Many of you will have stories of creatures you have encountered in the ocean. Here are a few of mine.
My oldest memory of a significant shark encounter was at the Bay of Islands 60 odd years ago. My mum and I were swimming 50 metres off the beach. I was getting cold so I went in. Suddenly I saw a large fin and tail tip skimming the surface 20 metres from me and between my mum and the beach. As calmly as I could I called out, “Mum, you had better come in. There’s a shark.” “Ross, stop crying wolf,” she shouted laughing. Then she saw it! But what to do? Swimming towards the beach meant swimming towards the shark. To her credit she didn’t panic and the shark swam slowly past her and out to sea. I thought at the time it could have been giving her a scare to avenge the mako shark that my mother had hooked the week before while game fishing and which had died after struggling on the line for 45 minutes – and they call game fishing a sport!
Most sharks will swim away when they sense or see humans and I am sure we would think twice about plunging into the briny if we knew how many sharks were within 100 metres of us. You often don’t see them but they see you. But the likelihood of being killed by a shark is tiny – only around 10 fatalities are recorded annually worldwide. When you compare that with the 100 million sharks that humans kill every year, I wouldn’t blame the sharks if they evened it up a bit and munched a few more of us – but not me of course. I once saw a photo, taken from a plane, of dozens of happy summertime swimmers at Matarangi Beach, oblivious to the many sharks within a few metres of them. Obviously, hairy white human arms and legs aren’t as inviting as a juicy kahawai or kingfish.
Another interesting shark encounter happened near the forbidden island of Niihau in Hawaii. A boat captain friend of mine had invited me on a fishing/surfing expedition off its coast, which was fine as long as we didn’t land, a privilege only available to native Hawaiians. He had told me many stories of his shark encounters in the Islands and had introduced me to his friend Mikey who had lost a hand to a hungry tiger shark while bodyboarding, and so had the same appendage as Captain Hook attached to his left forearm, which must have been pretty handy – excuse the pun. So when, on spotting a monk seal swimming near the rocks, Captain Ralph suggested we dive with it, I was slightly reticent as you can imagine. However after being assured that it was reasonably safe and I could borrow a spear gun just in case, I gingerly followed him into the water. We swam back-to-back as a safety measure and watched transfixed for several moments as a mother seal and her tiny pup frolicked around the colourful coral heads. What a beautiful sight. Suddenly, a long grey shape materialised on our edge of vision and then turned and raced straight towards us. It was a medium-sized shark about two metres long. As instructed, I held the speargun at arm’s length and fended it off when it reached us. It sped back to the edge of vision and then turned and came again. It repeated this five or six times while we were watching the seals, until it eventually found us to be either too boring to play with or too well-protected to eat and swam off.
Many people say that you won’t see the shark that bites you before it does, which made me feel slightly better about this encounter. However, the following week my comfort levels took a dive again. I had been surfing alone on a tiny wave 100 or so metres from the shore on the island of Kauai. It was the only wave breaking in the small swell. On reaching the beach again, I was told that earlier that day another surfer had had a huge chunk bitten out of his board in the chest-deep water. His friend had stayed with him and helped him regain terra firma. Luckily the shark’s bite had missed his leg by inches. A few years later a young female surfer lost her arm to a shark in the same area. Incredibly she still competes at a high level in surfing competitions. It seems that some people only need one arm to surf well but unfortunately many of us struggle to surf with two. To be continued …
-Words by Ross Liggins
