Great Wite Shark

 

At the start of this year, I watched the movie Jaws just out of curiosity. It still had an unnerving effect on me. A couple of years ago, my client lost his little daughter in the sea off the coast of Kwa-Zulu-Natal.

Her nanny took them to the sea, and the little girl disappeared. They found her remains the following day. Sharks caught her and ate parts of her body. My client felt immense devastation and grief. I attended her funeral, where they laid her body in a tiny white coffin. That changed my attitude towards swimming in the ocean.

The next experience I want to talk about happened when I was in high school. One day, some friends and I went to Simonstown to swim, snorkel, and spear fish. Sounds okay! Well, the weather was perfect, and the train ride there went well. There were many people and kids already splashing and enjoying the water, which settled our nerves, and there were no warning signals.

I swam to the floating raft, where many were climbing on and jumping off, and continued beyond that because I wanted to see if I could try out the speargun on a fish. I did not find a fish but a shark about 1.5 metres long. It kept moving in and out of the seaweed. Eventually, I thought I had the right moment to shoot, pulled the trigger and missed.

Disappointment crept in, and I was struggling a bit to handle the situation because it was my first attempt at spearfishing. I swam back to shore and decided I had had enough. Then I did what I usually enjoyed. I lay there to bask in the sun.

The reason for this story is that many years later, the movie Jaws was screened, and after that, I one day chatted with a guy about my failed spearfishing experience. He said, “Did you know that there are usually great white sharks in and around Simonstown?” I said, “No, the water is cold there, and they usually prefer warm water. I don’t believe you because I didn’t see one.”

Yesterday, I checked what he said online, and he was right. Imagine if I hit the small shark with my speargun and it bled! That could have alerted a great white shark to come to our location, and I could have become an easy meal for it. Spearfishing in those waters was the wrong thing to do, and I am lucky that I got away with it.

People pay to watch great white sharks in Simonstown, but they do it in steel cages. I went swimming in the sea completely unsupervised, with no protection, just like the little girl who lost her life. I was very fortunate not to become an easy target for those great white sharks, as I was not aware they frequented those waters.

There was no steel cage for my protection. God must have protected me. It was a situation of thinking about adventure and not being clear about what could happen or whether it was safe to be there. I was extremely fortunate.