"There is definitely no shortage of Great Whites."
A foil-boarder has been hit by a shark at the site of last weekend’s Tweed Heads Pro, the animal leaving behind a tooth in the foil’s resilient carbon fibres.
If you remember, competitors in the event which was held at a B-grade point called Cabarita half-an-hour south of the Superbank where a surfer was killed by a Great White less than two weeks ago, were cleared when an eight-foot shark swam through the contest area.
Photos and video of the foil-boarder flew around Instagram, the man, a local surfer Christian, surrounded by onlookers as he describes the event.
Dorsal Watch reported a fifteen-to-eighteen-foot Great White, as big as they get, “a tank”, swimming through the lineup around the same time.
At Broken Head, same day, a twelve-foot Great White swam through a crowd of fifty surfers, bumping one surfer on its way through.
At Kirra, a few hundred metres down the beach from the Superbank, surfers were cleared when a shark swam though the lineup.
Joel Merchant, thirty-nine and from Tweed Heads, says he’s been fishing for twenty years off the same stretch of coast where there’s been two fatal hits on surfers in the past two months, Rob Pedretti at Kingscliff, Nick Slater at the Superbank.
“People say they are hungry due to overfishing but you never seen a skinny one, they are all healthy and there is plenty of food for them, they have been left alone and bred up so well and thriving. The chance of interacting with a shark is more and more because there is so many of them.”
Commercial fisherman, Adrian Cottee, who is based in Yamba two-and-a-half hours south of the Gold Coast, said he he had to “leave the Tweed area two years ago because the sharks were eating the net and everything would fall out. There’s certainly big numbers of sharks out there.”
Are you really vying for the world record longest headline?
So the assumption being that human intervention is required by nature to keep things in balance?
Yes … cull all foil boarders
I once surfed Broken Head around 86 with only 4 guys out in a contest and the most dangerous thing was a rock just below the water line about half way along the bank and somehow it bit me ….. no loss of blood or limbs but fuck did my ego take a knock and forced me to go and surf , a la ADS (work on your weakness) , at Currumbin for a month a year until no longer necessary , so I would never look like Batman at Sunset Beach on a sand bottom right point with one rock sticking out ever again ……. Now there’s Sharks ?
Never gets old.
Like their human counterparts, maybe all the South African whites have moved to Australia? Our GW numbers are way down at their usual hotspots.
Watch out New Zealand, you’re next in line for the corresponding shark surge…
did you experience a decline in man-buns corresponding with a reduction in shark numbers? just theory I am working on?
It seems like a reasonable hypothesis Phat W … …that a Carnivorous Man Eating Shark would enjoy traveling the Seven Seas in Search of delicious Man-Buns . Surprisingly though , Sperm Whales don’t seem to like cream buns ?
Black carbon weave effect lures work for sharks. Interesting. Wonder if a few fluoro stripes would be more effective in overcast conditions.
ok after punching out a few cones…here is my take on that picture on top…
Those two dudes are in a carport scuffle. Gary grey shirt has just landed a solid right, connecting nicely to wetsuit guys jaw. He is now full of confidence…bouncing lightly around on his toes…posing, shadow boxing…hoping everyone is looking
Wettie man is shaken. The blow spins him….but he has a secret weapon…a super punch…
He just has to wait for it to charge up…BOOM
Pretty sure this won’t seem quite as funny tomorrow morning…thats what usually happens
I thought it was Ben Gravy describing how he surfed the sharks wake.
I’m a bit off my dial too
I miss smoking weed
You forgot to mention the 3m white at Mermaid yesterday and also the 2 x white sightings at Burleigh yesterday and also the 4m white at Tallie creek mouth today.
Imagine how long the title to this article would have been, if he did
The Never Ending Story ?
QLD Tourism Board and the Ghost of Russ Hinze announced today …..
“ The Gold Coast is Dead ! Long Live THE GREAT WHITE COAST ! “
Careful Bicko … you’re going to make Negs list … good of the family and all that…
I have been banned from a bar in Sud Ouest France since 2003 , because I left them , owing to visa problems, to go and work at a bar across the road , just to be able to stay in the country ….. A bitter pill to swallow after spending 15 years in the joint as a client , employee and above all a friend ….. so I think I’ll cope if I become a non person here at the BG …giggles
Thats today’s and tomorrow’s content.
Anyone here with a boat? Go out and get a few of the dogs.. floating drum and hooks.. Mark from sheringa said it works a great haha
Anyone read the link about the fisherman saying shark numbers are out of control? Bond University Dr McPhee says “No data on the number of white sharks was collected before they became a protected species, so there is no way to determine whether numbers have actually increased”…. dip shits don’t know shit. Waiting for scientific data to appear while surfers getting chomped.
Science is fake data.
Science
low white shark numbers.
Reality
Shitloads.
Science.
Covid will kill 60,000 australians
Reality
Fuk all dead.
Science.
Sea level rise.
Reality
No sea level rise.
Ok … let me have a crack
Fisherman always tell the truth
Lockdowns and isolation work
Umm yes they have
Actually, the crack about fishos ain’t fair. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that the numbers are increasing and it’s the science that’s not keeping up.
Anything works with manipulated data
That’s a bit like saying all tradesman are trying to rip you off.
Like all things in life, there’s good bad and lazy scientists. To say all science is faked is just fucking naive.
Cunt
Are ‘foul’ boarders included as surfers in official reports ?
Or should they be in the ‘incidental by-catch’ fishing statistics ?
