"The exact beaches no longer matter. They are on them all and the whole 'breeding ground' argument has become a joke."
A shark fisherman has prodded what might be called the Great White Industrial Complex, that group of scientists, researchers and so on, either ignorant or wilfully blind at the wild ol’ increase in Great White numbers in Australia, with a post claiming numbers have become so inflated you can now wander along a beach and catch ’em at will, pretty much.
Joel Nancarrow, a bit of an internet sensation who famously sailed into Sydney Harbour at the height of last summer’s run of bull shark attacks and pulled a half-ton beast just off a popular beach, writes:
White shark posts really bring out the page lurkers that are waiting for their opportunity to pounce. The law states, you can not deliberately target great white sharks!!!!!!
As it stands; They are so incredibly rare and endangered that targeting them would take an incredible skill set and be almost impossible along the NSW coast line.
We definitely do not enjoy catching them, they fight like they know they are protected, once on the sand, they lay there and make us do all the work to get them back in the water and they tend to get a bit “bitey” while removing the hook.
I never used to post white shark photos, but that also fits into the “low numbers” thing they try to push.
The fact that they are so “RARE” makes us feel like people also deserve the chance to see these things when they are accidentally caught, also hopefully the regular people on here read between the lines on this one and see how much of a piss take this whole scenario is.
They are in numbers so high that we rarely use hooks anymore on the beaches and just run cameras until we find a shark that we want to target.
The exact beaches no longer matter, they are on them all and the whole “breeding ground ” argument has become a joke.
Let’s hope these things are fair game at one stage soon so we can have some fun with them.
As he pointed out a few months back, “The amount of Great Whites is incredible. 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.
“On days 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.”