"Let's go kill some sharks!"
Just over one week ago, you read here about how my bucolic North County, San Diego seaside paradise has been transformed into a Great White-infested hell. Oh, beaches were closed as juvenile sharks circled and jumped like the waves were their own, shuttering breaks from Carlsbad to Del Mar.
Del Mar’s chief lifeguard, John Edelbrock, described the sharks’ behavior as docile — “not aggressive in any way.”
Well, those Great Whites swimming on the eastern seaboard must have taken note and, like the great east vs. west rap battles of old, threw down an absolute hammer track. Over 300 sharks have forced the closure of 60 beaches this summer so far.
Are these sharks docile, not aggressive in any way, like their west coast foils? We must turn to the Brexit’s Daily Mail for more.
Charles Vansant was the first victim, a strapping 25-year-old stockbroker swimming in water only chest-deep when the shark struck.
Anxious to encourage a reluctant dog to join him, the young American hadn’t noticed the dark shadow and tell-tale protruding fin behind him. The Great White shark shredded his left leg to the bone, virtually tearing it from his body.
Mr Vansant was helped back to the beach, but bled to death at a nearby hotel. ‘His death was the most horrible thing I ever saw,’ said a witness.
That incident was, of course, the first 1916 attack, likely by a Bull not a White, that lead to many more and a run of shark paranoia on the east coast, eventually fictionalized by the film Jaws. Well, the Daily Mail pivots straight from early Jaws folklore to our modern day.
Between July and early August, some 60 beaches have been closed because of shark sightings around Cape Cod, the Massachusetts summer paradise near where Jaws was filmed.
At least 300 Great Whites — sometimes 15ft-long monsters in just 5ft of water — have been spotted around the Cape. Officials have responded by putting up new warning signs about Great Whites and issuing lifeguards with tourniquets to staunch bleeding from bites. Purple shark-emblazoned warning flags fly at beaches at all times.
On and on the Daily Mail piece goes, whipping the reader into an absolute frenzy, pivoting back and forth from yesteryear to modern times, begging the readers to take up pitchforks, or harpoons, and go out a stabbin’.
Like… Lifeguards, hearing a bloodcurdling scream, turned to see what they thought was a red upturned canoe in the water. It was Charles Bruder, a 28-year-old hotel bellboy, swimming in his own blood that had pooled around him.
And… ‘Let’s go kill some sharks!’ became a popular rallying cry. Just as in Jaws, fishermen took to their boats looking for the shark, while police officers reported blasting away at suspicious shadows in the water. However, in the midst of the panic, Dr Lucas and other experts still insisted further attacks would be very unlikely. They were wrong.
So should we?
Should we take up pitchforks and/or harpoons and/or big ol’ guns?
Also, were you Team Bad Boy or Team Death Row?
More as the terror develops.
