They breed em a little different down there in South Australia, long a shark and by shark, I mean…big… shark, hot spot.
As one BeachGrit reader put it last Christmas after a young surfer was killed metres from shore, "In South Australia, you can have sharks or you can have surfing. You can’t have both.”
Two months before that, 55-year-old surfer Tod Gendle was killed and disappeared by a fifteen-foot Great White at Granites, twenty clicks out of Streaky Bay, South Australia, seven hundred clicks north-west of Adelaide.
And, earlier in 2023, and just a hundred clicks south, local school teacher Simon Baccanello was killed by a Great White while surfing at Walkers Rocks in Elliston.
Anyway, sharks are around and the locals know which breed you gotta be wary of, Great Whites, and those that are scary as hell to see up close but probably won't tear you in two.
Now, Aussie dad Tristan Turner has been hailed a hero after dragging a lightly wounded 10-foot bronze whaler his kids accidentally hooked while fishing off Kangaroo Island's American River Jetty.
"Dad, no!" screams one of his kids when his daddy jumped into the drink.
“We needed to get the hook out and let it go, so I just swam it around to the boat ramp off the rocks, got the hook out of it and got it back swimming again,” Turner told 7News. “I horrified my son when I swam off with it, he was a bit scared, but they’re a pretty friendly species of shark.”
Daddy, who wrangled trapped crocodiles for a living up there in the wild Northern Territory for almost a decade, says he has long held a dream to ride a shark.
“I had the opportunity when I let it go, hung on to its fin and went for a ride,” he said.
