"Australian researchers found little evidence of marine mammals in the stomachs of the 40 mostly juvenile great whites they examined."

On Sunday morning just a little before eleven, Gold Coast surfer Rob Pedretti was hit by a Great White shark, a ten or twelve footer, according to an expert in these things. 

A pal, Frank, and another Gold Coast surfer, Mark, tried to fight the shark as it circled the trio, occasionally charging, leaving dings in Mark’s board, following ‘em to the beach where Pedretti died. 

No bite-and-release mistake here.

Two days later, The Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper that is to the left what The Australian is to the right, and therefore virulently anti-netting, culling etc, ran a chirpy sorta piece bannered “Shark Debate” and with “environment” and “conservation” built into the URL headlined, “Study shows surprising diet of sharks with little interest in mammals.”

Great white sharks are picky eaters, altering their diet to meet changing needs as they grow. Mammals are of little interest until the animals mature and bites on humans are likely to be mistakes.

Research published on Monday in the Frontiers in Marine Science journal by Australian researchers found little evidence of marine mammals in the stomachs of the 40 mostly juvenile great whites they examined.

Richard Grainger, a PhD researcher at the University of Sydney and lead author of the paper, told the Herald, “understanding what sharks were likely to eat and where could help the public minimise the small chance of an interaction with humans. People should also avoid dawn, dusk and other times when the water may be murky, such as after rain.”

Here’s the flaw in the study.

Studying “mostly” juvies ain’t gonna help anyone when it comes to minimising “the small chance of an interaction with humans.”

Dolphins and whales don’t get hit by juvies only by bigger, older sharks, although the paper concedes, “The hunting of bigger prey, including other sharks and marine mammals such as dolphin, is not likely to happen until the sharks reach about 2.2 meters in length.”

(No one told this juvie White. Last year, surfer Sam Edwardes was put in an induced coma after he had a “football sized” chunk taken out of his leg in Byron Bay twenty years after losing his pal to a Great White twenty years earlier in South Australia.)

As for that ol furphy about avoiding dawnies etc, as Longtom wrote yesterday, 

We’ve learnt the published guidelines on avoiding White shark attacks are straight up BS. They like clear water, sunshine, small surf. The mistaken identity theory was the first casualty. White sharks, we learnt, are curious to aggressive. What makes a looker, into a circler, into a bumper then a biter we don’t know.

In a 2012 TED x talk, Grainger’s co-author of the paper, Vic Peddemors, from the NSW Department of Primary Industries, joked that the recent fatalities of surfers in Western Australia had constituted a “bumper season”.

The central question remains, I think.

Are Great Whites endangered?

Yes?

Keep ’em protected.

No?

Throw out a net here and there.

If the cops had the kill order and they were so close they could reach out and touch its dorsal fin why was it not carried out? 

Sixty-year-old Rob Pedretti was just doing what is, was, a regular winter ritual for Queensland surfers yesterday: a little cross-border raid to try and pick up a little extra juice on the miles of undistinguished beachbreak that stretches south from the QLD border to Cape Byron.

We all know what happened next.

Poor bastard had his leg ripped off in the jaws off a fired up White. He did not survive the attack.

Soft, wintery day. You get a lot of them around here this time of year.

Warm sun, high cloud drifting in. Clean babyfood with little cats paws of wind ruffle on it. A fit wiry sixty year old would think of nothing but enjoying a little shred.

A hundred miles south I was feeling a little edgy.

Almost a year to the day since a juvey White buzzed me with a little too much intent. Out on the back bank with my boyo and gal.

I don’t like surfing out the back banks, with deep channels between me and the land. Too much opportunity for cruising Whites to get a bead on you. I rarely do it these days but my son wanted a piece of it and helicopter parenting ain’t my bag. If a kid wants a piece of it, my reaction is almost always: sure, go get it.

My boy was lollygagging in the water. “Get back on your board,” I ordered.

He must have sensed something in my voice.

“Why?” he replied. 

I didn’t respond. Just scanned the water. There was bait, birds and dolphins feeding. Nothing unusual there, thats typical. Especially for this time of year.  

A short timeline and context follows, for the record.

Twenty-three days ago, my pal the shark drum line contractor for the smart drum-line array off Ballina/Lennox  was complaining about the endless run of swell.

