the great shark hunt

Where's Hunter S when you need him. Fuck the New Years fireworks, lets catch a big fucking white pointer and shoot it out of a huge cannon in the shape of a cock(or cunt) on the top of Mt Clarence.  Ka Fucking Boom, take that! you fucking, fucker of a fish! If little johnny had let us keep our guns we could have necked Limeburner's whiskey, fired our 44's into the air in celebration and swum, cavorting nude and carefree in the black of night!  

After wanderlusting the day away out at Torndirrup Sunday, I ran into my denmark aunty at the West Cape Howe winery gig. More big sister than aunt, 

"whatcha been doing?"

"been out at the gap"

"didn't get inspired to jump then didya?"

"nah.... weathers too nice" 

A Hunter quote  "Too weird to live, too rare to die " kinda fits my take on life/death. I am shit scared of death and the nothingness it entails. Haven given up on a biblical after life at 7 or 8 along with the commercial deities( tooth fairy and cronies), I have honed a taste for self preservation and longevity. I'd  be pissed to die tomorrow, there's many seeds in the pomegranate yet to taste. 

Luckily, in our privileged little corner of the universe (and I am talking very local here), apart from having all the basics needed for life, breathable atmosphere, water, food, shelter, etc. we have lucked on a place where there is fuck all to kill us. No cyclones, floods, fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, eruptions, plagues, pestilence or wars (religious or otherwise) of note. Stable if uninspiring political and civil infrastructures, work places with safety standards, the stuff we buy is usually tested and our legal systems lock up the otherwise mad and dangerous. Who could possibly harm us but ourselves?  Even our dangerous land creatures are small, poisonous and avoidable(only scaring those from across the ditch) as opposed to being large, carnivorous and hungry. Nothing to worry about really ........ except big fucking sharks. 

It's a primal fear, deep rooted, hard wired.... I don't want to be eaten.  

My 12th birthday sleep over, 5 mates, 2 movies, vhs not beta, Mad Max and Jaws. Still don't know how I got them past Mum, she obviously wasn't paying attention. Fucked us all up! Bug eyed, none of us slept much that night; and cars and the beach have never been the same since. 

I got my first surfboard not long after that, it cost me $20 for a yellowing, dinged up 7'2 pintail. I surfed everyday that summer, waves or not, but never alone.  If I was by myself I got the yips; rays, dolphins, shadows would set my sphincter clenching, skin crawling, heart pounding and blood rushing in my ears. It still happened when there were others in the water, but it was a communal fear then, we spooked together and shoaled like whitebait.  I have still never seen a shark while surfing but I know, deep down, that they are always there, somewhere, waiting, cruising. 

The shark of my fears is always a White. The others, with perhaps the exception of a Tiger or the taxi driversque Mako, will poke around for a bit and have a taste before deciding if you are lunch. The White that took the guy Saturday just fucking ate him, all of him, whole..... no questions, no trace. Same as the guy who got hit out at the Southern Group in the Abrohlos. Day 3 of his dream job skippering True North, bound for Broome, the Rowley Shoals and the Admiralty Gulf. A quick free dive for some crayfish; cackers are best, their heads twisted off live, a feeler poked up their arse to remove the shit shute, cracked in two with a chef's knife, and onto the hot plate in a bit of garlic, butter & NZ sem sauv, on the sunny deck, in a light easterly,with a beer, any beer, even EB works. I hope that's what he was thinking about when he hit the water and I hope he never saw the 6m fish that got him. I hope it hit him so hard he was out cold..... imagine any lingering consciousness in a sharks rancid gut...... what jonah, what did you say?  

We were drifting for King George in about 20ft of water, half a k off the beach at Hamelin Bay when I first saw a White. Hamelin is just around the Cape from Augusta. During the late 1800's it was a timber port with one terminus of an 100-km rail network running out onto a deep water jetty. The other ended in Flinders Bay and between the two ports the M.C Davies logging company at one stage exported a third of all timber out of the state. That early logging is the reason the Boranup Karri's appeal to the human eye so; uniformly sized trees, evenly spread, no under-story, a giant Zen garden where the hand of the gardener is generations lost. These days, like in Flinders, only the bones of the jetty remain. Hamelin was always a lousy port. Right at the southern end of a long wide j shaped beach it faces N'NW and the scant lee of the near shore island of the same name could not save a ship in a winter storm. The maritime museum has at least a dozen wrecks recorded from this era. The odd cray boat still uses it when a big high in the bight cranks up the SE summer patterns, but a camping ground, kiosk and boat ramp are about it now. Those constant summer winds were what drove us around the corner from Augusta to fish and swim in the early to mid mornings before the wind really howled. 

 Dad had borrowed Athol's 12 foot tinny because it was easier to launch there than our bigger Clark and we were drifting mid-morning, across the middle of the bay; all emerald green and turquoise, fading near shore to arayan blues. Polarised glasses for picking the seagrass banks, terry towelling hats, white zinc for cracked lips, a little leftover steak on a no.6  for the first fish and shiny cubes of whiting thereafter for the rest, a white bucket,  driftwood cutting board, boning knife ground past slaughtering a lamb, and a red fuel tank sloshing to the peculiar drumming rhythm of a drifting tinny.  

"Is that weed moving?"

"Where?"

"Over there"

"Na......."

Pause.

"Must be a raa......."

"Oh Fuck me!" 

With this a White cruised up alongside and we both lost the power of speech. At least 4 foot longer than the tinny, maybe more, the shark was huge. It circled around us casually at a slight distance before sweeping in close and rolling side on, to eyeball us impassively; in doing so revealing that smirk with it's row, on row, on row of teeth and vivid mottled graduations of hue, concrete grey fading to the unbearable whiteness of it's enormous  belly. I had the urge to reach out and stroke it like a dog, to feel the cold sandpaper rasp of it's hide. It was so close I could have. The old man finally snapped to and whispered,

"Don't make any sudden movements." 

"I wasn't planning any, actually." 

A whiting tukk tukk tukked my line. 

At this point the shark spooked. We don't know why, but later speculated it had brushed one of the whiting lines. Like a V8 auto when planted, the shark lurched, almost squatting under power, pectorals spread, the thrust emanated from the tip of its nose and shuddered through the body before erupting in it's scything tail and it was gone. 

My old man nearly ripped the cord off the outboard a split second later and we were up and planing instantly in a funk of fear and 2-stroke fumes, skipping whiting rigs along the surface, hand line reels merrily un-spooling before I could get them wound in and sorted, feet dancing to avoid the bait board and knife as it flipped off the seat. Dad forgot about the landing and pointed straight for the beach and we shot full throttle through the surf and halfway up the beach before we came to a stop. 

We sat there in the sun for a long time and debated if we should tell the swimmers and families near the jetty. We decided not to, the shark had gone the other way after all and was probably several k's away by now.

It would just fuck everyone's summer if we told them. 

"Shall we go back out?"

"Nah, lets go have a look at the island, hey." 

Postscript: I went surfing Boxing Day, my first since the Mid's attack and the day before the Port Kennedy one. I have a shark shield I bought before either attack; for surfing, swimming and diving. It got a few laughs the first time I wore it but no one laughs at the fucked up stingray tail anymore and I am kind of popular in the water. But you know I always knew they were there. 

BTW the only thing of note Howard did is enact those gun laws; otherwise he should have been shot out of a huge..........