No heats today nor tomoz maybe.

The finals of the women’s Maui Pro have been put on hold and the event may be cancelled after a recreational surfer was hit by a shark twenty yards offshore at Honolua Bay this morning.

The man, who was quickly reached by The Maui Pro’s water safety crews, suffered injuries to his left side lower extremities.

The water safety crews performed CPR on the man on the beach.

In a piece to camera from Oahu, the WSL’s CEO Erik Logan called the attack an “incident” adding the WSL’s “thoughts and prayers” are with the “victim” and that the event may be cancelled, which would make it the third WSL event to be called off because of shark attack, following Jeffrey’s Bay in 2015 and Margaret River in 2018.

There have been four fatal attacks in Maui in the last twenty years, 2004, 2013, 2015 and 2019. All hits by Tigers.

A week-and-a-half ago, a Californian woman suffered severe trauma injuries to her front torso after a hit while swimming in front of the Mahina Surf condos on Maui’s Lahaina coast.

Hawaii’s most famous shark attack was in 2003 when teenage surfer Bethany Hamilton was rolled by a fourteen-foot Tiger shark at Tunnels in Kauai, severing her left arm just below the shoulder.

There will be no competition at the Maui Pro today following a shark incident involving a recreational surfer this morning at Honolua Bay. The WSL is working with authorities and our thoughts are with the victim of this incident. The Maui Pro is on hold until further notice. pic.twitter.com/AGZSkF7wKZ

— World Surf League (@wsl) December 8, 2020

 

Pro surfing!

The best Hawaiian surfers are back in the water as the Pipeline Invitational gets underway. The top two, I think, get to enter the Pipeline in Memory of Andy Irons likely getting underway tomorrow.

But, anyway, fun and Pipe. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Come for the tubes, stay for the buttery smooth voice of Joseph Turpel.

Watch here.

Comment below.

"There's more than one shark expert shaking their head right now."

The New York Times is a daily broadsheet that recently blamed a French school teacher for his own beheading.

It could hardly be accused of being anything but on the liberal side of the ledger. 

So it comes as a surprise, pleasant or otherwise depending on your bias, that the paper has dived into Australia’s Great White Shark Crisis, something so far untouched by the Australian press.

Under the headline, “Death by Shark Is at a High in Australia. What’s Going On?“ we read,

What’s behind the increase in deaths? The question is vexing many in Australia, where public pressure is rising for authorities to take tougher measures to protect the country’s picturesque coasts this summer as people emerge from coronavirus lockdowns and eagerly head to the beach.

Scientists find the high numbers shocking, and they wonder what forces may be at play.

“There’s more than one shark expert who’s shaking their head right now, thinking, ‘What on earth is going on?’” said Culum Brown, a professor of marine biology at Macquarie University in Sydney who studies shark behavior. “Eight is certainly off the scale, and we haven’t even finished the year yet,” he added.

Maybe ’cause Whites have been protected since 1999?

Six years ago, I called a South Australian shark fisherman for his opinion on the then surge in Great White attacks.

Turned out he didn’t just have a theory on the dramatic increase in Great Whites in Western Australia, he was positive it was due to the AFMA (the Australian Fisheries Management Authority) shutting down vast areas of fishing areas to gill nets because of the by-catch of Australian fur seals and Great Whites.

What fisheries didn’t know was that skippers were under-calling the number of Whites coming up in the nets; the skippers afraid they’d be shut down if fisheries knew just how many Whites were destroyed as by-catch.

In the end, they were closed, anyway.

The irony was, he said, if fisheries knew just how many Whites were coming up, perhaps the White wouldn’t have been regarded as a threatened and endangered species.

“Think about this,” he said. “Ten years ago, there were nine or 10 boats operating and killing 200-to-300 Pointers a year. We were allowed to have an incidental catch of Pointers. They’d get tangled in the nets and come up dead. Now, say, if we work with a conservative kill figure of 200, and 50 of these Whites are mature, and of those 50, 25 are female, they are going to have one baby every two years. So, instead of the population growing like it was, or sustaining at a certain level, it’s blowing out. It’s growing faster and faster. The number of Pointers is increasing dramatically.”

As we spoke, he texted me a clip of a five-metre White attacking his boat, taken the day before on his iPhone. “This thing was breaking its teeth off on the boat,” he says.

“It’s only a matter of time before attacks surge again,” he told me. “That’s if people stay in the water. If they don’t, problem solved.”

The NYT, meanwhile, goes around in circles for a while before concluding,

“It’s probably just really bad luck.”

“We have ways of planning that now and it will allow women to also surf at Teahupo’o.”

The International Olympic Committee has confirmed the selection of surfing, and breakdancing, for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

And it’s gonna be Teahupoo for the surfing, naturally, ’cause France conquered this gorgeous lil corner of the Pacific a lil over a 150 years ago thus enabling an island fifteen-thousand clicks from Paris to serve springy, puffy and buttery croissants.

“The conditions at Teahupo’o offer an amazing performance wave that will excite athletes and captivate fans. Elite surfers – men and women – compete here regularly and are eager to compete for Olympic glory at Teahupo’o. With 22 men and 22 women surfers, we are happy to reaffirm our total commitment to gender equality and fair sport,” said the International Surfing Association’s Fernando Aguerre. “We salute the five candidatures (Hossegor etc), which were all excellent and well-known surf destinations, but Tahiti was truly exceptional in offering our athletes, and our sport, spectacular conditions for optimal competitions.”

Teahupoo was taken off the women’s calendar in 2007 ’cause it was deemed too dangerous.

And, now?

“We can put the women on at a time of the day when the waves are less powerful,” the president of Tahiti’s surfing federation, Lionel Teihotu explained to AFP. “We have ways of planning that now and it will allow women to also surf at Teahupo’o.”

The waves at Teahupoo will be a dramatic contrast to Chiba’s brave little beachbreak runners expected for Tokyo in 2021.