The surf was pumping but he was agitated; he’d dragged a fat twelve-foot White off the drum-line two days before and he wanted to get back work. The big swell  was preventing him from baiting and checking the gear.

He, like me, believes the drum-lines are keeping surfers safer in the area which has become a White shark attack hotspot. Ain’t too many whites can swim past a 22/0 circle hook with a stingray flap as bait.

They get dragged a mile out to sea and released with a tag inside them. 

So we all knew it was that time of year again.

But we forgot, in the midst of very fine run of late autumn swell. Crowds were high, there was safety in numbers. 

Day before the attack was a dreamy day. Head-high sets rifling down the bank. Moderate crowd. The water was stacked with bait. Slivers of cut glass in the morning sun. A yellowtail kingfish the size of a small pony swam straight past me. Crystal clear water.

There’s no safety in that. We’ve learnt the published guidelines on avoiding White shark attacks are straight up BS. They like clear water, sunshine, small surf. The mistaken identity theory was the first casualty. White sharks, we learnt, are curious to aggressive.

What makes a looker, into a circler, into a bumper then a biter we don’t know.

Neither will Rob Pedretti or his buddies that tried to drag him in after the attack. The attack happened around ten am. Paramedics were there by 10.40. The police cat scrambled from Tweed Heads, went out the bar, turned south, went past Fingal headland, then Kingscliff creek and the rocky reefy corner of the coast before it got to the open stretch of beach in front of a series of resorts and a new suburb called Casuarina.

That took just under an hour.

Rob was already gone by then.

Under a blue sheet on the beach, soul hopefully transporting to a more peaceful place.

The cops on the cat found a lifesaver on a ski engaged in a game of cat and mouse with a highly agitated predator. The shark had no intention of leaving the scene of the attack. Article 37 of the Fisheries Act was invoked which enabled the police to execute a kill order on the shark. 

The footage of the incident makes this kill order seem confounding. At one stage in the vision a cop on the bow of the vessel is leaning over, almost close enough to the shark to stroke its dorsal fin. He has what appears to be a camera in hand. 

I rang Inspector Kehoe from Byron-Ballina Area Command and asked him what the hell happened. If you had the kill order and you were so close why was it not carried out? 

“It wasn’t safe to do so,” he assured me.

The shark was too deep to safely put away with a firearm, which is the method used.

I didn’t ask him the deeper moral question of should it have?

In this instance, I think yes.

A defining characteristic of living things, from amoeba to blue whales, is the defence of itself from predation. To abnegate that fundamental natural law is to cloak existence in a sickly coat of misguided anthromorphism. We accept our place in the food chain, celebrate it even, but we don’t let the killer escape back into a highly populated surf zone.

It put the guy away, attacked his mates as they tried to rescue him total nightmare scenario, then hung around for four hours afterwards. 

A defining characteristic of living things, from amoeba to blue whales, is the defence of itself from predation. To abnegate that fundamental natural law is to cloak existence in a sickly coat of misguided anthromorphism. We accept our place in the food chain, celebrate it even, but we don’t let the killer escape back into a highly populated surf zone. At the least, not without a tag and a free trip out of the area.

Can anything be done now?

My pal George Greenough has had many encounters with Whites and written about them in detail.

Awareness is his primary tool. You got to turn on the primitive senses, the old lizard brain, that kept us safe on the savannah. If you feel something, check it out. Investigate movement.

It’s amazing how close that big animal can get to you without you knowing about it.

But if you can, if you can get your legs out of the road, even a micro-seconds notice can save your life.

As for his pals who dragged him across the gutter, whilst a ramped up White rammed them and circled them. That’s so gnarly. So, so heavy.

People say they hate their fellow surfers. I love my fellow sistren and brethren surfers and I love them even more when I think of what these guys did for their pal.

I hope they’re OK.

If you know them, keep an eye out.

They won’t be sleeping well for a long time.

A fascinating journey into worlds hitherto unknown…

If you’ve got an hour up your sleeve, there’s worse places to park your time than this swinging little convo ‘tween Peter Evans, the Australian chef turned spruiker of alternative therapies like a $15,000 light machine he says can treat “Wuhan coronavirus”, and Kelly Slater, the eleven-time surfing champ and noted enemy of the flat-earther community.

