Pretty off-the-highway town on Australia's east coast clapping to the rhythm of bellicose sharks…
What’s it feel like to be sitting in an early evening lineup, alone, pretty three-foot waves, and you get hit from below in a classic Great White ambush attack?
Chris Little, forty, from Bondi in Sydney, was on the last day of a vacay at a pretty little off-the-highway joint on Australia’s east coast near Forster, an area filled with photogenic waves that dominated surf mags worldwide for a decade.
It’s spring. Longer days, warmer nights.
It also means an increase in Great White fever as migrating whales swing on home from mating season in the tropical north. Locals know to keep a wide berth at sunrise and sunset, maybe even avoid high tide when the Whites swim close to the rocks.
Let’s place the scene. It’s six-fifteen pm, south Boomerang Beach, right there in the corner. It’s daylight saving so it’s still an hour-and-a-half before dark. One guy sitting by himself.
As Chris paddles out he passes the guy riding a wave in. The guy waves, smiles.
A set, bigger than anything that’s comes through all day, appears.
“I’ve nailed it,” thinks Chris.
Then, as he paddles out to pick off his choice of waves, Chris feels a sharp tug on his legrope. Thinks the clown he saw on the way out has paddled back to the lineup and is making a funny prank.
“I quickly realised it wasn’t him,” says Chris. “I felt like I was hooked up to a ski boat. I immediately realised it was legit.”
He keeps saying to himself, “I know, I know, I know.”
The last time Chris did that, a realisation that his world was about to come to an end, was when he was a grommet in his car with his girl and he hit some water and flew off an embankment on the Bruce Highway, near Brisbane. He grabbed her hand and said,
“I know, I know, I know.”
In the water, Chris feels as if it’s a reverse wipeout. His legrope gets pulled so hard the board disappears underneath him.
Then he gets pulled under.
He tries to peel off his ankle strap. Can’t reach.
“I’m getting manhandled, dragged,” says Chris.”It was power on tap, like getting in a good car. I have a thirty-two litre board (six-two DHD DX1) and I’m almost ninety kilos.”
The leash stretches until he feels it break. The board flies fifteen feet in the hair. Later, he’ll discover it’s covered in micro-cracks, these weird little breaks in the glass.,
“It was like a fucking missile from a submarine and I was left fucking sitting in the brine like a tea bag. And, I thought, this thing is going to double back and fuck me up.”
It didn’t.
“I obviously freaked it out. So I swam like Ian Thorpe, like Alexander Popov, the fastest man in the water, jumped on my board, bellied it to the beach and threw my board on the sand.
The girlfriend of the guy who’d waved to him on the way in says she saw the hit.
Tells him: “I was wondering why there was some learner out the back flailing by themselves.”
The guy sees him and and asks what happened.
“I just had a run-in with god-knows-what out there, it bit through my legrope and dragged me underwater.”
“I came in ‘cause it felt suss out there,” he says.
Chris laughs. “You gave me a smile on the way in! You fully gave me a wave.”
In the carpark, as Chris tells his wife what happened, the guy drives past and throws him a can of VB.
A local strolls by and says, “Heard you had an incident out there.”
He adds a pal of his was knocked off his board at the north on the previous Friday.
Three weeks before that, a surfer was belted by a ten-foot Great White, knocked off his board and so on, at Lighthouse Beach, near Seal Rocks, a few clicks south.
“The sheer power of the thing, it felt like I was getting hit by a bus,” Mike Bruton told a local tabloid.
Chris says the hit has ’t rattled him, per se, but he’s had a few dreams, one where he’s at a beach that’s a mix between Noosa and Bryon, and the same thing happens. In the dream it’s the same feeling, the same sensation.
He keeps the legroom in his bathroom, which he examines whoever’s he’s on the shitter.
A reminder of his mortality?
“It’s my only justification, the only proof,” he says. “Friends ask me, Who saw it? No one. Any mates? No. But I’ve got a legrope.”
Unlike all the other risks shark deaths are primarily a risk for surfers only, so if only 1 in 10,000 surf then that increases the risk to 1 in 374.
That makes it the most risky for surfers of all in your list by a long shot
Proofread, much?
NonJohn is a savage sailor drunk, scared of nothing, except for sharks.
“The board flies fifteen feet in the hair.” Impressive.
Heya Urchin Sepsis,
Gnarly experience! Do ya still paddle out or get in thee water?
Fuck sake Derek, what does he know??
