Shark horror

From the Weekend Australian, 30/9/2000
By Matthew Spencer and Terry Plane

© The Australian

"We didn't read the signs, and there were signs." Local Cactus Beach surfer Paul Gravelle was speaking less than a week after 2 surfers had been taken by white pointer sharks in a period of just 24 hours and 250 km apart.
Gravelle said a huge pod of porpoises swept into the bay at Cactus Beach last Saturday and stuck close by the surfers at the famed Caves reef break. "They were tight, they were really tightly wedged in and they just hung there and hung there and hung there", he said. "A guy from the beach paddled out and said there was a big fin out the back." Earlier that day Gravelle, who has been making surfboards at Penong, 20 km north of Cactus, since 1976, noticed a big seal that also clung close to the surfers at Caves. In the evening a girl walking on the shore west of Cactus saw a pod of porpoises, jammed together right in close to the beach. "That's an indication there's a pointer, the porpoises definitely knew a pointer was around", Gravelle said. A white pointer estimated at five metres long struck next morning, taking a lone surfer from the Cactus reef break, just east of Caves. Cameron Bayes, 25, was on honeymoon from NZ with his wife when he carried his board from the camping ground in the sandhill above Cactus Beach and into the surf, about 6.30 on Sunday morning.
The great white attacked an hour later, taking Bayes just 50 m offshore in a circular motion before releasing him and coming again, thrashing with awesome power before submerging with board and rider. On the beach, horrified witnesses saw the swell turn red before the shark surfaced about 500 m away and spat out a piece of surfboard.

1. Caves 2. Castles 3. Cactus 1. Cunns 5. Backdoors 6. Witzigs X. Where attack occurred

Next day, almost unbelievably, another surfer was taken, on a reef break in Anxious Bay, 250 km south-east of Cactus. Jevan Wright, a 17-year-old from Port Lincoln, was surfing with his girlfriend's father, Graham Chapman, 40, and 25-year-old West Australian Craig Pringle, at Black's Beach near Elliston.The young surfer was paddling in to shore when Pringle and Chapman saw fins and thrashing, but by the time they got to the scene only pieces of the surfboard remained. Pringle believed the shark was a four-metre white pointer. Marine scientists have ruled out the possibility of the same shark being responsible for both attacks, saying great whites travel only 75 km a day. Another surfer, who moved to Cactus from Adelaide 30 years ago and requested respect for the anonymity of his remote lifestyle, said the adrenalin rush at Caves when it was really pumping was what kept surfers coming back, despite shark attacks. "I think pleasure overrules pain, if you can catch that drift", the surfer said, "This place is magic when it's barrelling and you're compressed inside - it gives you a high, you expect to see angels." But he said Bayes's death had cut deeply in the Cactus surfing community, overshadowing even the pleasure principle. "I just went to pieces the other day, it really shocked me, I had tears running down my face", he said. "I've no intention of going in the water at all, it's just odd weather, it's eerie." The man claimed surfers developed an ability to sense sharks in the water, but said Mr Bayes may have not understood the feeling. "You can feel the vibe when there's sharks around; that tingly feeling like when you front up to a wild dog. Other surfers at Cactus last weekend also commented on the "eerie" weather, claiming the misty conditions carried "the whiff of shark". "It did have that look about it", says local surfer Andy McBain. "Some day you can just get out there and smell it." Cactus locals have long known that white pointers were common - there were two in Ceduna Bay all this week - but they had never known of a surfer being taken in the water.

In 1978 a local surfer needed 180 stitches after an attack by a great white, and in 1975 local boy Wade Shippard bled to death on the way to hospital after a pointer took one of his legs off while he was swimming. Now it's different: Two surfers ripped from their boards and other members of the surfing subculture have to reassess their utopia.
"The first time I heard of Cactus Beach was in South Africa in the late 60s", says Gravelle, "and it was renowned as the home of the white pointer even then. We've always been under the impression that sharks are attacking the board and not the surfer; we've now got to reconsider." Surfers at Cactus are drawn to three unique reef break - Cactus, Castles and Caves - on the remote coast of the Great Australian Bight, 70 km west of Ceduna. The swells rise out of the deep Southern Ocean and the waves are shaped by reefs off the beach, like Pipeline and similar breaks in Hawaii. Born in Durban, South Africa, Gravelle first surfed Cactus in 1974 and found it comparable to the famous break at Jeffrey's Bay, west of Port Elizabeth. "When Caves is classic, there's only half a dozen places in the world on par", says Gravelle. "Pipeline and Jeffrey's Bay when it's perfect, are in the same category." The waves aren't big - about 2.5 m, but they pack punch. "We've got more power, because we come out of the raw ocean", he says,"with offshore winds it's as good as anywhere, really."
The road to Cactus is 20 km of white lime dirt from Penong, on the Eyre Highway, 900 km west of Adelaide by road and 200 km east of the head of the bight. Each year, about 3000 people come to the camp in the scrubby sandhill that separates the tidal salt lakes from the roaring ocean, drawn by the isolation, the beauty and the surf.
Only one family remained in the camp yesterday, an no one was going near the water as communities along South Australia's west coast absorbed the loss of the surfers. "It appears to be the main area", says Barry Bruce, a research scientist at CSIRO in Hobart specialising in white pointers. He's conducting the first serious study into the great shark's physiology, movements, feeding and breeding habits. "If we can better understand where sharks go and why, we might better inform people about the risk of going in the water", says Bruce. He says he has seen 5m white pointers in water so shallow "we were worried about taking our 5 m runabout in there." He believes that where sharks go is determined by what they're feeding on. By tagging and tracking a white pointer for several months earlier this year he determined it swam as deep as 94m, but spent most of its time in less than 20 m of water, including 10 per cent of the time on the surface.
"They're a highly mobile shark," he says. "It's almost impossible to catch a shark responsible for an attack." There are about 50 surfers living in the Cactus area, and they plan to gather in the next few weeks to discuss the shark attacks. On their agenda will be the placement of a stainless steel barrier to make the beach safe from sharks. They prefer that to shark nets because they believe it's less likely to harm marine life. The group will also discuss other issues, including a theory that deep sea fishing in the bight and around Port Lincoln may have reduced white pointers natural food sources, driving them into shallow water.
Cactus surfer Brad Feuerriegel says a management plan had to be developed to prevent fishing near the reef breaks in an effort to rid the area of the attraction of bait and fish guts. A hot topic in Penong this week was whether shark fishermen should hunt white pointers in the hope of killing the killers, despite official reminders of orders protecting the monsters.
"I believe this shark could make Cactus part of his run", says Feuerriegel, a sentiment echoed by Gravelle. Others in Penong disagreed, saying the shark was only doing what came naturally. "I would be a lot more relaxed in my mind if we went out and killed this one, because it's a man-eater," says Gravelle.
Bruce argues the sharks' case by saying "sharks play a really important role in the eco system" by maintaining the health of species below them. "They are swimming lions; they pick off the slow and the sick of species such as seals and dolphins - only the fit survive."

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