“I don't think anybody else needs to see it other than the coroner.”
Two days after Steven Payne was disappeared by a Great White shark in chest-deep water in front of his girlfriend, police have revealed a drone operator captured the attack.
Payne, a thirty-seven-year-old surfer from Melbourne, was five weeks into a six-month vacay around Australia with his girl and dog when he was hit by the Great White at Wharton Beach, eighty clicks east of Esperance, around midday on Monday.
In 2020, local surfer Andrew Sharpe was disappeared by a “monster” Great White, a day when witnesses reported the water turning red one kilometre away.
That attack came three years after teenager surfer Laticia Brouwers died in front of her family after being hit by a Great White in 2017, where Sean Pollard had an arm and another hand bitten off by a Great White in 2014 and a few clicks away from where diver Gary Johnson was killed by a White, also in 2020.
Esperance police Senior Sergeant Chris Taylor called off the search for Payne after viewing drone footage of the attack.
“I don’t think there’s much point in utilising all the resources that we have at the moment too much longer,” Taylor said. “It (the drone footage) shows a lot of blood, the shark and some other things in there I don’t particularly want to go into and I don’t think anybody else needs to see other than maybe the coroner and some other experts who will determine the type of shark and size.”
After the fatal attack, Esperance shire prez Ron Chambers told the national broadcaster that Great Whites are “a wild animal that’s out in the ocean…We have no control over their movements or where they can or can’t go, so there is a risk when you do go into the water.”
He added,
“We’ve got absolutely fantastic beaches and we get a lot of people down here that visit them,” but said visitors needed to “manage that risk (of Great White attack) as much as possible.”