Four surfers hit and killed by Great White sharks in South Australia in a year and a half.
The hard-core South Australian surf town of Streaky Bay, staring straight into the Great Australian Bite and wearing every Southern Ocean swell, is is mourning tonight after one if its sons was killed by a Great White while surfing at Granites thirty clicks west of town.
The surfer, twenty-eight, born and bred Streaky Bay boy now living in Port Lincoln, had caught and ridden a wave to the inside where he was attacked by the Great White.
His surfboard was found seven hundred metres out to sea with the familiar half a legrope and large circumference bite mark.
Ten hours earlier, local fisherman and surfer Jeff Schmucker had posted a warning for surfers to stay away from Granites after one mate’s cray pots had been grabbed by a frenzying Great White and another mate, fishing for whiting, had been stunned by a sixteen-foot Great White attacking the little fish in a couple of feet of water.
“Heads up to all the surfers at Granites today. There is a large aggressive Great White very close to Granites/Indicators.”
Last October, 55-year-old Tod Gendle was hit, killed and disappeared by a fifteen-foot Great White while surfing among a crowd of a dozen surfers at Granites.
The Great White left only Genle’s board and the stub of his legrope.
Two months later, teenager Khai Cowley was killed by a Great White while surfing at Ethels on the state’s Yorke Peninsula, thirty two nautical miles across the Spencer Gulf.
Earlier in the year, and just a hundred clicks south, local school teacher Simon Baccanello was killed by a Great White while surfing at Walkers Rocks in Elliston. A brave soul, Baccanello warned others to split as the shark started swimming towards him telling terrified kids in the lineup, “Don’t worry, get yourself to shore”.
A local expert, who keeps his name outta these things ’cause he doesn’t need the headache of city lefties hectoring him about these majestic fish, told me last year that this was only the beginning.
He pointed to the end of the large mesh gill net fishery, closed for fifteen years, and the protection of the Great White as the culprits.
“It got worse because we stopped killing ’em,” he told me tonight. “I was catching two a trip in the gill nets and then, fifteen years ago, stopped using the gill nets and the numbers got out of control. I had a bad feeling about this. I rang another mate and he had just caught and killed one on his longline, an incidental catch. They’re aggressive and it’s a recipe for disaster.”
He said if people want to retrieve the body of the local kid, “there’s fuck all you can do. If you want him, you gotta catch the shark. It would give people around here some closure.”
A pause and an ironic laugh.
“Good old West Coast, eh.”
