"From Fowler’s Bay to Port Lincoln it’s the worst place in the world to go surfing. And it’s getting worse.”
For the past fifteen years the Streaky Bay fisherman and surfer Jeff Schmucker has been trying to get a pretty simple message across – the population of Great Whites on South Australia’s west coast has blown out and there’ll come a point in the real near future when surfing will become unsustainable for anyone who isn’t thrilled with the idea of being disappeared by a Great White.
Well, that time is now.
After Streaky Bay local Lance Appleby was killed by a Great White shark, the fourth fatal attack on a surfer by a White in South Australia in less than two years, Schmucker told the Australian Associated Press the population of Great White sharks had “exploded” to such an extent surfing there was now a risk no one should take unless you had a jetski patrolling alongside.
What happened?
In 1999, Australia declared the Great White “vulnerable”and made it illegal to hunt or harass the fish
Since then,
RIP surfers Peter Edmonds, Tadashi Nakahara, Rob Pedretti, Mani Hart-Deville, Mark Sanguinetti, Tim Thompson, Nick Slater, Cameron Bayes, Jean Wright, Nick Peterson, Simon Baccanello, Todd Gendle, Khai Cowley, Lance Appleby, Brad Smith, Nick Edwards, Kyle Burden, Ben Linden, Chris Boy, Ben Gerring, Laeticia Brouwer and Andrew Sharpe.
I got a call from Schmucker yesterday ‘cause he wanted to get it out there that surfing on the South Australian west coast was now “unsustainable. It’s fucking over,” he told me.
I’d written a similar piece shortly after the attack but Schmucker would be real grateful if I could get it out there that, if you want to surf on South Australia’s west coast, your odds of being killed are going to be dramatically shortened.
Schmucker knows these waters.
He first started fishing out of Streaky Bay with his Daddy back in the early seventies when he was eight. He knew how to gut a shark by the time he was nine and before he was in double figures he was sitting on the stern of the family trawler pulling in bronze whalers.
He adores his coastline, calls it one of the most unique in the world with its six estuaries, dodge tides, shallow water sea grasses, its wild offshore fishing. He says pole-fishing for tuna in the raw as hell Great Australian Bight is “one of the most electrifying methods for excitement and action.”
Schmucker says the latest attack has left Streaky Bay even more traumatised than usual.
“The kids are reeling, there’s all sorts of emotional stuff going on. Everyone’s fucking upset and not sleeping. And fair enough. I didn’t sleep for the first few days. I was waking up in the night with the logistics of it, the reality of it. It’s fucking brutal. The kids who were there are thinking of it. They can see the blood splashing in the water. It’s firmly in their minds.”
He says every time there’s a new shark attack he gets a text from Jevan Wright’s mum, Katrina. Jevan was seventeen when he was killed by a Great White at Blacks, there on the Eyre Peninsula.
“I lay awake at night wondering whether his bones are still inside the shark and where is the shark,” Katrina told the Port Lincoln Times in 2001. “If only we could get that shark and get the body. It sounds gross, but it’s no more gross than getting than getting a body out of a wrecked car.”
The day before Jevan was killed, New Zealander Cameron Bayes was dragged off his board and killed by a Great White at Cactus, a couple of hundred k’s away along the same coast.
“And she tells me, ‘Jeff you got do something about it.’ It’s fucked. It’s still raw.”
Schmucker says, “I don’t want people to be hurt. It’s not the people who are eaten, they’re gone, it’s the impact on the communities in the surfing world. It really hits people hard.”
Still, surfers continue to roll the dice. A few days ago, surfers were chased out of the water by a Great White at Caves, a surf spot a couple of hundred k’s west of Streaky Bay.
“These people think they can surf Cactus with twenty people and be safe. They’re fucking dreaming. From Fowler’s Bay to Port Lincoln it’s the worst place in the world to go surfing. And it’s getting worse.”
Schmucker says he doesn’t want to be the boy that cried wolf, but at the same time he’s a realist. He hears what the government, what surf lifesaving has to say, that it’s all anecdotal, no hard evidence, but he has almost fifty years in the water down there, in the surf and on boats.
If you didn’t know, all longline and gill net commercial fishermen have had a HD camera on their boats for the last fifteen years.
“And it’s all kept on a hard drive. Fifteen years of data,” says Schmucker. “Every time there’s an interaction with a threatened species you have to put it in the log book. All that data is there and that data will be conclusive in the growth of the (Great White) population, all these Whites from three footers to twenty footers entailed in the fishing gear.”
He says the roll call of surfers dying is hard to take.
“I feel a little responsible for surfing in South Australia. If I don’t say what I think, there’s going to be so much tragedy in people’s lives. In the late nineties, we were down to seeing one or two Pointers a year.”
So, what can you do about it?
“Two things. Section 79 of the Fisheries Act allows for the destruction of a shark that has killed someone. If it was the same shark, and it’s a possibility, that ate Todd last year and got Lance this year, and they’ve got both boards so they get the DNA, the shark needs to be killed on the same day. You need to kill a rogue shark. Second, look into monitoring all sharks over ten foot. The little ones are eating fish. Tagging is easy. Maneaters come to you. But you gotta burley up. Give us a sea lion, shoot one of em between the eyes or electrocute it, and you’ll have more Pointers than you can point a stick at.”
“Listen,” says, Schmucker,
“This about saving lives, saving people from lifetime traumatic experiences. You don’t go to a game park and get out of the car and walk around. People put the blinkers on with surfing. I was addicted to surfing like no other cunt on the planet, surfing from when the surf came up to when it went down. But if you’re surfing here on the Eyre Peninsula, be a fucking realist. You shouldn’t be going in the water until there’s some strong mitigation in place.”
