…
Boom. If Parko is on call for the high style Halcyon House then
there is no way he can continue to compete.
Yeah?
Anyone in the service industry will tell you that the first rule
is making sure you are always available to fill hours and the
second is that the customer is always right.
True?
I got instantly fired from my only service industry job.
Still. Can you imagine a worse life than teaching surf lessons?
These must be very bleak days on the WSL. Very bleak indeed. But
since he is giving them, shouldn’t we go and learn how to
do proper cutbacks?
Or do you think you’re above a few pointers? From the world’s
most stylish surfer/handsome instructor?
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Mr. Hitler bronzing his buns after three hours of
making an ass out of himself in the lineup.
Or maybe just be sent to Tasmania with all other
adult learners.
As you know, I am currently in San Francisco
and I’ll be damned if the weather is not a most pleasant 70
something degrees Fahrenheit (22.7ish for my Australian and
European friends). The sun is shining with not a hint of that
classic biting cold wind. The bum urinating on the telephone pole
seems to be enjoying himself and the one who asked me for a
quarter, then a dollar, was chipper even after I turned him down
both times.
See that chubby white manboy across the street? Yes, he is
headed to an open floor plan tech startup with 40 million dollars
in series B funding but guess what he left at home? His black North
Face fleece! Or maybe it’s just tucked into his over-the-shoulder
satchel.
In any case, last night I had a lovely dinner, an adventurous
take on contemporary American cuisine, with even more wonderful
people. The conversation, as it does, turned to surfing at some
point and the struggles in learning. The bobbing around helplessly,
going over the falls, getting in the way of everyone, fin cuts,
leash tangles, face getting exfoliated by sand.
And it made me wonder. What kind of sick bastards are we, the
ones who stick with it?
Not including those who live in warm water places with enough
waves (Hawaii, parts of Australia etc.) learning to surf is
perverted masochism. There is nothing even remotely fun about it.
It is awkwardness coupled with pain coupled with more awkwardness.
And helplessness. And looking like a complete spastic in front of a
beach packed with spectators.
I thought back to when I first learned to surf and suppose I was
so young that I stunk at everything. I couldn’t hit a baseball with
any sort of consistency or a three-pointer. I played quarterback
but was so small that I couldn’t see over the center so would just
heave the football downfield before getting bone-crunchingly
sacked. I was as good at surfing as I was at anything which is to
say bad.
So I guess I wasn’t really a sick bastard. Childhood, in and of
itself, is a sort of perverted masochism.
But what about the adult learner? How miserable must his life on
land be to stick with something so absolutely impossible to learn?
How driven must she be in order to spend the minimum 500 hours in
the water required to poke down the line with a poo stance?
Miserable like Hitler? Driven like Pol Pot?
Yes, the adult learners, the ones who really stick with it, are
unstable should be locked up with the key thrown away. They are far
too dangerous for society to contain. Or maybe they can all just go
live and learn together on Tasmania. I heard, at my lovely dinner
from a wonderful person, that 1 in 4 Tasmanians is directly related
to a convict.
(A very funny classic from our friends at Australia’s Surfing
Life)
Two days ago, while checking a surf spot called Spookies,
next to the more famous, though less exciting, Angourie Point, Will
says he saw a “fifteen-foot” Great White breach “seven foot in the
air.”
On his Facebook page, Will wrote: Just saw a 15 foot
Great White breach off Spookies !!!!! Fucken raddest thing I’ve
ever seen !!!!!!
“I just went to check the surf and sat down for about 10
seconds; it was probably about a kilometre out and the thing just
jumped out seven feet in the air.
“This thing was definitely hunting, so I told a guy who was just
going out that I saw a giant Great White out there, and asked him
to tell the others. One guy came out of the water and he had a
cut on his head and it was bleeding, but the others stayed
out.”
“It was about a 15 footer and had its whole profile from the
top. It came out like a freight train, if that thing hit you you’d
be in half.”
Shaking and in awe of the predator’s sheer power, Webber
rushed down to notify the four surfers who were in the water at the
time.
“This thing was definitely hunting, so I told a guy who was just
going out that I saw a giant Great White out there, and asked him
to tell the others. One guy came out of the water and he had a
cut on his head and it was bleeding, but the others stayed
out.”
Webber said he had always wanted to see a shark, just not
when he was in the water.
