Shark Bait

Posted on April 10, 2007 @ 4:46 PM

"How much longer are you thinking of staying out here?” the young pro asked me after about ten minutes. Literally only ten. He’d had a couple of waves. I’d had a couple. We’d each sat out there alone for a few moments, me with my feet up on my board, scanning the brown water around me, trying not to think about what I knew was there. Then he’d paddled back out and asked me that.

It was a great little wave, a proper pointbreak with a sketchy suck-out at take-off followed by a reeling funnel you had to tuck into just to stay off the rocks. It was close to being too small, but great for photos, which is what we were there for. Pros need photos, and I’d been tagging along with this guy for the last couple of days sampling his local waves while our photographer snapped away for the mag.

The thing is, we were in South Africa, and he happened to live on a stretch of coast notorious for shark attacks. His main local break seems to pop up regularly on the news for all the wrong reasons, and that’s the wave in the middle of town, the city centre of his surfing territory. This wave was way out in the wilds.

It had been raining a lot, so the rivermouth adjacent to the point was swollen with floodwater, which was so brown that even if I had let my feet dangle, I couldn’t have seen beyond my knees. There was debris in the water – sticks, logs, you could even smell it. At one point I thought I saw a bloated animal slide out in the river current.

I’d been pretty freaked by the shark scene since we got there, but had developed some simple logic to overcome my fear. The way I saw it, this guy had been surfing here his whole life. And he’d obviously surfed a lot – he must have, to get good enough to make the tour. So how could I turn up at his home town and refuse to surf with him because I didn’t want to get eaten? Who am I to decide his place is too dangerous? And besides, the waves were pretty sick. And when in Rome …

So until he asked me that question – a ridiculous thing to ask when you’ve only just got in the water and it’s barrelling down the point – it hadn’t occurred to me that this guy might be scared shitless. I was only calm because I thought he was calm.

“Are you worried about sharks?” I asked him.

“Yeah. I reckon we should get out,” he replied.

That was all I needed, all either of us needed. We couldn’t paddle fast enough. I tried not to splash, tried to ignore how far away the shore looked, and tried not to imagine what was listening to our sudden movements underwater. I think we both scrambled onto the boulders – a beeline up onto dry land.

I’m not sure what was going through his head when he suggested surfing there in the first place. I’ve often wondered. Was it pressure to get photos? Was it machismo? Or was it just a normal day at the office for him, interrupted when his honed sixth sense picked up some incremental increase in danger? But more often I worry about what was going through my head. How could I have followed him out there? Any fool could see that it ticked ALL the boxes required if you want to get eaten by a shark. It was a place where people get eaten, on a day when people are most likely to be eaten.

It bothers me that I’d been so frenzied for a surf that I was prepared to leave good sense on the rocks. The waves weren’t that good. And it wasn’t hardcore, or brave or cool. It was really stupid. By far the stupidest surf I’ve ever had.

I have a lot of respect for surfers in those parts of the world. Surfers in places like Cape Town, the subject of Craig Jarvis’ story, must seriously weigh up the odds every time they paddle out. Cape Town’s surf population is burgeoning, and so is its great white population. The surfers have few defences except to keep watch, use their brains and get out of the buffet zone when The Man arrives.

And yet we’re stepping into his paella every time any of us surfs, pretty much anywhere in the world. In fact, the whole thing’s a risk – the sharks, the reef, the waves, the currents. We play in nature, but nature doesn’t give a damn about us, which only seems to make it more compelling. We push off from our solid ground, pushing our own tiny limits, learning gradually just how far not to go. And inevitably we form a deepening bond with wilderness and an awareness that we’re never separate from it, that we are nature, so we need to show it serious respect.

Which might explain why, as a loose group, we surfers are disproportionately active in trying to protect our natural environment. Our first ever Green Wave Awards made it clear just how much passion there is out there in the surfing world. In the grand scheme of things we’re all shark bait, but one thing became clear when we judged the awards, there are heroes among us. – ADR

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