Encountering Great White Sharks: A Spearfisher's Perspective on Shifting Ocean Dynamics

The first time I came face to face with a great white shark I felt something shift inside me. One look into those eyes darker than a planet-sucking black hole really does humble you.

But it wasn’t the eyes.

Getting a closeup look at its face, all gnarled and freshly scarred from the last desperate bites and scratches of an unlucky seal, is one of life’s brutal reality checks.

But it wasn’t the scars.

Prior to my encounter I had spent years as a plucky, overconfident spearfisher, even once etching my name into a national New Zealand kingfish trophy. Dealing with sharks simply comes with the territory. I’ve had fish ripped off me by bronze whalers, I’ve been surrounded by bull sharks, shadowed by silvertips, surprised by sevengillers and charged by an aggressive mako.

Now, it’s not something that happens on the first day you go spearfishing, but, as your skill set develops and you dive deeper into more critical areas with increased activity, well, it turns out that sharks like those places too. You get used to it, sort of. And dare I say it, you can actually enjoy some of the encounters.

With zero bycatch, spearfishing or “spare-fishing” is an extremely selective, low-impact pursuit that for me has never been about the catch but about the entirety of the wild experience possible anytime you pull on a wetsuit.

Submerged with the clock running down on your inhaled breath, you have zero capacity to think about anything else. It’s an unusual juxtaposition where you exist in an environment with a goal of slowing down your own heart rate, to relax, to allow your breath-holds to last longer, to sink deeper, where the water compresses you even smaller. All the while being surrounded by things that do the exact opposite of this Zen you seek.

It is one of the only places in the world I’ve found where I can properly turn my brain off to all other life frivolities. As I tell anyone who asks, there’s no internet underwater. Leave the GoPro at home, go solo, and it is truly one of the last punk-rock activities on Earth you can do for yourself.

In my lifetime of ocean activity I’ve never encountered more sharks than currently, not just in Australia but in New Zealand as well. There are places I no longer spearfish because the mere sound of a speargun fired soon lifts the familiar silhouettes from the depths beneath. Sometimes they can be in groups of three or more, meaning any speared fish is likely to trigger quite the underwater party. Time to leave that spot and try somewhere else.

Watching that first great white materialise out of the gloom before me, it was the extended white stomach I spied first. It gave it a girth I’d not experienced in any other shark encounter – not even close. This was a dump-truck of an animal compared with a sports-car like mako. The totality of its circumference is something that still plays in the back of my mind when diving, pushing me way back down the underwater pecking order – a mental shift.

While foreigners often struggle to tell New Zealanders and Australians apart, one place we do seem to differ is our attitude to teethy fish. There is a belief in New Zealand that “Aussie fishos” love catching sharks, while “Kiwi fushos” frown upon it. One popular New Zealand fishing TV show (not mine), in an attempt to show an island’s tiger shark population, even went so far as dressing a character as an Australian just to try and catch the fish. Outrageous.

But there are other, deeper feelings towards sharks that simmer here on the big island. Australia is, after all, the country that once lost a whole prime minister, who swam out from a local beach never to be seen again. Shark or drowning? The question lingers.

It has also had the world-famous angler and writer Zane Grey on a visit announce that he considered every shark captured a potential life saved. Possibly this was justification for dragging multiple sharks ashore in world-record attempts and to fill chapters in his books.

So the problem of finding a way to live with sharks is nothing new. It’s entirely possible that numbers are returning to a normal that none of us have experienced in recent memory. A shifting baseline perhaps – or maybe its one of nature’s longer ocean cycles that we don’t yet recognise.

Thanks to modern acoustic and satellite tagging, the great whites I dived with off Stewart Island in New Zealand are some of the very same animals that are now here on the east coast of Australia. It’s an annual migration that matches the humpback whale journey from Antarctica each season. When you understand that a humpback calf is born at 1.5 tonnes of pure protein with a one in five mortality rate, this collective movement makes so much more sense. A floating restaurant for sharks.

Last week through a pair of binoculars off Dee Why on Sydney’s northern beaches, I counted seven whales all surfacing simultaneously. Eastern Australian humpback whale numbers have surged past the 1960s pre-whaling era, with some estimates putting the population at 60,000 cetaceans. So its not an unreasonable leap to think this could be helping the great white shark population as well.

Sadly in today’s polarised echo chambers, at one end of the debate we have some people telling us sharks are just big misunderstood puppy dogs. At the other end of Facebook an Australian shark hunter is vomiting from the adrenaline dump of hauling in and butchering a massive bull shark locally.

These extremes make rational conversations in the grey middle area increasingly difficult. The recent increases in shark bites and sightings, especially around Sydney beaches, have surfers, swimmers and politicians understandably concerned, as the conversation gets louder in the public domain.

With no obvious answers, better science, technology and surveying is going to play an essential role in finding our way in this new normal.