Amazed and dissapointed by some of the comments here,really thought some of you guys were better than this, have surfed all over aus for 40 years, and kited for the last 10 , find it disappointing to see, stuff the rest of the creatures in the ocean as long as its good for us .
Most people surf/kite have a affinity with the ocean , if you dont get out and go to ski parks and pools ,i read comments all the time about how we all think that kiteing is a extreme sport ,the risk we take in the water is no worse than the risk otehr sports have , paragliding, base jumping driving every day in the car, sure we need to protect ourselves , more tagging and monitoring of GW might help , wont know till we try.

I have heard from many guys that surf/kite and if a shark takes me so be it , its their water ,im sure that they would rather die of old age,i know i would ,had a few close calls over the years ,but never once was tempted to go and grab a gun a shoot every shark , a bit of common sense and when and where not to surf/kite goes a long way to saying safe .

You dont kite in 40 knots on a 12M kite !!

One thing is for sure though WA is seeing more and more GWs.
Friend of mine is very active at the local SLSC and they get sightings a lot more then is reported to the media.
Sharks off the coast of Augusta is one thing but GWs at scarbough beach is another.
I think tracking needs to be done so that the sharks coming into METRO beaches are at the very least spotted.

man eating shark

CocosLocals said..

One thing is for sure though WA is seeing more and more GWs.
Friend of mine is very active at the local SLSC and they get sightings a lot more then is reported to the media.
Sharks off the coast of Augusta is one thing but GWs at scarbough beach is another.
I think tracking needs to be done so that the sharks coming into METRO beaches are at the very least spotted.

GW's have been at scarborough beach before william dampier hit the west coast. There is seal colonies on Rotto, bird, Carnac and garden islands.

Of course I like to be condescending and pompous: see dojoism 101.

Beyond that, I'm attempting to tease out some of the underlying cosmologies from which the various viewpoints sprout.

The "it's our planet to use as we see fit" clearly has Abrahamic roots - man created in the image of a God who is separate from his creation and can dominate and control it by fiat. My suggestion is that this worldview has been pretty thoroughly made obsolete by the combination of evolutionary understanding in the 19th century and ecological frameworks in the 20th.

The notion of Australia as a "frontier" country, with "boundless plains to share" probably underlies some of the sense that we can extract resources as quickly as we like and simply move on further when a given fishery/plain ceases to keep up with or collapses under that rate of extraction. This may have seemed true when our population was smaller, our technology for resource extraction/harvesting less advanced and much of Australia was still barely touched by colonialists. Again, the foundations for the boundless frontier notion are no longer tenable - the fertile lands and waters of this country are pretty thoroughly charted and exploited. (The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery is relevant here).

The above viewpoints may also combine with a kind of infantile grandiosity - "I want everything to be just how I want it and I'm entitled to that and I will rage and wail and scorch the whole wide world unless I get it."

That these viewpoints were once widely held is understandable. That vestiges of them live on subconsciously in collective and individual thinking is no surprise either. That it may be sobering, maddening, and challenging to move beyond them is clear. But I submit that we either learn our ways into a more sustainable cosmology or we destroy ourselves hanging on to the old one.

None of this need detract from the distress and grief of those whose loved ones are killed by sharks. We can offer our deep and sincere condolences and sympathies whilst also bringing a mature attitude to our stewardship of the biosphere.

There is something primally horrific about the possibility of being taken by a shark or a croc - something that must run deep in our evolutionary history. There is no such primal, visceral horror though at the thought of death by lung cancer. Sure, it's not a pretty thought, but it doesn't conjure up anything like the same deep gut reaction. But, as others have said, if we were a bit rational about it, we'd spend a woop-load more resources protecting people from nicotine and junk food than from sharks. Gut reactions are not to be denigrated (indeed I support a finer tuning in to them), but they needn't be acted upon immediately and at all costs without reference to other sources of information and decision-making processes.

djdojo said..

But I submit that we either learn our ways into a more sustainable cosmology or we destroy ourselves hanging on to the old one.

Well here's some news for you, dude. ^^^

Regardless of whether your cosmos is wonderfully sustained,

or perfectly eco-balanced,

God's green Earth is full of harm.

The planet is trying to kill you every minute of every day,

and it's going to win in the end.

lol.

^^ Plus 1 for that seafever! I too would rather pass in my sleep without fuss. But should I end up in the belly of a shark or croc I'd hope no-one would try to hunt it down. Rather at least I would have been able to contribute a little back to nature....

Young's death a 'freak tragedy'

A massive coastal search is underway to try to find the shark responsible for the attack, with beaches between Sawtell and Woolgoolga closed on Sunday.

Michael Young says his family does not want the attack to result in a shark cull.

He says the family has come to terms with the "freak nature" of the tragedy.

"The Young family has grown up with the ocean as surfers, divers and fishermen since most of us could walk," he said.

"We understand nature and the freak nature of this tragedy. Although we believe in the tagging of large sharks, we do not wish for this to result in any sort of cull."

Addikt said..

I just want to taste a GW burger, heard it beat's a baraburger hands down ......!!!!!!

ill swap you a gw burger for a human burger :)

iandvnt said..

Those factory ships are insane. How you can control what you catch and what you are doing to the wider oceanic population in the nets of one of these is beyond me. The bycatch (seals, dolphins, sharks and non marketable fish) generated by these things is astounding. And to think of how much of what they catch ends up in tins to be fed to cats.

There is no margin for rehabilitation of fish stocks.

At least with commercial pole fishing the fish are caught quickly and undersized/bycatch can be thrown back.



That is a video of how quickly pole fishing can be done. And I've seen a doco where the guys are pulling a fish out every 5 seconds.

Anyway, back to the shark subject - the push to cull sharks is completely irrational.

You knock off a few of them - it just gives space to the others to occupy that feeding space. A 3-4 m GW deserves his spot in the world - the chances of reaching that size, despite all the odds are tiny. A bit like advocating killing off 4 m + Crocs.

Nothing is "our" domain - there are areas that are extreme to the point when we put ourselves in them we are at the mercy of the conditions - think - the desert, the ocean and mountains. We can prepare for what we will encounter out there but we are by no means in control of it. There are plenty of examples in the world of where extreme hubris has lead to our downfall.

Yea, let's cull humans first.

tobes said..

Humans killed by sharks worldwide per year - 4.2
Sharks killed by humans worldwide per year - 100,000,000

Fair's fair? I don't think we're playing fair.

I dont think that is a fair call....how many man eaters per year are killed???

A few heroes on here that wouldn't mind being munched on by a shark, and some that even look forward to it!! Watch them all squeal like little girls if the time ever came.
Shark cull no, but rogues that get a taste for humans, take them out of the equation.

If a dog mauls someone it is usually put down out of fear it will do it again. May not even be the dogs fault. It may have been provoked, hurt in some way.
Do you really want to take the chance that the shark does not start to look at humans as a food source after an attack?
Not always going to get the offending shark for sure, but if lifeguards etc are close by, then action should be taken to remove it.

Hehehe..


Tobes, you just smashed KKiter out of the park