Opinions are like arseholes so here's mine!
For all those dudes who say your chances are greater than being hit by lightning blah blah - well If that's your mantra that you use to make yourself feel better swimming in places that great whites live than whatever works for you!

To the dude who says tigers are bad - well they are big but not normally aggressive. Bull sharks are very aggressive and bronze whalers can be unpredictable.
Great whites scare the crap out of me because they are naturally hunt and kill prey human size. Have you seen the sillouette of a boogy boarder from below on TV docos? Looks surprisingly like a seal. The footage of the GWS jumping out of the water is from SA where they use artificial seal lures towed behind the boat so for all of their senses they can be fooled or get it wrong sometimes.
Tigers are more like opportunistic scavengers. Ron/ Valerie taylor regulary swam and interacted with tigers making films. They wouldn't swim with whites.

If you do stuff like surf/swim/spearfish at dawn or dusk in high risk places like cactus beach, stradbroke island, near seal colonies, fraser island, canals of the gold coast (bull sharks) or jumping the gantry of a prawn trawler full of rum in the middle of the night then your chances are far better than average in my opinion. If you have to swim in the southern part of austrlaia where great whites live then your chances of coming onto contact with other sharks are decreased and the water is usually clearer than nothern australia, but I am thankfull that I live in an area to warm for great whites! Like I say it's all opinion

p train said...

Just a query, if great whites don’t like to eat humans why do they often consume people after the initial mistaken identity attack.
What annoys me more than the media beat up is the when they ask Rodney Fox and family for their opinions, when they are so unbiased now, they make money out of teaching great whites to feed from boats and to attack humans in cages, unfortunate for the people that don’t swim in cages.
I believe that practice should be outlawed.
Also, why are great whites a protected species, surely I can’t be because there are too few of them. Not that I think they should hunted maybe just controlled a little, like many other dangerous animals are.

I gotta agree with that one, I think interacting with and feeding sharks introduces the expectation that humans = food (I guess there's a lot of research to be done on that though, but feeding apes has been proven to alter their natural behaviour - eg by Jane Goodall)
With ~200 fatalities attributed to sharks in the last 2 centuries the odds are very small, but this will be no consolation the the families of shark attack victims.

kitecrazzzy said...

The shark diving practice IMO should be banned. They chum the water around a person in a cage. When the same shark comes across a swimmer what do you expect them to do.

I worried about the shark when the news (radio) said it was as wide as a car... The picture of it showed that it was like 4m long max. Media beat up for sure

I had a close encounter with a 4-5mtr great white whilst diving at a depth of about 25mtrs at the Abrohlos Islands once . Sure I was scared as it swam along parallel to us just inside the limit of our visibility but when it turned towards us and got closer and I saw its tremendous girth that I really panicked. They really do have a large width for their length, I know it's an exaggeration but I have often described it since as being nearly as wide as a car.
I do sometimes wonder if they should remain protected when a lot of the other fish in the food chain have been just about fished out around metropolitan areas. Not that I want to go and kill them all I just worry that after years of overfishing we have upset the natural balance of nature and with their usual food supply stocks dwindling they may start to look elsewhere.

the whites are bloody wide alright. fins included, a 4-5m white would be as wide as a commy. bronzys give me the sh1ts too. on saturday a curious bronzy prob 3m came in at me at venis bay.
the profesional jackass fishermen gut their fish in the way into the bay, where people and kids are swimming. luckily the bronzy wasnt too hungry as he swam around a couple of times and then nicked off.
the funny thing was that there were heaps of dolphins in the same area. i always was led to belive that sharks avoided dolphins. obviously not...