Pete, who is a surprisingly good surfer given his genesis in Melbourne and middle life lived in Bondi’s dirty closeouts, talks to Kelly about myriad topics including ageing, fear and the therapeutic benefits of hallucinogenic plant-based drugs, something close to Kelly’s heart.

Two-and-a-half years ago, the universe was revealed to Kelly at the Rythmia resort in Costa Rica, “an all-inclusive luxury resort” where “93.26% of our guests report a life-changing miracle during their stay.

Among the usual eco-resort activities, yoga, massage, hose-in-the-ass-enemas (hydrocolonic cleanses), Rythmia offers ceremonies with the psychoactive brew Ayahuasca.

“I got a miracle of information,” reported Kelly. “It opened up some sort of doorway in my future. It was otherworldly.”

In the convo with Pete, Kelly says he knows a girl who was suicidal her whole life until she “did a few sessions with plant medicines and was basically healed from it.”

It gets good when Kelly lists his famous pals, which include Jonah Hill (“I got a message from Jonah Hill and he told me he’d started surfing and that it changed this life”) and Lewis Hamilton (“I’ve become quite good friends with Lewis Hamilton and Lewis is in Bali right now surfing with Rizal. He says surfing is the greatest sport in the world and if could quit everything he does, including Formula One, and be a surfer he would do that!”)

Bombshell!

Get listening. 

Carry a tourniquet, learn how to use it, maybe save a life.

When Gold Coast surfer Robin Pedretti was hit and killed by a Great White yesterday, even after his buddies belted the shark and got him to the beach conscious, it brought into relief the new reality that if you wanna surf certain joints, carry a tourniquet.

Last night I spoke to Jon Cohen, an ER doctor who repurposes military tourniquets for use in the surf and who has made it his mission to use his expertise the solve the problem of preventable shark attack deaths.

He knows that most Great White hits are a bite-and-release taste test so once the shark leaves, if you’re quick a life can be saved.

Cohen, a Canadian who learned to surf in Hawaii, works around Australia in various emergency departments, including Esperance, a sudden hotspot in Great White attack fatalities.

He says he hasn’t analysed yesterday’s attack, so he’s speaking generally, but if you can get a tourniquet above the wound site, your buddy has a good chance of living.

There’s an exception here.

If the shark takes off an entire leg or arm and there’s no stump, well, even a combat medic can’t stop the bleeding.

But if there’s a stump, there’s a chance, a good chance.

If you act fast.

You carrying a tourniquet in your wetsuit? Or on the beach?

Before anything, before calling anyone, get it on, tight, a couple of inches above the joint.

That’s it.

No tourniquet or it’s in the car?

Get a towel. Apply as much pressure as you can where the blood is coming out. All that matters is stopping the blood.

A catastrophic attack and your buddy is going to lose consciousness in three minutes; after five minutes the outcomes are poor, says Cohen.

“Once someone goes into hypovolemic shock a cascade of bad things happen in your body. It decreases your chance of survival,” says Cohen. “In all of the tactical combat critical care, in military areas, wherever there’s mass casualties, big shootings, bombs, massive car crashes, the only thing that’s indicated to do before anything else is to get on the tourniquet.”

Right now, Cohen is working with an ocean safety group in Esperance, a pretty Western Australian town that’s been hit by three Great White attacks in the last six years. Two dead, including a teenage girl, and a man left without an arm and hand. (See Gary Johnson, killed Jan, 2020, teen surfer Laeticia Brouwer in 2017, and Sean Pollard, 2014.)

At a recent seminar teaching Shark Bite Management in Esperance, eighty people turned up.

People carry custom kits in their cars with a sticker on the back that says “Tourniquet Trained”.

I ask Cohen, if being trained in the use of tourniquets is the new CPR.

“There’s still going to be a lot more people during of heart attacks, and that’s true in the surf,” he says, “But if you’re surfing with your family, your kids, some group of buddies, getting the crew together to make sure they know what to do, giving it thought, having a strategy of what to do is part of your risk assessment when surfing sharky spots.”

Click here to check out Cohen’s range of tourniquets, including one built-into a leash for sixty Australian dollars.