“They Will Attack in One Foot of Water” Great White shark myths exploded 

"The amount of Great Whites is incredible. People are gonna hide from it and say it's not. It is."

The Newcastle-based shark fisherman Joel Nancarrow, whom you’ve come to know and possibly love over the past six months on these pages, just dropped a vid that explains more about Great White behaviour than the previous thirty years of of expert papers.

Standing ankle-deep on a Newy beach, a bait of mullet wrapped around his wrist, Nancarrow watches as a Great White shark arch its back clear out of the water to grab it. 

On his social media pages, he posts footage that marine authorities would prefer stayed private: Great Whites feeding in crystal-clear water, in broad daylight, metres from crowded beaches near Redhead and Blacksmiths.

“The amount of Great Whites is incredible,” he says. “People are gonna hide from it and say it’s not. It is.”

His central, disquieting argument is this: almost everything the public has been told about Great White shark behaviour is wrong. Distance from shore is irrelevant. Water clarity is irrelevant. Time of day is largely irrelevant.

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“All the stuff that they tell you about sharks goes out the window when it comes to these guys,” he says.

He is particularly scathing about Shark Smart, the government-backed public education program.

“Shark Smart is dangerous,” he says flatly. “All the crap Shark Smart go on with is gonna get – has and is gonna get – more people killed. They’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. They’re reading books.”

The myths he wants demolished are specific.

When a swimmer is taken close to shore, the immediate public question is always: how far out was she?

Nancarrow calls that the wrong question entirely.

“A lot of people say, how far out to shore was the lady swimming? That means nothing. White sharks will come in incredibly close.”

His footage, shot at local beaches, shows a Great White in water so shallow its back breaks the surface.

“That’s ankle-deep water,” he says. “And it’s got its back out to grab hold of that bait.”

He has also observed a consistent behavioural pattern that he says has predictive value.

“On days like that, when the wind is westerly and it’s dead flat, they will always sit behind the furthest wave out, doesn’t matter whether it’s a foot off shore or 300 feet. That’s where they’ll be.”

Flat, calm conditions, in other words, are not the benign invitation to swim that most people treat them as. They are, by Nancarrow’s reckoning, a warning.

“Whenever it’s flat and smooth, you’re at a greater risk of Great White shark attack, and that is a guarantee.”

The dirty-water myth irritates him particularly.

Conventional wisdom holds that murky, churned-up water is the danger zone, the terrain where a shark might mistake a swimmer for a seal.

“Rain, dirty water, that’s all bullshit with these,” he says. “These things are in crystal-clear waters. They’ll be in a foot of water. They’ll feed aggressively any time of the day.”

There is one behavioural observation Nancarrow offers that is, if anything, more unsettling than the rest. Great whites, he says, don’t typically kill on first contact.

“As you watch, they grab and swim before they eat. That’s why a lot of people get let go.”

He pauses.

“Even this one. That’s a big fish, doesn’t eat it straight away. They always swim with it a bit before they’ll eat it.”

He is also tracking the spread of tiger sharks along the NSW coast, which he describes as “a bit concerning,” though he adds with dark pragmatism: “We can actually get rid of them, so that’ll be right.”

Nancarrow is not, by his own account, a fear-monger.

He says he usually leaves the Great White sharks alone, that he doesn’t target them, that the footage accumulates almost incidentally while he’s “mucking around with the camera.”

But he is adamant that silence is no longer responsible.

“It is at that time now,” he says. “People need to know the truth.”

“If you want to listen, you listen. If you don’t, you don’t. But those that need to will.”