“Unbelievable scenes” Surfers warned to stay away from world-famous Snapper Rocks due to frenzying sharks 

"Lineup is EMPTY! First time EVER!"

In what is either tremendously exciting or terribly worrying news, depending on whether or not you like to actually enter the ocean, packs of marauding sharks have forced surfers to stay out of the water at world-famous Snapper Rocks. 

As reported by para-reporter Nicka35, 

In unbelievable scenes schools of big sharks have turned up snapper rocks chasing bait balls on the right now! Gold Coast surfing core lords on the scene to get the shot!

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Responses BTL were mostly upbeat, healthy ocean etc, and with humourous cameos by Matt Wilko and trainer to the stars John Gannon.

Wilko wrote, “But do they have their names on the surf club stairs?

And while getting hit by a shark surfing on the Gold Coast used to be the most abstract of concepts – until 2020 no surfer had ever been killed by a shark there despite wall-to-wall crowds at every hint of a wave along its thirty clicks – that changed when local realtor Nick Slater was a hit by a Great White at Snapper.

Nick had just finished work for the day, was shredding the little warm-water runners from Snapper through to Rainbow on his Morning of the Earth twin when he was hit again and again by a fifteen-foot Great White.

The first fatal hit on a Gold Coast beach since shark nets were installed more than sixty years earlier.  

As Longtom (RIP) wrote at the time, 

“Shallow water, it would have been waist deep on the tide. Clear water. Can’t pin mistaken identity on the shark. It must have come in like a Polaris missile from the amount of water it displaced. There was no delicacy in the attack. The footage shows clubbie skis, three or four of them heading his way, to the rescue, I thought. But they didn’t respond. Others seemed to not notice, or scatter. Despite the crowd, an utterly lonely way to die.”