"I've never seen Mum like that before. She was just
trembling on the beach."
If you live in Esperance, a pretty little town once
famous for its impossibly clear water but now better known as the
world’s Great White attack capital, well, your nerves are
going to be a little frayed.
Esperance has become such a byword for Great Whites, the
Discovery Channel brought a New York-based marine biologist, Dr
Craig O’Connell, to the isolated town to film a documentary
exploring the peculiarly aggressive nature of Esperance’s Great
Whites.
In October, popular local surfer Andrew Sharpe was taken “almost
whole” by a Great White, the body never recovered.
“The body is just fucking
gone,” said one witness.
Another witness, swimming with her kid a click away, described
the water turning red.
Nine months earlier, diver Gary Johnson
was hit by a White as
soon as he dived into the water off Esperance to set his anchor and
killed. Last week, an inquest heard that his wife dived in after
her husband, the water “full of blood and sand”, the tail of the
Great White “flapping” up and down.
She described his eyes as
“open and lifeless.”
In 2017, teenager surfer Laticia
Brouwers, holidaying in Esperance, died in front of her family
after being hit by a Great White.
Three years earlier, Esperance surfer Sean Pollard, 23, had an
arm and another hand bitten off by a Great White.
There’s a theory kicking around that once a shark has a “blood
meal” it’ll return to the area during their annual migration.
On Thursday, six surfers were called to the beach by terrified
beachgoers “frantically waving their arms” after a twelve-foot
Great White was spotted dangerously close to the group.
As per the state
broadcaster,
Tagon Robbs and Brayden Little were among a group of six
surfing a break off West Beach, two minutes from the centre of
town, when terrified beachgoers began to wave them in.
“[Tagon’s] parents were on the rock, his dad just got in
from the surf, and they were just frantically waving their arms,
screaming,” Mr Little said.
“So we all paddled in. We didn’t actually see the shark
until we got onto the step.
“Then we saw the shark coming back in through the line up,
and it was like probably a three- to four-metre great white, which
looked like a little submarine.
“[I’m] pretty freaked out obviously.”
While the Esperance local said he had seen a couple of
sharks while surfing before, he said he had never seen one so close
nor witnessed such a visceral reaction from onlookers.
“[Other times were] nothing like this. Nothing like the fear
and the people running down and the actual fear in their eyes, and
so it really hit home this one, it was serious, it was really
close.
Mr Robbs said he felt grateful to be
alive.
“If there was no-one running down the stairs,
you never know what might have happened. We wouldn’t have seen it
[the shark],” he said.
“I’ve never seen Mum like that before. She
was just trembling on the beach.”
Diver Greg Pickering, who’s been hit twice by sharks, the last a
Great White in Esperance in 2013, called for a cull after
Laticia
Brouwers was hit warning then that WA
could expect “more of the same” unless action was taken to
reduce growing shark numbers.
An abalone diver for
forty years, he told PerthNow, “There wasn’t any. You
never saw them. That’s changed now. You’ve got a situation where
the numbers have built right back up again. I don’t think a lot of
people understand that. The numbers are very high. I’d say they’re
similar to what they were in the 1960s. I’ve seen more sharks
over the last few years than in the 20 or 30 years before
that.”
