Diving under the water, a limitless, flat calm sheet of silvery water under a pale pink sky in the late afternoon.
He always loved the sea, especially underneath the sea.
He had dived more than 190 times, a young 22-year-old collecting cuttlefish eggs.
They saw the shark from the boat above and sounded the alarm.
The great white nudged the other diver aside and butted the young boy; he tried to fight it off.
The shark came back and grabbed his leg between massive jaws lined with two rows of giant serrated shark teeth, (a shark has 3000 teeth, when one is broken or lost in the side of a boat, a whale, a surfboard etc, a fresh one is rotated into place).
He pulled the boy who loved the sea down deeper and deeper into the depths.
His mate saw the boy calmly try to free his leg from the shark’s grip.
He had no thought of death, as he disappeared.
I wonder about his last conscious thought and I console myself with the fact that he would have lost consciousness fairly quickly from the massive loss of blood and his lungs filling up with water.
No longer a marine scientist, a son, a friend, a lover, the boy had become shark meat.
Great whites do not chew their food. Their teeth rip prey into mouth-sized pieces that are swallowed whole.
And apparently they don’t eat humans.
My friend who dives a lot told me the shark would die because of all the rubber from the wetsuit it ingested.
As a child
Why am I (and a lot of other people) so fascinated with stories of shark attacks?
As a child I swam beyond the breakers with my father. Out in the deep blue emerald green sea, swept up and over rolling fat waves of smooth silky water.
I exhilarated in the sense of weightlessness, the freedom to float, to feel the molecules of water caressing my young, carefree body.
A couple of years later, on the way home from town in the bus I saw three young boys sitting together in a single seat.
They’d just seen Jaws at the movies.
“I’m never goin’ swimmin’ at the beach again!”
“No way!”
“I’m not ever gunna set foot in the ocean, ever, ever again!”
They were almost chattering with fear and anxiety.
I made up my mind there and then, on the 364 Laperouse bus, that I was never, ever going to see Jaws, I loved my ocean too much.
But it started to filter in, the fear, and one night, coming home in a friend’s car, it got me.
Constantly alert to the fact that Jaws is out there
We lived down the road from a drive-in and as we drove pass the final few minutes of Jaws were playing.
We pulled over to the grassy verge and sat dumbstruck as Robert Shaw disappeared, silently screaming, down the shark’s gullet.
As it was the 70s, we’d smoked a few joints that evening, and we may even had passed one around as the shark ate its dinner, I don’t know.
What I do know is that I can never ever set foot into my beloved ocean again without being constantly alert to the fact that Jaws is out there, waiting for me. (And for that I have Spielberg to thank, thanks Steven, thanks a lot).
The young boy who died on Wednesday had no fear; most people who are attacked by sharks have had no fear.
They’re usually divers, surfers, and fishermen.
The shark does not discriminate.
Jaws was on the tele the other night. I poured myself a large Shiraz and sat down to watch it.
Apart from the first scene of the beautiful naked girl being ripped to shreds I actually quite enjoyed it, loved it in fact.
I knew what was coming in the scene where Roy Schneider leans over the back of the boat chucking burley into the water.
I knew but nothing could have prepared me for the sight of the great white leaping up and out of the water towards Roy.
I gasped and jumped. The dark red wine flew out of my glass and splattered all over my freshly washed woollen cardigan.
I laughed and refilled my glass as I watched the shark have its way with them.
At least I was safe in a lounge room a good 200 metres from the River Derwent.
