“Fear on Cape Cod as sharks hunt again!”
Here’s a story eerily familiar to surfers and anyone who goes into the water beyond their shins in Australia.
No Whites around, virtually no attacks in the past one hundred years… suddenly… boom…boom…boom… hits, fatals, surfers bleeding out on the sand.
Gorgeous Cape Cod, that geographical cape that swings its J-curved arm from the south-east corner of mainland Massachusetts, think rich cunts festooned in striped tees riding in yachts etc, has suddenly become “host to one of the densest seasonal concentrations of adult white sharks in the world.”
“The animals trickle into the region during lengthening days in May, increase in abundance throughout summer, peak in October and mostly depart by the dimming light and plunging temperatures of Thanksgiving.”
Here’s the numbers: during the entire twentieth century there were three shark attacks, one fatal, in 1936.
Since 2012, there have been five hits by Great Whites.
Last year, a Great White killed a swimmer at Casco Bay, Maine, a couple of hundred miles south.
“In Maine, we never knew we had Great White sharks,” the swimmer’s husband said.
The story is a horror show of first-person accounts.
Here, lifeguard Nina Lanctot arrives to find boogieboarder Arthur Medici, hit by a White, dragged out of the water onto the sand by his pal Issac Rocha.
Medici was motionless and without expression. His pupils were fixed and blank. He was not breathing. She checked his pulse. There was none. Scanning, taking in information quickly, she examined his wounds. A chunk of flesh of one leg was missing, and the other leg was mangled. Worse, the wounds were not bleeding or noticeably seeping. Lanctot’s eyes followed drag marks leading from the water to Medici’s silent frame. There was not a drop of blood. His femoral or popliteal arteries had been severed, she figured, and his blood drained away. Without hemostatic clamps and immediate transfusions, he was past saving. The nearest hospital was more than 30 miles away. Lanctot knew this math. It was bad.
She heard a man in the crowd. “You’ve got to do something,” he said
Rocha had tied a boogie-board leash around one of Medici’s legs. Lanctot slipped the tourniquet around the other, just under his groin, and twisted it tight, clamping quadriceps and hamstring hard to bone. The lifeguards and doctors worked frantically, pumping Medici’s chest with the flat of their hands while one gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Lanctot felt pangs of empathy. Medici’s skin was turning ashen. Rocha was inconsolable. She wished his mother were there to comfort him. She held Medici’s hand, hoping he would feel companionship, knowing he could not acknowledge it.
Surfers are referenced later in the piece, which you can read in its entirety here.
After Medici’s death, some surfers switched to stand-up paddle boards, which largely keep limbs out of the water and offer greater visibility. Others, like Lanctot, quit surfing on the Outer Cape. Some kept surfing, but with whistles, so if a shark appeared they could clear people fast.
Whistles!
Scientists have applauded the arrival of the Great White packs,
“The annual returns are a success story, a welcome sign of ecosystem recovery at a time when many wildlife species are depleted.”
So there’s that, I suppose.
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It all started with the Pipping Plover. Environmentalists insisted no Jeep out to Great Point when nesting. So the F’n things took over all the beaches, which now abandoned got the seals to return, the tasty snack favored by GREAT WHITES. No matter. those living in $25MM dollar homes on Nantucket and the Vineyard don’t really go swimming in the sea, after all that salt on their ever so well toasted skin. Nope just for sun tanning and champagne, and if they really want it they can install a salt water pool next to their mansion, and then of course there is the pool boy…..we have lost our minds, but soon a correction cometh.
Here on Cape Cod the sharks aren’t so much of a menace as are the increasingly bold and predatory Coyotes. We call for action in attempts to save our dogs and cats and are called “entitled” and worse, but it’s almost impossible to walk pets on short leads, now. I doubt even having a child or two dragged off and eaten will spur any kind of action.
The best way to respond to sharks is to cut off their food source. We have so many seals that they are destroying our commercial fishing industry and they definitely attract sharks. Fashion designers need to start using lots and lots of sealskin in their clothing.
First thing you do is kill all of the lawyers! Oh wait that was Shakespeare! Kill off the rabbit and squirrel supply and the Coyotes will disappear. As for certain of the obnxious dogs and their owners, their fate should be left to the coyotes…and sharks
Whites never seem to hit Vals.
What a dense take on the subject. The ocean is the sharks home not the other way around. You enter knowing the risk involved. And do you know how many people frequent the waters of Cape Cod per year? But that number which is in the millions vs the amount of encounters . It’s laughable. One is more likely killed by a dog.
I take it you aren’t of the Sydney Reillys?
