"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.

No respect.

At the very end of 2019, I thought for one brief second, that shark and man could live together in harmony. That there was a way forward for us. That we could dance a beautiful tango. The sun came up on 2020, however, and shown its light on a terrible mob of monstrous Great Whites, fifteen to sixteen feet long, very heavy in weight, who had descended upon the peaceful burgh of Yallingup, there in Western Australia, to feast on a dead Sperm whale in such an uncontrolled frenzy that onlookers described it as “an orgy of flesh and blood.”

But you know Yallingup, don’t you? Hometown of Australia’s most beloved surfer Taj Burrow?

Do you disagree?

You think Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson, Mark Occhilupo, Rabbit Bartholomew, Jack Robinson have more fans, represent the Lucky Country better?

Oh, you are wrong, and much so. Taj Burrow, the perpetual bridesmaid, surfed like we all should, like we all would if gifted the greatest combination of skill, guts and panache. He surfed so good… excuse me, well… that he never once needed a World Title to prove his worth.

Confident.

Though I wonder if his confidence is slipping as he likely watched, through binoculars, those sociopathic apex predators ripping a stately whale to bits? We must turn to Australia’s 7 News for the gory details and try to keep our eyes all the way open.

Two great white sharks have been captured in a feeding frenzy by an astounded fisherman off Western Australia’s coast.

Jesse Gibson and his friend James Powley filmed the 40 minute encounter while fishing about 12 kilometres off Yallingup on Saturday morning.

The four and a half metre monsters were feeding on a dead sperm whale, taking turns biting into the flesh of the floating carcass.

Gibson told Sunrise the sharks circled his boat for about ten minutes before heading to their main meal.

“It made me a little nervous,” he admitted.

I should think “a little nervous.” I should think that I would never ever want to enter those waters again.

The imperial Sperm whale deserved better, don’t you think?

Deserved respect.

Dreams come true!

Now that the calendar has flipped for everyone, for us all, from 2019 to 2020 it is time to sober up and consider the changes we want to make in this new decade. How we would like to perceived by others. What we would like to see staring back from the mirror.

And there is one thing that we would all wear well.

More big-wave cred. Heaps more big wave-cred. So much big-wave cred that it oozes from our very pores.

But how do we get?

Of course we’re not going to paddle out at Maverick, Jaw or wherever, no. We are going to buy a Jeff Trotter Design Skin Surf branded as… “The synergy of style & sport. Surfboards, in a sophisticated and sleek neutral palette of crocodile inspired prints, that are both sculptural pieces of interior art and functional high-performance boards.”

Jeff Stone Trotter says, “I grew up spending endless summer days on the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu, so coastal living has always inspired my design aesthetic. My goal was to design sophisticated, real boards, that function as beautiful works of art when they’re not out in the water.”

Elle Magazine promises, “The boards ooze big-wave cred, even if they never leave their perch above your mantle.”

Sold?

Buy here!