Shark Attacks

It's funny how people believe bad things won't happen to them. And my grandfather thinks he is always right. This time he was.
 On Monday I took my visiting grandparents to Fishoek beach to have coffee as the coffee shop is right on the beach. It has a beautiful view and no stairs for my almost 80-year-old-gran to mount. So while looking at the blustery sea, my grandfather mentions the shark attack a few years ago and the conversation turns to shark nets. I replied that we can't have shark nets here and Fishoek is safe - only one shark attack ever. I also explained that shark spotters are paid to stand on the mountains overlooking the bay and a siren sounds when the sharks come too close to swimmers. A flag system is used to warn about the danger of sharks or low visibility. I couldn't say then which flag meant what. But I argued with my grandfather that shark attacks were not a threat.

The very next day a Zimbabwean man was swimming at Fishoek beach in chest-high in water and was eaten by a shark. Eyewitnesses say the shark took a bite, swam away, and then turned around and swallowed him whole. It happened quickly with blood and a fin visible to most.

The 37 year old victim's wife was on the beach.
1) My immediate thought was that I wished I had been there and that I had missed the drama on Fishoek by a day. Then I felt like a blood-hungry journalist who didn't care that this was more than story. It was a tragedy. A youngish man enjoying a holiday swim in the middle of summer got eaten while his wife sat on the beach. It was almost movie-like.

2) The day after the attack was a perfect-windless summer day. Usually summer days are windy and unpleasant by the afternoon. But one day after the tragedy it was if the sea had been calmed in some sacifice to  angry gods.

Due to the heat and flat beauty of a calm sea, my siblings and I wanted to swim. We drove above the beaches on Boyes drive and looked down longingly at the clean crisp ocean devoid of people. From the mountain, we could see perfect surfing waves and blue sea glistening in the hot sun. We moaned that we couldn't swim. The beaches were closed while authorities searched for the body of the shark attack. How selfish is human behavior? It is only fitting that we empty the beaches as some kind of mourning for a life so suddenly taken on a summer holiday day. Not to mention that finding the body was important. Yet we just thought about how we couldn't swim that day. His body has not been found a week later.

3) Four days after the attack my younger brother and our British visitor went surfing, unafraid of the shark that had eaten someone a few days before about ten kilometres away. If it takes four days to depersonalise the danger of the ocean, what does it take to keep people aware of the danger of HIV /AIDS and get them wearing a condom consistently? This is a valid question in South Africa where more than 5 million people are HIV positive? We think we are immortal or that we will all live till 80.

4) The day after the attack my hairdresser told us how he had learnt about it through twitter. One of the clients in the salon had a family member on the beach who twittered about it and soon the whole salon knew before radio news told them. All the news did was repeat what they knew. When is South African radio news  going to add more to what citizen journalists already know?

Somebody died swimming. There are questions to answer. These are some of them:
Is shark cage diving contributing to the increase of shark attacks?
Do sharks now associate the smell of humans with food given to them when humans enter their undersea world?
Are sharks coming in looking for food because the seas are over-fished?
Are the shark spotters, that are funded by government and business, doing their job? If the shark sirens and flags are not intelligible to tourists and non-locals what is the point of paying spotters people to stand on the mountain and look for sharks? Perhaps their flags and sirens need a little interpretation so beach goers notice and understand them.

Or perhaps shark spotters, who can see little on an ordinary windy summer day, are not the answer to the increase of shark attacks in the bay. Nobody debated what the answer could be because the next day new news took over the airwaves.