"We need to come to terms with the fact that this is an apex, ambush, opportunistic predator and it is a very dangerous animal."
The middle-aged surfer Brad Ross, whose life was briefly threatened by the arrival of a feisty Great White shark measuring roughly fifteen feet three days ago, has kept a real low profile since the attack.
Instead it’s been left to his pal Kane Douglas to do the media rounds to explain that, yeah, Brad is quietly processing the attack back at home with his fam, all of whom appear to be surfers, but a little sad his fav shooter is busted.
“It was such a big shark, when you see the footage of it, it’s like something you’d see in South Australia,” Douglas told the state broadcaster.
Two hours after the attack, a five-metre Great White set off one of the non-lethal SMART (Shark-Management-Alert-in-Real-Time) drum lines nearby, which consist of an anchor, two buoys, a baited hook, and a satellite-linked GPS communications unit with a triggering magnet, dragging the equipment almost a mile away from where it was attached to the seabed.
The baited hook was removed and the Great White taken a click offshore and released.
The Lennox Head surf journalist Steve Shearer, better known as Longtom and whose literary obituary you can read here, was the voice of reason in a story by the left-tilting state broadcaster on the spike in Great White encounters on the North Coast.
I know the science is not completely settled on that, but then we are starting to see more and more of these interactions, encounters and, unfortunately, attacks,” Longtom said.
The pendulum of public opinion went too far when Jaws came out as seeing sharks as these blood thirsty predators, but then it probably swung too far the other way, saying that they are harmless and they are not interested in us. We do need to come to terms with the fact that this is an apex, ambush, opportunistic predator and it is a very dangerous animal and we need to be aware of that.”
And from Greg Webber, shaper to the stars, once hopeful of building game-changing wavepools etc,