Fucking hell.
May be a few more witnesses than we know, but good luck getting them on the news to talk about it.
Told the misses they were golfing, forgot to mention stopping off for a stroll around the nudie beach.
Jesus
That’s fuked up.
I hope you claimed it on workers comp somehow.
Thank fuck for that. After seeing the crowds during this mornings south swell, I was thinking it was about time we had some more shark scares on the North Coast.
Forster such a lovely spot. Doesn’t surprise that the ocean there is teeming with all that swims, and all that eats them.
Lucky break for old mate!
Forster sort of reminds me a little of North Straddie, or Moreton Is. Those places also very sharky
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Any lingering damage?
Thinly veiled attempt by Derek to drive real estate prices down. Take the blinders off Sheeple and research Agenda 21 Bondi.
I had a similar thing happen to me in West Oz in April during salmon season. Yanked off my board with an insane amount of force, boils erupting everywhere. A mate watching from the carpark saw me paddling out towards a set and then fall off my board. He heard me screaming but couldn’t work out what was going on. It was terrifying but looked quite unspectacular.
Stoked this dude is alright. I dunno if this is an aborted or a mistimed attack when they miss like this? Surely a GW can hit a slow target like a paddling surfer with more deadly accuracy?
You never know. It might be doing a pass to watch for a reaction, the leash is hanging down away from the surfer, and it gets tangled. If it was intent on an attack, it wouldn’t have left Chris guessing about its intentions.
What’s amazing is the strength of the animal, sharks and dolphins are both ridiculously powerful, pound for pound they totally shit on humans. Like that probably wasn’t even that big of a shark.
Yeah in my situation a bigger set loomed up and I started paddling quickly out and across towards it when I got yanked by my leggie, and from from what Chris Little described above it sounds like he just started paddling for a set too. Maybe the shark was coming in for a look/cruise past and we just moved off it’s line slightly, hence the legroom tangle.
The force of it was incredible, like nothing I could imagine and I don’t even think it was coming in for a strike.
I was in murky water, close to sunset by myself. Couldn;t see any schools of salmon but there was probably something going on somewhere (yeah, maybe a dumb thing to do but I was happy to be surfing fun waves by myself). Crew who seem to know things about sharks reckon either a tiger or GW.
The funny thing is Chris’ take home from this isn’t ‘maybe I shouldn’t surf solo at dusk when the salmon are running’ but ‘I knew I shouldn’t have worn my leggy’
No, no, on the contrary, and I left that bit out of the story, he was going to surf without a leash but his board had been on the roof, still had it attached etc. Says it would’ve got him good minus leash, which he says, is serrated, all burred up, where the teeth went through.
That might just have been the skin scratching the rope.
oh don’t be silly . it was the white pointed hat of a submersible KKK hat , those white will get you everytime!
my take home : @ ‘almost’ 90kegs and riding a 32 litre sled?
Will you tell story, again, of staring down a shark at Blueys, I think it was. I think about it all the time.
ha! Here’s the story, written for Swell.com in 2000:
Around two months ago, in early March, I was up at Blueys Beach in northern NSW, Australia, paddling out to a new five-foot southeast swell, the water clear as air. Just on the edge of the outside sandbar I saw a set wave coming and something dark — small but growing bigger fast — inside the wave face, heading at me, or at least close to me.
Instantly I knew it was a shark, probably a bronze whaler, one of a breed common off the Australian east coast. For some spur of the moment reason I doubt I could explain, I duckdived deliberately to have a closer look at this beautiful beast, and suddenly wondered, “Does it know it’s trapped in this wave?” Maybe the shark had got itself locked into the wave’s energy BY MISTAKE, not fully comprehending the energy band. An accidental surfer. Anyway, I duckdived and watched this bronzie flying at me like a six-foot missile. I was captivated in that instant by the shark’s perfect form: pectoral fins half-outstretched, guiding and aiming it in this moment of half-surprised acceleration, and everything else streaming out behind like some sort of jet fighter plane about to break Mach 1. Then the shark must have glimpsed me — something as big as it, pushing back through this weird force that’d seized it and was throwing it forward at crazy speeds — and freaked! Those pectorals flared out, fully extended wings, and it rolled off to the north and bolted into the clear blue distance.
As it did, I had another sudden realization — I wasn’t afraid.