Memo to Derek Rielly: Maine is actually north of Cape Cod, not south as you write in the article
People want us to thank sharks for letting us share their oceans. Problem is, the ocean has a new apex predator: man. The shark’s purpose of culling fish populations has been assumed by man. So they now turn to seals which are protected by our laws. This is not a “returning to normal” as described by many shark enthusiasts and researchers, but an end result of recent human activity. When shark hunting grounds coincide with copious human activity, such as on Cape Cod or South Africa, this is a huge boone for shark people because it makes it much easier to study and ogle sharks. Here on the Cape, many are worried these attacks will affect the economy which has depended on tourism for over two hundred years. There are propositions to install echo sounding buoys and nets around beaches to drive sharks north, to the seal-rich beaches and bluffs of Maine and New Hampshire which are much less populated. However the shark community has fought any measure to control these predators, as they are simply awestruck by their magnificence and relish the opportunity to study them with the abundance of ports and indeed ocreanographic institutes in and around Cape Cod. The fishermen and women of the cape are descended from whalers, some families have been here for four hundred years. They have been pulling their punches so far, but if this shark threat is not addressed in a “scientific” manor, these animals will be purged from our shores for good. It is not a matter of if, but when. Shark researches need to embrace the fact that these beautiful creatures can have a place in the perennial man made ecosystem we now inhabit (like it or not), but they do not eat plastic and shit topsoil. We have driven them out of their natural habitat and they now prey in areas that can be hazardous to human life and prosperity, just as we did to the wolves by scouring the forest of game. There are no more wolves, and if we do not act rationally about sharks and abandon the pop culture inspired fetishism and idolatry, they will find themselves in the crosshairs of the oceans’s true apex predator.
Seal rich beaches and bluffs of Maine?! That’s a laugh, you guys have roughly 80,000 seals in Chatham alone. Maine’s seal population is way more spread out over a much larger coastline. Also the water is about 5-10* colder on any given day. You got a plan to warm it up? Unfortunately for you I’d say the shark problem is here to stay unless your willing to go out and cull the herd.
Seal relocation perhaps? Shark poaching is here to stay unless either the marine mammal protection act is revised and we get to enjoy your culling of the seals…or a scientific approach is embraced.
Seals have always been shark food, retard.
This is true. I was at a recent CoC meeting where various shark solutions which would result in fewer sharks and more dollars were being discussed quietly. The thing saving the sharks from being quietly slaughtered is that nearly as many tourists come hoping to see a shark during their stay.
The sharks are protected by the law and that is what’s saving them. People are not slaughtering sharks because they don’t want to face huge fines for doing so. It has zero to do with tourism, they are protected by the federal government not Massachusetts. You two know nothing about where you say you live
YES, sharks are in the water..nothing new here but a tragedy just the same as this isn’t Disneyland but it is arguably safer!
Once again the victim DIDN’T have a Whoop strap to stop the bleeding, WASN’T wearing Laird’s anti-white cologne and chose to wear the seal costume knowing Halloween was weeks away!
A tragedy!
Only way I can see these protections being removed from the seal population is to convince the woke greenies that the seals are transphobic
Entire 20th century people weren’t out on surf boards dressed up like seals. Also there weren’t nearly as many people, especially in the water.
sounds like bowling with human pins! Thanks for sharing. lol
great read.
We should be thankful to all Sharks they allow us to enter their ocean. They sometimes just need to send a reminder they are there and to stop treating it like a garbage dump.
I will be thankful for shark fin soup
U either a teen or u have a psych issue because to say that it was not one bit funny…
It will be much less funny when these animals are all dead and gone. You’ll find that without a common sense approach to this threat, Cape Codders will defend their shores with much more than condescending rhetoric…
Cheap talk, kill a couple first and then talk shit. My guess is your buying a sup rather than a harpoon.
FIRST OFF I AM FROM THE CAPE and I’ll tell u what people are not as upset as u.
There are now great white tours for $2500 with that revenue coming in there will be no complaints. The seals and the whites are both protected and I’m sure if it comes down to it it would be the seals that will go before the sharks. They are ruining the beaches and the sharks are there to feed on them. Truthfully I rather see the seals and sharks stay and the people go away. All of these animals are important to ocean and play a part to keeping the healthy. Maybe people like u are the problem and need to go away
Yeah we had ” red rover ” at school, got banned… then ” pumbles ” where two pumblers knelt about 2 metres apart and crew had to run though the gap without being pumbled …always ended in tears for some and much laughs for most!….there was ” brandy “…One tennis ball an oval of participants and throw the ball at someone so hard it brands, once branded you got your turn to reciprocate…hahaha…cheap thrills…kids huh!?…slaps…knucles..pyramids.etc etc…wonder what they play today.? 5 kids sitting around a screen watching a pro ” gamer”…
Should I even bring up the childhood playground game, “smear the queer”?
Ahhhh so that’s what happened to you. The jigsaw is starting to show the full picture.
Pain pong. Ping pong table set up in the garage. Playing games to 5. Loser had to stand shirtless with legs touching the edge of the table. Winner got to whack a ball at the unprotected flesh.
That evolved into games of cricket with the batter in the garage, bowler running in from across the street with the half-taped tennis ball. The aim of the batter was defence. The aim of the bowler was to get the ball to appear to be going wide, but to swing back and zero in on the batter’s nuts.
And then that evolved into the really grown up version of brandy that was going down the local high school’s cricket nets and trying to land as many bruises as you could on your mate’s thighs. We figured it was safe enough as it was only a half pitch of synthetic turfed concrete. It was all well and good until my mate hit the 20cm rip in the synthetic turf about 1m onto the pitch and the ball reared up and skimmed off the top of my head. Two inches lower and I would have been voting for the LNP.
Kill em all….people that is.
“think rich cunts festooned in striped tees riding in yachts etc.” D.R.
“some surfers switched to stand-up paddle boards”
It’ll be eaten alive for me.
Where are they? What are they doing right now? They got the money, now they have to clean it.