Anecdote – Mick Lawrence, President Surfing Tasmania Inc., 22 June 2022
Carcharodon Carcharias is a Big Mouthful
Winter’s a good time to have a project and this year mine has been researching a Surfing Tasmania submission to the state government on Draft Aquaculture Standards. It’s involved a lot of reading, research and hours on the laptop – and one name that kept popping up was my old mate Terry Horton.
With hundreds of salmon pens clogging our waterways, Tasmania is now on the radar of every seal in the southern hemisphere – because seals love eating salmon. All they have to do is get inside a pen and it’s the equivalent of gorging yourself senseless at Xmas lunch.
It’s appropriate that Carcharodon carcharias is a big mouthful, because it’s also Latin for the white pointer shark and that’s where old mate Hortz comes in. You see the bible on these monsters of the deep is a book released by local expert Chris Black in 2010 called White Pointer South and Hortz features no less than five times.
The best story is one I’ve dined out on for years. Hortz had managed to land a fair sized mako and while posing in front of it at the Eaglehawk Neck weigh-in, the shark somehow dislodged itself – taking a sizeable chunk out of his knee in the process.
‘Dead shark bites man’ was the headline in the next day’s Mercury.
The other stories were much more serious and all involved whites over 5 metres. In 1981 Hortz was working around the Hippolyte as a deckhand on Robin Pettman’s fishing boat, Amanda J, when he saw a white pointer he estimated as 7.6 – 7.9 metres. That’s bigger than the largest ever caught in Tasmania – a 6 metre monster weighing 2000 kg that became snared in a net in 1983 off Clydes Island, Eaglehawk Neck.
Surfers know Clydes Island as The Reef and Hortz was convinced that’s where his Hippolyte monster lived and told me ‘”Mick – If you want to live to an old age, never surf there again.”
I didn’t always believe Hortz, but on this one I did. Obviously!
Getting back to my submission. One of the issues I have raised is: what protocols are salmon farmers taking to mitigate against increased white pointer activity caused by salmon farming?
Research shows that between 1820 and 2010 there has been eleven fatal shark attacks in Tasmania. Ironically the first was in 1825 at what is now known as Shark Point at Midway Point. Three convicts were collecting oyster shells in waist deep water for a lime kiln, when the only one who could swim, named Amphibious Jack, was attacked by two large sharks, had a leg bitten off rendering him Un-Amphibious.
Over the same period there has been seventy seven captures of white pointers, most of them in gill nets and most of them in southeast Tasmania where most of our seals happen to live.
Since 2010, interestingly when salmon farming really took off, there have been a further seven shark attacks. Only one was fatal, but disturbingly four, or 57% of those, have been on surfers. All were non fatal – one at Shelly Point, Scamander in 1989, one at Binalong Bay in 2009, one at South Cape Bay in 2012 and one at Clifton Beach in 2016.
According to Chris Black the most likely time of year to encounter a mature white pointer in Tasmania is over the winter months. That’s when seal pups begin to wean and learn to feed for themselves and sharks know it. Surfers should too.
Just to confirm the validity of this, since the points ‘Big Days Out’ last week there have been three white pointer sightings. One at Carlton Beach last Monday, one at Orford last Tuesday and one yesterday. A couple of young Clifton locals were riding The Reef – aka Clydes Island at Eaglehawk Neck – when they were chased out of the water by a very large shark.
Scared shitless they drove around to the Blowhole and waited for an hour. They then decided to check out Dave’s Place where they found waves and a neatly severed adult seal head accompanied by a distraught young pup.
As any young idiots would do, they promptly donned their wetties so they could look like seals and paddled out for a surf.
Old mate Hortz would be rolling over in his grave!
