Longtom on Superbank Great White Hit: “That’s the end of that fantasy. No more thinking crowded Superbank is a refuge. How far down the path are we to a Reunion Island reality?”

One of the guys who dragged the lifeless body to shore, Jade Parker, said “the whole idea that the shark was trying to single him out is not realistic” despite the footage showing unequivocally the shark doing exactly that. It hit him then hit him again.

Five pm, an hour before low tide, little off-season tradewind swell running.

My boy and his pal out scrapping around by themselves on the outer bank reforms at Lennox Pub, me feeling edgy as fuck and wishing I’d driven them up to the Pass or even Superbank… somewhere safe with more legs in the water.

Little almond-eyed tubes safe under the veil of nets and drums. Greenmount felt then, as it has since the whole shark crisis kicked off, about the safest place in the world to surf.

The most unlikely place to have that giant rooster tail of water erupt around you or a loved one and the whole familiar by now horror playing out, except this time caught in the web of the surveillance society.

Yeah, I saw the footage.

That’s where I would have sat with the kids, down the end past Little Marley, picking up some little wide runners into the afternoon glow. Probs having a little chat in between waves with Nick Slater, asking him what he thought of the Morning of the Earth twin he was riding.

Forty-six, still feeling good. Washing off the stress after a good day selling real estate. Lots of buyers, people escaping the lockdown, looking for sunshine, warm water and a safer surf compared to across the border.

It’s all changed now.

That’s the end of that fantasy. No more thinking crowded Superbank is a refuge, even if from paranoia.

You get sick of looking over your shoulder every five minutes.

Check on the Sharksmart feed and you get something like this daily: DPI advise 2.81 m White Shark tagged and released from SMART drumline at SOUTH BALLINA, Ballina at 06:15 pm on 8 Sep 2020.

Ignorance offers no bliss either. It is what it is now.

And what it is, is fucking hectic. Just how far down the path are we to a Reunion Island reality?

Further than we were a year ago is the only honest response.

Much, much farther than a decade ago.

Shallow water, it would have been waist deep on the tide. Clear water. Can’t pin mistaken identity on the shark. It must have come in like a polaris missile from the amount of water it displaced. There was no delicacy in the attack. The footage shows clubbie skis, three or four of them heading his way, to the rescue, I thought.

But they didn’t respond.

Others seemed to not notice, or scatter.

Despite the crowd, an utterly lonely way to die.

What Owl Chapman termed “the naked moment”.

He was already bled out by the time they got to him.

Contrary to reporting yesterday the nets were set, along with an array of eight drum-lines. The nets, just landward and to the north of where Slater was surfing, the drum-lines array, just seaward of the Snapper Rocks line-up. That left a corridor aimed directly at Slater of around three or four hundred metres in width in which a White shark swam before attacking the man.

The PR debate over sharks rages on.

Fanning, himself a survivor, is in full pitch mode for a documentary called Save This Shark which (unsurprisingly) runs the angle that sharks are merely “magical, majestic and misunderstood creatures”.

One of the guys who dragged the lifeless body to shore, Jade Parker, said “the whole idea that the shark was trying to single him out is not realistic” despite the footage showing unequivocally the shark doing exactly that. It hit him then hit him again.

There’s simply no other way to parse those moving images.

The footage.

The fucking footage.

Would I want that footage out there if it was my kid, my pal, gal, etc etc?

I’d be driving around with a baseball bat looking for the perps. Is it an inevitable consequence of the surveillance capitalism we all live under? A thousand times, yes. We all want the convenience, we have to accept the consequence. We are all addicted, as Tool noted in Vicarious to watching things die “from a good safe distance”.

Why can’t we just admit it?

What to do?

Pull your kids out, take a day off.

Deal with it.