"Some of the fishermen here are real cowboys..."
Well if this isn’t an understandable, yet horrific, turn in our current, ongoing Shark Apocalypse. The one where Great Whites are using sophisticated military tactics to surround and squeeze Florida, Tigers are eating people whole in Réunion and Bulls, generally intransigent, carry on as normal. T.S. Eliot, inspiration behind the worst movie ever made, once declared, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but whimper.”
Poignant, starkly beautiful but wrong.
The world ends in the jaws of a prehistoric apex predator.
It ends in the jaws of a Great White, likely, but if mankind is born with one trait it is self-preservation. If born with with two, self-preservation and a love for Martin Scorsese mob films where many people become executed, gangland-style, with a bullet from very close range to the head.
And this is, allegedly, what a scuba diver discovered buried in a shallow reef cave underneath stop number 3 on the World Surf League’s Championship Tour Margaret River.
Oh you already know that West Australia is home to a vibrant, aggressive band of Great Whites, that they regularly threaten to bite, chew, eat surfers. It is illegal to hunt them but fishermen are known to take justice into their own hands.
Our source on the ground says, “Some of the fishermen here are real cowboys. They carry guns when they go out in case of, uh, emergency.”
Other divers have confirmed the shark’s existence, each declaring it to be “huge” and “massive.”
Still other, third-hand, reports declare the shark may have a rope still tied to its tail suggesting it had been possibly “dragged and drowned.”
The sharks presence, noted on West Australia’s shark spotting and tracking app SharkSmart, has reportedly not been dissuading surfers from enjoying Main Break’s big scary.
BeachGrit has commissioned a diver to confirm the shark’s presence, current state and cause of death.
More as the story develops.