“I’m definitely not surfing today and I’ll be surfing very close
to the rocks from now on. It’s burnt into my brain. I’ve
always imagined but now I know what it looks like… it was like a
missile.”
Meanwhile at Ballina, an hour or so north, and the current shark
capital of the world, four Great Whites were just spotted near
surfers at North Wall.
From Surf Stitch: "The MODOM Ambassadors including Jack
Freestone, Taj Burrow, Craig Anderson, Kalani David, Noah Beschen,
Alana Blanchard, Tom Whitaker, Mark Mathews. We have also had a
number of tour guys like Kelly Slater test out the product during
Bells." Did anyone here get attacked by a shark? Well? It works! |
Photo: Modom
“Modom didn’t give us a cent for what you read here (yes, we’d
tell you). We’re just fucking thrilled to have something that’s
potentially effective at discouraging sharks.”
Modom’s magnet leash sprung from a license agreement with
SharkBanz, a subsidiary of SharkDefense, which is
a New Jersey based company founded by Eric and Jean Stroud in 2001.
SharkDefense is the proud owner of numerous shark
repellent patents. In addition to magnets, they also sell a line of Batman style shark
repellent spray.
Considering the company employs numerous “scientists,” it’s
worrying that there is a total lack of peer review or access to any
of their “research” data.
Sure, they have some “research” posted on their
site, but it amounts to little more than a collection
of data gathered by others, with no indication of how they
proceeded with real world testing.
Lucky for us there are concerned citizens willing to double
check claims for them.
Take a gander at the following video. Does an excellent job
demonstrating the efficacy of the Sharkbanz’ magnetic
wonder.
Sharkbanz are not designed to prevent sharks from eating
visible bait. They have a hierarchy of senses and can override the
electrical sense in the event that visible bait is present. Again,
Sharkbanz are meant to deter curious sharks from biting a person
while in investigative mode, not prevent them from eating bloody
fish bait.
All this is just arm chair speculation based on lack of evidence
and contradictory marketing material. I really need to talk with
someone in the know. Ideally that would be a person who studies the
creatures for a living and doesn’t have an economic interest in
promoting the product.
I’m yet to see any rigorous testing on Sharkbanz carried out
by independent scientists, and I am fundamentally skeptical about
the ability of these devices to deter sharks from biting people.
Decline in magnetic field strength is governed by the inverse
square law. Thus even a couple of inches from your Sharkbanz the
magnetic field is extremely weak – weak magnetic fields do not
inherently repel sharks. Basically, the device has a very small
magnetic footprint – most of your body will not be within this
footprint.
The inverse square
lawstates that “a specified physical quantity or
intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
from the source of that physical quantity.”
Dr Meyer continued, “I’ve seen some research data showing
aversion to solid state magnets by small sharks held in close
proximity to the magnet. The problem is that field strength is
declining exponentially with distance from the magnet, so to a
propagate a strong magnetic field over an area the size of a human
body would require a tremendously powerful magnet (=large magnet)
at the field center. For full effectiveness, we would also need to
understand the minimum magnetic field strength threshold for shark
repulsion, and design a field that was at least this strong
immediately surrounding our body. This threshold will likely vary
as a function of shark species, size and motivational
state.”
Basically, even if it works (it doesn’t), the Modom leash will
only protect the foot your leash is attached to. The other leg,
your arms, your head, they’re still up for grabs.
The biggest problem I have with devices like Sharkbanz is
that people are clearly buying them with the belief that they will
be either entirely protected from shark bites, or at least less
likely to be bitten. Neither of these facts have been
scientifically proven, and there are fundamental reasons why these
devices are unlikely to deter a shark from biting you. These
devices are in a grey area, exploiting peoples fears, without being
held to the high standards required of other safety devices (i.e.
that they actually work). The burden of proof of effectiveness is
on the manufacturer, and in my opinion, they are a long way from
demonstrating effectiveness in preventing shark
bites.
Pretty crazy price point, especially considering it’s just a
normal leash with a neodynium magnet attached. The same type of
magnet you can buy on Amazon for under twenty
bucks.
It’d be damn easy to rig one of those things to a leash, maybe
wrap a cord around it and fashion a necklace. It’d not work just as
well, and you could spend the balance on whatever it is that dumb
dumbs blow their dough on. ICP concerts and lottery tickets, I
suppose.