So we could describe the apprentice incidental by-catch foul boarders as “foiling off( als )”
Naw fuck not me carbon foillll
I preferred the days when surfers traded foils for money and smoked ‘em ? My mate lived next to a provider of the said product whose pseudonym was ALuminium Foil and there was always shenanigans a plenty, with women of the night occasionally being dropped off to my mate’s unit by mistake ….As they say No Foil like and Old Foil !
Oh by the way, if this guy is a god-botherer, do you think he’ll take the attack as a sign that Jebus don’t like’m foils?
…isn’t he “Christian” rather than “a Christian”?
The holy text is ambiguous, brother Harry.
“ Photos and video of the foil-boarder flew around Instagram, the man, a local surfer Christian, surrounded by onlookers as he describes the event. “
…and they say punctuation and grammer doesn’t matter. See what a void of uncertainty we have been thrown in to for lack of a comma or somesuch?
[oh, and by the way, family guilt cannot be cured, only passed on to the next generation].
This is how thousands of years of conflicts started. Little disagreements in the exact readings of shark attack stories on facetious surf websites.
One man’s religion is another man’s heresy ….
https://youtu.be/Ka9mfZbTFbk
THE FOIL!!! The carbon fibre foil! It’s a sign!
See how much we need Ben Marcus
sermon in the car park. followed by a meet and greet ,schooners and chicken parmigiana at the RSL
Early Christians never used the crucifix as it represented a horrible death by slow torture but used instead the sign of the fish ….
Today’s Christians may happily embrace the symbolism of the cross , rebirth , eternal life for everybody etc , while the symbol of the Big Fish , might now represent , a horrible quick death ?
There was a kook on a foil getting Jet ski whip ins on the 2 foot shorey out the front this morning. And he was wearing a life vest. Why couldn’t a shark get him?
I went out today for the first time in, what, a year and half?.. and had to suffer the sound of that exact guy for a while.
Add to that the various narcissistic fuckwits swanning around taking pictures of each other posed and shrieking.
I am such a fucking kook again. Big chunky board but could not even get into a single one until I bellyboarded in to leave. Waves were fat. I’m fat. The fat heads on the beach. Fat jetski. Fat depressed mood of no money.
Fat-her, forgive me for I have not sinned enough.
There ya go.
Rant over.
It’s a start!
Sho’nuff.
Why u no surf for 1 half year?
Life, family stress /guilt, swollen nutsack (yes, for real), more family guilt / stress.
Get well soon. Go surf again
I’m all healed up. Well.., perhaps not mentally. But those scars are for life. Doctors tell me that only a surfer knows the feeling. (use of joke twice in same comments stream, sorry)
Swollen Nutsack was plenty reason all by itself. And Swollen Nutsack is going to be the name of my new band – once I get one. Glad you are doing better.
To hell with that eggbeater. Glad you got a go out CB. Next sesh will be better mate!
I wish we had snipers in the hills at time like that.
It’s that acess running track.. really fucked things up down there. If that’s where you went.
Yes. I hate that track.
Keep it up or the cunts win!
It’s terrible out there currently anyway. Had a swim at lunch though and the bank in the middle was starting to show some shape on the lower tide
Yeah the rocks were looking good but loads of guys on it so I went out kinda south middle.
Wouldn’t have mattered where I went out, but I figured I cop less karmic ire by wasting waves with no other competition rather than a lineup full of actual surfers.
Tell you what, a wee hour of paddling and I feel FUCKED tonight. I really need to get back on the program.
You caught a wave ! That’s better than what ELITE WSL ATHLETES, Felipe and Lakey Petersen did a few years ago at Tahiti and Cloudbreak .
Step by step .
Did you at least get some sense of satisfaction taking out your reshaped stick? Or did you nearly “accidentally” leave it behind the back tyre as you reversed out the parking bay?
To be fair, I haven’t actually stood up on it yet with its new arse surgery, so I shall withhold judgement until I get it planing and attempt a bottom turn.
If it still sinks, then it won’t even make it back up the path home. I’ll just leave it on the beach for some poor sucker to adopt.
If that happens then use the opportunity to give it to a grom who still has a twinkle in their eye. But only on condition that they suffer through the cautionary tale of surfing’s inevitable destination of a bitter and miserable life. It’ll give them a chance to quite while they’re ahead, or else hate themselves even more when the penny drops that it’s too late to get out.
Sounds like a Surfing Life and the Laws of Thermodynamics have something in common ….
“you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game”
I still have a twinkle in both eyes
Only a Surfer Knows the Feeling.
I’ll take it
I so read that as reshaped ‘dick’
Shoulda knuckled up Ads. That shit is unacceptable
Oh I wasn’t surfing
Yeah it was pretty shithouse up the bay today
It seems the surfer cull is upon us.. this is all disturbing as fuck. 15-18ft.. so much for the juvenile theory.
It’s time we chatted
About how your Mum and Dad
Made baby Polo…
My own Haiku!
Today, as cube once said.. was a good day
Great Whites rule!!
So Tigers and whites don’t have sex with each other?
Not very progressive.
Sounds like the colonial history of India ?
I’m conflicted – I’m not quite sure how I feel about a foil-boarder being attacked!
Don’t worry – he surfs very well also.
Though , it is totally against my humanist principles , I must avow , like my brothers from the Shire , that in the battle between Fool-Boarder and Shark , I am unequivocally 100% for the SHARKS !
https://youtu.be/IKRlvpC7d6c