"If people knew how many people are bumped off boards, how many Whites we’re seeing close to shore, they’d be shocked.”
Esperance surfer Mitch Capelli is an ordinary man, a teacher by trade, who has been thrust, by circumstance, into an anything but ordinary situation.
His phone has been running real warm this past week, after surfer Andrew Sharpe, a popular Esperance local, was disappeared by a “monster” Great White in front of his pals last Friday at Kelpies, just outside of town.
In 2017, Capelli, who is twenty-seven, created Ocean Safety and Support, which has a centrist approach to Whites, after teenage surfer Laticia Brouwers died in front of her family after being hit by a Great White at Kelpies, the same place where, three years before, surfer, Sean Pollard, had an arm and another hand bitten off by a Great White in 2014.
The teen’s death was enough to spur Mitch into doing…something.
He wasn’t sure what that was going to be, just something.
Better to act, he figured, than watch more people die or be maimed, more families traumatised.
Ocean Safety and Support aims to be that middle ground between those who believe the White is a unicorn whose existence on earth is proof that magic surrounds us and therefore the animal is sacred, and those who want to kill the bastards.
Action has to happen, and now, says Capelli, not at some vague point in the future.
When I interview Capelli he apologises at a few different points in the interview for becoming emotional, passionate. He admits to being rattled as fuck, too, spending the last three months chasing waves between in the north-west.
Anywhere but Esperance.
“(Great Whites) are affecting our way of life,” he says. “We’re losing friends, family and community members. It’s so hard to deal with. The government has a duty of care, it’s teetering on criminal negligence. It’s got to that point. I might sound unreasonable but people are dying and nothing is being done. Tagging and lights and sirens and buoys are not solving the problem.”
Kelpies, he says, “is such a beautiful spot. Everyone wants to be able to go, park the car on the beach, have a paddle, be free to enjoy what our beautiful coastline has to offer. But people are shit-scared. And rightfully so. I’m avoiding my hometown at the moment. It’s probably the sharkiest place in the world right now. That’s the reality of it. We’re not dealing with tigers or bull sharks, either, we’re dealing with Great Whites that get hold of you and you don’t survive.”
Like a lot of surfers, fishermen, divers, Capelli blames the dramatic increase in interactions with Whites on the Australian government’s decision in 1999 to list the species as vulnerable and protect it in the waters of all States and Territories of Australia.
“They were never endangered in the first place,” says Capelli. “Obviously the population has exploded. It takes ‘em five to seven years to be sexually mature, then the females have between two and twelve pups every eleven months. That’s exponential growth. And really basic maths… the scary part is the worst is yet to come. What we’ve seen in Esperance is not surprising for most of us. This is our reality. As a young fella, one day I’m going to have a family of my own. I don’t want to bring up kids and not be able to put ‘em in the water. All the older fishermen in town, they don’t have their kids in the water. The schools are looking at ending diving, the aquatics program, surfing, it’s affecting every aspect of our lives… the recreational dive industry is dead and it used to be an international thing, we have some of the most beautiful dive locations in the world. The clearest water. The abalone divers are all in shark cages. Surfers want to ride a wave and they’re being hunted. That’s how it feels. If people knew how many people are bumped off boards, how many Whites we’re seeing close to shore, they’d be shocked.”
As I wrote a week or so ago, there has never been a period in human history when humans, divers, surfers, whatever, have been killed by Great Whites in such numbers as in 2020: seven deaths this year, four surfers, Rob Pedretti, Mani Hart-Deville, Nick Slater, Andrew Sharpe and three divers.
Capelli talks of his frustration at not being able to cut through at a governmental level, the Western Australian premier blowing off another surfer death as an example of the risk we face when jumping in the water.
“So many of the boys who were surfing with him are traumatised. They don’t know if they can go back in the water now. Psychiatrists are being organised to see those guys, what they witnessed was so messed up.”
I tell Capelli that as brutal as it is, it won’t be until the larger population gets a taste of what an attack looks like that attitudes will change, and reference the Vietnam War. If it wasn’t for the war photographers and writers like Micheal Herr, no one back in the US would’ve known a damn thing about the horror there.
It’s the same with the footage of Nick Slater being hit by a White at the Superbank last month and Tadashi Nakahara bitten in half by a White at Ballina. Beach cams recorded it all. The owners of the footage were quick to disappear it. Well-intentioned, yeah, but if people saw what a White hit looks like?
It’d change minds.
“It shouldn’t have to come to that,” he says. “Surely the fact that people are dying enough. I don’t think the stories need to be shared. They’re too gruesome.”
Well, that’s the point. I tell him I spoke to the surfer who fought the White off teenager Mani Hart-Deville, who says he won’t speak about what he saw out of respect for his family.
“What I can say,” says Capelli, “is that they never had a chance. These are big, big sharks. It’s all over really quick. It’s not mistaken identity, not having one bite and letting go, but chomping ‘em in half, taking the whole body and gnawing on it until it’s gone. Eating it on the surface like it’s a seal. The mistaken identity thing, they don’t wanna attack, they don’t like humans, is bullshit, mate. Utter bullshit. They are are the apex, predator, opportunistic, ambush predators. If a feed is there, they’ll take it.”
I ask, what would you do, if you were given the keys to the State gov?
“Drum lines instantly after an attack. Instantly. They just killed someone so therefore there’s a problem animal hanging around. Prevention requires intervention. If sharks are hanging around and showing signs of aggression, it should be removed. It won’t have any effect on populations. Their habitat is not threatened.”
After that, mitigation strategies, keep the number in check.
It’s hard work and it ain’t paying the bills.
Still, “No one else is doing it, fucking just doing it, man.”
(If you want to get in touch with Ocean safety and Support or buy a trauma kit, click here.)
