A triumph of pragmatism.
A Western Australian boardriders club, pragmatic as hell and who ain’t afraid to mention the unmentionable, has organised a chain of shark bite kits and defibrillator machines at five iconic beaches in the state’s south-west.
The kits stretch from the accessible-only-by-four-wheeler, Bears, to just out the front of Taj Burrow’s (former) pussy palace at Rabbits, Yallingup main break, Smiths and Injidup Car Park,
Yallingup Boardriders raised the money for the heart-starters and “slam kits” featuring Ukranian-made, combat proven crank-handle tourniquets and infographics on what to do when your pal is de-limbed by a Great White, something that ain’t so rare in these parts, and organised workshops with the ER doctor who makes the kits, Jon Cohen.
Jon Cohen, you’ve heard of.
Each time there’s a negative interaction (see, I’m learning) with a Great White, I give Jon a call, ask him to break down the latest attack and the response from other surfers and first-responders.
He’s made it his life work to get tourniquets in the hands of Australian surfers who, for the first time in the sport’s history, have to seriously confront the possibility of interacting in a negative fashion with the suddenly everywhere Great White.
Still, and this is real important, a shark attack, even by a monster White isn’t necessarily a death sentence.
According to Cohen, who is forty and who grew up in Canada and got into surfing while at college in Hawaii, if you can get the de-limbed person to the beach and apply a tourniquet above the wound so no blood can spurt out the hole you’re good.
He say that once you’ve stopped the blood flow you’ve got four hours before the leg, or arm, is choked off and dies. It means if you’re at a remote beach with no phone redemption, you can tourniquet the wound and take off for an ambulance or chopper without your buddy dying.
“It’s the same principle as a car crash, someone falling off a building or getting hit by a bullet in Iraq,” says Cohen. “Stop the bleeding and get the surfer to shore. In thirty seconds, using a tourniquet, you’ve saved a friend’s life.”
The kits in West Oz are the basic slam kit, one hundred and twenty dollars. Someone gets hit, you go to the defibrillator box, call emergency (triple zero in Australia), and the lock opens.
That ain’t perfect, says Jon.
Like, he’s thrilled his kits are there at the beach but he knows someone could bleed out in the time it takes to get the kit unlocked.
And, at a lot of places n the south-west, only one telephone network, the most expensive one, works.
Jon wants stand-alone shark kits, unlocked, and containing not just the standard tourniquets but advanced equipment in case any doctors or paramedics are around.
This’d include junctional tourniquets, for “absolutely horrible wounds, the arm or leg completely gone” and a device that acts like a little balloon. You stick it into the hole, blow it up and staple skin over the hole to keep pressure on it. Other tactics include trying to sew over a bleeding artery if you can see it.
Advanced, yeah, but it’s surprising how many docs surf.
“We don’t wanna confuse anyone but this would give ambos, police, doctors, nurses, extra equipment to play with.”
As well, you open the box and it automatically calls the police, and even Jon, so he can monitor the situation, help where he can.
It’s ironic that Jon has just taken a gig as the director of emergency at Manning Base hospital, a short-ish drive from Tuncurry, where a surfer was killed a couple of months back, and a short chopper run from Crescent Head, where a surfer had his arm destroyed by a White a few weeks back.
I assume as its in Yallingup , the packaging will be all designer labeled…
A fishstocking safety net being replaced by a tourniquet ……. Is this absurdity at its most absurd or has the future of surfing been wrapped up , tightly , and thrown away ?
Or just a fashionable change in ideology ? Once we were surf punks , now we are Mummies ?
This isn’t going help big business cash in on surfing at the Olympics.
It’s viewed as negative press by surf promoting people
Negative interaction indeed
I confess surfing solo in that part of the world is something I could never really relax into.
I went to a dinosaur bones and skeletons and stuffed recreation exhibition thingo with my two young daughters yesterday coz we’ve got a nice little 4 day weekend owing to the Olympics that noone can go to. As I walked around and saw T-rex and triple size lions and weird looking things with teeth a foot long, I dutifully noted that not a single cunt there mourned their absence in today’s world.
