The other day my friend said, ‘I don’t think I am going surfing today, the beach is a bit sharkey’.
It’s something only people who live here, who know the water, say.
I don’t think ‘sharkey’ is an official adjective that one can use to describe a body of water which contains said sharks. I don’t even know if it’s spelt with an ‘e’.
But when someone who surfs everyday says the water is a bit sharkey – I don’t go in.
Sharkey isn’t just an adjective. Most importantly as a beach assessment tool, it’s a ‘feeling’.
‘Happy’, ‘sad’, ‘sharkey’. Live here long enough and you’ll get it.
But for my friend who flagged the whole sharkey scenario, for her it wasn’t just a feeling. It was an evidence-based condition assessment.
When she said sharkey – she meant she’d actually seen a shark, albeit a baby one just two feet long in a couple of inches of water. When she told me the scientific basis for her prognosis I agreed. Definitely sharkey.
I wondered whether this new term should be added to beach condition warnings.
Kind of like one of those fire hazard warnings that tracks everything from zero risk, to moderate, to catastrophic.
We could have the sharkey monitor. From ‘not sharkey’ to ‘very fricking sharkey’ to I guess, the final reading ‘SHARK!’
Bruns probably gets the most sharkey because it’s near the river mouth. After a big rain the water gets a bit dirty and churned up. I think that’s also a good early sharkey warning. Sneaky, murky water where you can’t see them. At least in the bay, in the crystal clear water, they’re in plain sight. So even when it is sharkey, it never ‘feels’ sharkey.
Wow, this sharkey thing is more complex than I first thought.
I actually think understanding that sharkey is a feeling is an awesome way to live with sharks. It’s preservation intuition. People in the far north probably get the same thing but with a different species. They probably wake up and walk to the ocean and say, ‘hmm feels a bit crocky’. That’s why mainly tourists are at risk. Because they don’t feel ‘crocky’, they are more likely to be eaten.
I am terrified of sharks. Jaws ruined my enjoyment of the ocean forever. I’ve always found it ironic that the most rejuvenating thing you can do, where you can feel the anxiety of your life just melt away, is the one place you can be eaten alive. Bitten in half. Realistically, that’s a good reason to get anxiety. Relieving anxiety by swimming in the one place where you can be chomped in half is one of the great paradoxes of paradise.
But I’ve made peace with sharks. I think they’re beautiful and prehistoric and powerful and mythic. And terrifying. I like that there is something in nature that we haven’t conquered. Something that reminds us that we are another link in the food chain.
Saying the ocean is sharkey is like saying the forest is tree-ey. They’re in the water. It’s where they live. So to be fair, the beach is always a sharkey place, even when it doesn’t feel sharkey. You rarely walk into your home and go hmm, it feels sharkey. Unless you live with a bunch of property developers.
But I wonder, seeing as the greatest predator on earth is us, do sharks ever warn their young, ‘be careful today my love, it feels a bit humany’.
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