With respect to your article, a rebuttal that i read yesterday from the BBC,
it seems like 1929 had more fatalities, weren’t too many surfers ‘Down Under’ back then, right?
Is Australia really seeing more shark attacks?
link: https://www.bbc.com/news/wo…
Per the BBC article linked above, you folks “Down Under’ have had 21 shark bites this year, when the average is 20, yet in 2015, you had 35 bites, with 2 fatal. Interesting story, linked, worth a quick read…
As a young fella up north WA many years ago , when fishing we found a large tiger shark on the beach dead as fuck , anyway we were cutting it up to get its jaws, when we discoverd it had died because a huge plastic wrapped bail of what looked to be Thai Budda Sticks was jamed in its throat ,
Well to cut a long story short thas where the WA saying ” roll up a shark skin ” originated.
On ya Mitch Capelli for doing something about the shark problem. Like you said no one else is doing it.
I hope you flicked him a tail pad
i am gong to get a pet orca and/or pet elephant seal
Elephant Seals and/or Mother Inlaws are the go.
Clearly there’s an issue that needs to get sorted out. Luckily you live in a capable state that has the resources, potential political will and government machinery to address the problem of people getting killed by fish! I don’t have any opinions on what should be done about the problem, but I have a few musings to throw into the hat…
The “protected species” argument that’s become very popular isn’t watertight. Not full of holes either. But probably one of a few factors. Long story short, South Africa’s great whites have also been protected for 3 decades but that alone hasn’t produced the situation that Australia is experiencing right now.
Compare Australia’s great white patterns to South Africa’s trends, where they’ve been protected since 1991. We had a surge of bites in the 2000s, mostly around Cape Town’s beaches in the months when the GWs are known to cruise the beaches looking for small sharks and large fish (instead of hitting up the near-shore island seal colonies to feast on pups). That period would support the “sudden increase in protected species numbers” argument. Towards the end of that period there was also a bloodbath by bull sharks (maybe just one fish) at a single beach at a small Wild Coast town over a couple of years – most likely unrelated to the GW bite surge but who knows?
But GW bites and numbers are way down these days. There are still GW bites happening but they’re less frequent and not concentrated so much in Cape Town.
I had gone to school with one of the surfers who died from a bite over that surge period, and I witnessed a miraculously non-serious bite in 2012 in the town where I now live as I was still on the beach about to paddle out. At that time there were over 150 individually-identified GWs that came and went between two local near-shore seal colonies hosting a combined 110k seals. Now, the cage diving boats are lucky if they identify 2-3 at any given time. The great whites just suddenly weren’t there anymore – not only here but around all the usual seal colony / shark hotspots in the south-west of the country. Other species have moved into those areas in their absence. (Tourist cage divers now leave traumatised by the theatre of unprotected bronze whalers getting pulled out by fisherman who park in the middle of the diving boats where the bronzies are attracted by chumming). So yes there was a spike in numbers and bites, but then a huge decline that wasn’t part of a deliberate environmental management strategy.
Two well-documented theories for the sudden great white disappearance are the orcas that started appearing around the GW hotspots (killing them for their livers, etc) and the sudden overfishing of smaller shark stocks (GW food) for the aussie flake market. No doubt there’s local corruption going on relating to the licenses for overfishing those species. A shark spotting programme at some popular spots with elevated views can also claim some responsibility for reducing bites in Cape Town.
Maybe surfers along the garden route and into the eastern cape might report a different picture? There seems to be a healthy GW population in Plettenberg Bay, which more closely resembles the northern NSW coastline. My area in the south west is a better environmental match to australia’s SW coastline.
So ja, whatever great white management strategies get put in place (if any) in Australia would do well to consider more factors than just the protected species status.
Why the insistence from some on calling these attacks “bites”? A phrase coined by the scientific community in an effort to show that these attacks are done mistakenly, but, as Mitch Capelli says, these are not ‘bites’; they are vicious attacks with intention to feed or kill. Calling them “bites” only serves to help those that believe that sharks “are in their environment, if you don’t like it don’t go in the sea”. Does nothing to help those who have lost loved ones or those who have been maimed for life.
Nah “bite” can mean an attack or an investigation or eating for food – there’s plenty of evidence out there to suggest that some bites are most likely aggressive attacks while others are more likely curious investigations. The term “shark bite” has plenty of inherent violence in it, whatever the shark’s intention.
The word you wanted to get upset about is “encounter”.
So why not just use the word “attack” then instead of bite or encounter? That’s what always was used, until more recently when talking about sharks attacking became Eco-politically incorrect. No doubt there’s plenty of evidence for aggressive “bites” so why amalgamate in that case? May seem trivial but not to those who know, or are, victims. They’re the ones who have the right to be “upset”.
I’m not.
Well you’re lucky, because lots of others where I live are.
Urchin has been attacked. And you’re right Jean, semantics matter. All encounters are attacks but there are degrees, hence the adjectives. Hope they get the fuck out of your spot.
Thanks. Always been around but been almost 10 years now here in Reunion since there was a sudden change for the worse. Multiple factors, yes, but the protected species in Oz/ fishing ban here is strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) similar.
I feel deep sympathy for all indivduals and communities involved in the recent spate of attacks. Literally the stuff of my nightmares.
I just don’t care if it’s called a bite or sttack. Especially coming from a Saffa. It’s common colloquial Saffa English.
Not just Saffas who use the term bite though. More a term used by those who prefer to see many (not all) of these attacks as mistaken identity of prey and who seem reluctant to admit that a shark will attack to kill/eat and/or maybe to defend its territory.
But are people who matter still using the “mistaken identity” theory? It feels like we moved on from that at least 2 decades ago.
“Ohh I got attacked by a bee ?”
The WA premier should go for a swim…
He will need to check with his Chief Medical Advisor first