Together, we all looked at the giant, terrifying things before us and collectively breathed a thank fuck sigh of relief that those fuckers weren’t still roaming the streets and killing the kids. Great to keep the kids busy for an hour or so but not a single fuck given they were extinct.
I don’t particularly wish the same for ye old shark, but I can’t say I’d be too distressed if they were to slowly fade away at the hands of some nasty politician cunts ordering mass removal on the sly…. Cunts scare me more than t-rex
while it would be relieving knowing that there would be nothing out there on the hunt for us, once we lose sharks we lose our entire ocean. The ecosystem would collapse and I’m sure it would be a worse place then when sharks were around…
Evidently, I ain’t Darwin, but I do ponder whether it would mean “we lose the entire ocean.” Pure, wild speculation of course, but I wonder if some other species of fish wouldn’t just step up.
Humans are cunts no doubt and have no right to determine the existence, or not, of another species of living thing yada yada yada, but this is a surfing website. And we surf. And sharks are fucking with our heads, and bodies, when we surf. A first aid kit on the beach ain’t gonna bring my pound of flesh or my leg back. Seems like a bit of tokenism.
Look at the world map. Oceans are fucking giant things. Surely we can find a way of turning sharks around once they get to within 1km of the beach. Send ‘em back out to sea. Or to Christmas Island. Gotta be Something. For the kids.
But if there are so few Whites, as is claimed, why hasn’t the ocean collapsed already?
Come on old Bitchy one, you should know by now that logic and good reasoning have long been banished from all Australian govt. agencies. And I’m not being facetious either (always wanted to use that word – the only one in the English language with all the vowels in the correct order. Fucken turning the Grit into a place for grammarian cuntz).
Back to sharks – even if they were endangered, they certainly fucking ain’t now are they? Balance, recalibrate, reset the scales and all that corpo poppycock. Too many sharks. Rebalance rebalance!
I do think, there’s sharks and there’s…sharks. White supremacy etc.
Is the grey nurse non-binary then?
There is no shark population problem in australian waters, the shark population problem is elsewhere in the world where fish factory ships opperate. It is easier for green organisation to greenwash economically advanced nations and soon like reunion island there will he parts of australia you will be unable to enter the ocean without losing a limb.
There have been 5 major mass extinction events – the last being the K-T (Cretaceous-Paleogene) extinction which took out the dinosaurs. This can also be seen with a major iridium anomaly, theorised to be from a significant meteorite impact.
It’s good for us to remember our significance on a ~4.4 billion year old planet. In the last century we came up with a sound geological history of the earth and in the last 20 years we’ve had the narcissism/arrogance? to write ourselves into it as the masters of the 6th great extinction.
So I agree, thank fuck for no T-Rex roaming the street. Let’s just go surfing and wack the odd great white if it gets in the way!
I’ll have you know that Australia is, apparently, about 240 years old give or take. History writes itself when you’re the writer…
Don’t mention the 45,000 year old remains of The Mungo Man to those who took over the empty land of Terra Nullius ….
Are than any chances a meteorite crashing into the Gulf of Mexico, 65 million years later , could possibly solve, the human interaction with shark situation , while not disturbing my next surf trip in October ?
Well, I identify as a Binary-Indigenous-Killer Whale. Don’t f around, Whitey.
Bunker Bay surely needs one.
Yeah, it’s on Jon’s list. And for those whose memory don’t stretch back too far, bodyboarder Kyle Burden was killed there by a White and, last year, a long boarder was hit by a fifteen footer. A local surfer on the scene said, “the White came out the water and inhaled the board pretty much. The guy managed to roll out of the way and then a longboarder got him to the beach.”
I used to love surfing there but my fishing mates always talked about the salmon runs on that side of the Cape. Just what old sharky would like to follow in for some chow.
You’re making surfing scarier than watching Jaws reruns. Shit, seeing that big red sign on the beach, wonder how many punters just turn back around.
Might have to change your pseudonym to …..
Derek Hynd’s Missing Limbs ?
And why can’t Great Whites takeover truly woeful waves like Newquay or other seriously crappy waves in Northern Europe where people are actively campaigning to keep sharks alive in SoCal and Oz ….. 20000km away ?
Tbone representing!