Shark Fear. It’s surfing’s Great Leveler. Even if you’ve never seen one of the men in gray suits, you know they’re out there somewhere, and the knowledge changes everything. This spooky vision of our tacit engagement in the global food pyramid below our usual seat at the summit, for once, is a subtle yet profound thing. It thickens surfing’s essence with a primitive scent of blood and predation. It rips us away from the endless witless stream of “extreme” sports, few of which — despite their obvious risk to life and limb — feature the opportunity of being devoured.
We taunt ourselves with this Fear. What surfer hasn’t dived into the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week with a tingle of horror-movie apprehension? “Frick!” you think, as the colossal Great White lifts its gaping serrated jaws from the sea to tear away yet another bag of horse guts from the film crew’s grasp, “imagine if….” And the idea has a reality for surfers, a distinct possibility unfelt by people who don’t spend hours in the ocean each week chasing waves. It feels to us like something that could happen.
Yet most of our shark-thoughts are hopelessly conditioned. When we think “shark”, we think of that Great White swallowing our legs, and no amount of factual information can convince us otherwise. It doesn’t matter how many times we read about how more people die of bee-stings than shark attacks each year, or about how many more sharks people kill for food than vice versa, or about how few Great Whites there are anymore … what we know is the Fear.
The fact is, many of us co-exist with sharks way more than we realize. Thousands of surfers, for instance, ride off Sydney, Australia beaches before sunrise and after sunset most mornings; nobody’s been killed off a Sydney ocean beach since 1936. This, however, is not for want of sharks. In recent years, while blundering about several hundred yards offshore on paddleboards and in swim training sessions, I’d seen numerous men in grey suits — bronzies, gray nurse sharks, a couple of makos, and what I think from its long snout and thin raked body must’ve been a blue — plus dozens of varying rays. A number of ’em were well inside the shark nets pegged here and there along the coast, nets that supposedly protect Sydney’s beachgoing populace. What struck me most about these beasts was their astounding lack of interest in me as a victim. They’d swim along near the bottom, or pop up for a few seconds 10 yards away, take a look, and bail. Were they on Valium?
A couple of my friends, experienced divers, spend a lot of time spearfishing off a reef perhaps a half mile out. “Oh, there’s so many sharks out there it’s ridiculous,” they casually assured me. “They’re all around us.” My friends keep their eyes open, and if a big one — a large tiger, for example — showed up, they’d be on the boat in seconds. But they’re not unduly concerned by the Ruthless Man-Eaters; after years of diving, they’ve come to know the sharks are really just after the fish.
Which brings us back to Bluey’s, and that weird inter-species eyeballing moment. Sharks aren’t like dolphins; you never sense that companionship between mammals … hell, they didn’t look much different 300 million years ago, which gives ’em roughly the empathy of a crocodile… But for that instant between the shark’s seeing me and me seeing it, SOMETHING happened. Maybe a dissipation of the Fear. Maybe just an appreciation of this accidental surfer, a creature whose water instinct — a mere prickling of nerves in its tiny brain stem — outstrips anything we humans will ever achiev
It’s usually all blurry when I open my eyes.
I think the fear of sharks is far more powerful than the presence of sharks themselves. When a bait ball goes splashing past your hair stands up and your heart jumps and you might even think about calling it a session. But usually when you actually see a shark, it doesn’t bother you too much.
More exciting real stories please.
A welcome addition to Shark Grit Mr Rielly. Mr Smith would be proud!
Yikes! happy to hear the Little family didn’t lose their daddy, that shit would play on your mind!
I had a similar experience with the local wildlife up there once, except I was actually at the Reccie,
A White? Or one of the predatory honey-tans?
Chestnut-orange, I’d say.
A friend was eyeballed by a white (aquatic) at crescent recently too.
Looking forward to holiday up there next week :-/
Since drawing a line through Forster I was planning on moving my vacay surfing activity to Crescent’s gorgeous back beaches. Is nowhere sacred to these animals? And was it an artificial chestnut orange or actual skin tone?
The nets stop at my beautiful Nobby’s (not to be confused with Delicate Nobby near Creso) and don’t start again ‘til Snapper. That’s a lot of red texta.
And it was a Trumpian chestnut-orange.
The back road is full of Noah’s..a dead spermwhale has been on the menu there all last week…I wouldn’t go there for the next month
… same same as the Forster region DR.
And, that many Eastern Brown’s sliding about at present!
I am a bit tired but I’ve understood that Bryon keeps his legroom in the bathroom and the sharks have found a foster home ?