Surfers like me can’t get spooked by sharks. Then the fear wins

My wife issued a stern warning over the phone yesterday morning. “Don’t go surfing!” She was in Melbourne, watching the tennis, I was back in Sydney doing the day care drop-off for our three-year-old son – a routine I typically follow with a surf in the eastern beaches. But what to do in the wake of four shark attacks?

At Tamarama, there was one person out, a lifeguard doing his board training routine. Typically, I look for the lonelier line-ups – more waves for me – but today I wasn’t game. Another local surfer pulled up and flicked a sharp-toothed comment out the window.

“Get out there with the bull sharks!” he jibed. It was a kind of gallows humour, trying to make light of a situation where a sense of fear had consumed a typically carefree morning ritual.

Staring pensively at the water, we tossed around a couple of views. There is certainly some frustration with a scientific community that often rejects any opinion held by surfers or fishermen about the growing number of sharks in the water. It’s not that surfers are dismissive of the empirical requirements of science, it’s just that our primary agenda is self-preservation.

At present, the slow march of science is not working to stop the attacks. Later, a journalist friend sent me a report stipulating that bull sharks liked it when the water was more than 20 degrees and there had been 40 millimetres of rain. Maybe the science just isn’t reaching the public.

Still, at Tamarama we discussed the use of drones to provide real-time warnings about sharks. Drones in the air from dawn until evening, equipped with technology to sound alarms for surfers and swimmers.

In Cape Town, South Africa a co-funded program (council, donations and research partners) employs full-time shark-spotters. Spotters use binoculars and drones to relay sightings straight to the sand below.

The Cape Town program also features a sophisticated flag system, with different coloured flags used to indicate recent sightings and visibility conditions. Supercharged by modern technology, the model now includes automated beach signs and mobile alerts. The data accumulated by spotters is passed on to assist scientists with their research.

In NSW, government-funded drone surveillance has been trialled in conjunction with the surf life saving clubs, but the process is ad hoc and inconsistent at best. At the eastern beaches, surfers are more likely to take their cues from the resident maverick who runs his own drone-shark app. Meanwhile, South Africa seems to be way ahead of the game.

Eventually, I drove to Bondi and surveyed the scene from the beachside car park. A dozen or so surfers were clustered on one sandbank where fun-looking waves broke left and right. There were other peaks on the beach, but it was clear everyone was sticking together, convinced their collective mass offered protection from predators. Maybe there’s no science to support this, but it’s certainly how human nature works. The water was still opaque from the rain, but the sun was out, lending its enchantment to the playful beach setting.

Should I surf? Would the head noise be too much when the fear crept in? Was it a diabolically selfish move as a father with a young son? All this goes through your mind.

Instinct took over and I waxed up and paddled out. If I didn’t, maybe I wouldn’t for weeks. In the line-up, the mood was tense above the murky water; looking into the eyes of other surfers, you knew what they were thinking or trying not to think about.

“You’ve got to surf,” insisted one mate, who explained he’d spent a lifetime at far sharkier spots than Bondi. This was not a macabre thrill, no Russian roulette with the shark – it was more a case of not allowing the fear to win.

Surfers will always paddle out; the promise of a few waves is a pleasure too good to give up entirely. Generally, we make our own risk assessments about the conditions and what might lurk beneath, but we’d always like to feel safer. In a land girt by sea that trades heavily on the ideal of the sun-bronzed surfer – both culturally and commercially – is that too much to ask?

Luke Kennedy is the editor-in-chief of Tracks Media.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.