As we rolled into July and the big holiday weekend, phones along the Carolina coast were ringing with loved ones calling about the uptick in shark attacks locally. The national media spotlight focus on these attacks coincides with June’s 40th anniversary of the movie “JAWS.”
Heading into the Discovery Channel Shark Week 2015 on Sunday July 5, more than seven people were bitten by sharks on the coast of the Carolinas in a matter of three weeks, some seriously, at least one critically.
Wrightsville, Carolina and Kure beaches — thankfully — have been spared: no shark encounters. Conversation veers to why sharks have attacked swimmers to the north and south but not here. There are a great number of theories as to why these attacks are happening.
“This confluence is rare,” Wrightsville Beach town manager Tim Owens said this week. He has no theory about why we have had so many, or what is causing them, but he said, “It could happen here, too.”
The latest, on June 27, an 18-year-old was attacked and seriously injured on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore near Rodanthe after seeing a shark “while swimming with others.” His injuries were to the right calf, buttocks and both hands. He is reportedly “in serious condition,” upgraded from “in critical risk of dying.” He did not lose his leg.
On the previous day, a 47-year-old man near the same area, in Avon, N.C. was bitten on his right leg and lower back.
Two days earlier, a child had minor injuries from a shark bite at Surf City.
In June there were seven documented shark/human encounters in the two Carolinas. On June 11, a teenage girl at Ocean Isle Beach came away from her encounter with minor injuries, although her boogie board had bites taken out of it.
Three days later, two separate teenagers swimming at Oak Island, a 13-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy, lost limbs in separate shark attacks, 90 minutes apart.
In South Carolina Friday morning June 26, a 43-year-old man saw a shark at Hunting Island State Park, 90 miles south of Charleston, yelled shark, and was then bitten by a second shark.
Referring to the two Oak Island attacks June 15, Owens said, “Both situations are obviously tragic and hopefully isolated. It is very unique. I have been surfing on the coast since I was 15 probably and I cannot recall a summer like this, particularly in North Carolina. Not six in two weeks.”
Representatives from Wrightsville’s hotels, Holiday Inn and Blockade Runner, said the media frenzy has not affected occupancy, but the reports have impacted the number of people in the water.
Last year was a record-setting one for visitors to the Carolina Coast and the numbers for the first half of 2015 suggest the record setting continues.
UNCW’s biological oceanographer Larry Cahoon said the Discovery Channel usually scares people with dramatic Shark Week footage and tall tales.
“From a scientific point of view, six [seven in two states] attacks in three weeks, although it is dramatic, is not a lot of data, it is not so many dots so you can connect them all and draw a pattern,” he said.
He said two attacks, the little girl at Ocean Isle Beach and Surf City, were pretty classic mistaken identity attacks, where a smaller shark bit someone on the ankle or foot, causing minor wounds.
“This is the typical pattern we see in most beach-type shark attacks. The two at Oak Island where each child lost an arm, and the two on the Outer Banks were real attacks. They were mid-body attacks to arms or torso, those sharks bit them multiple times, they were bigger animals and they pressed home their attacks. So that’s different. I am a whole lot more concerned about that kind of attack than I am the mistaken identity attacks,” he explained.
Cahoon said the vast majority of people are close to the beach when they are swimming and these attacks have occurred in the surf zones. The 16-year-old boy attacked at Oak Island said in a television interview he was in waist-deep water.
“Their sense of hearing is very good, sharks hear us in the water,” Cahoon said. “They are very good at low frequencies that we can’t hear. They can hear the struggling fish on the end of the line. They can hear us wading and swimming. They know we are there. When you look at the numbers of people in the water and the number of sharks nearby, there’s millions of contact hours there, every year.”
Cahoon said there are five to 10 sharks per mile. “That is thousands, maybe tens of thousands” along the coast, he said.
He said these recent attacks were not at dusk or dawn, the time typically attributed to the predator’s feeding time. He said there are no hard rules there; most of these people were attacked in the middle of the day, which is good news for Wrightsville Beach Mayor Bill Blair and Mayor Pro Tem Darryl Mills who have not given up their daily afternoon swim in the 5:30 to 6 p.m. range.
“The odds are very, very small,” Cahoon said. “The fact is it’s extremely rare, even the cluster we have had. There are lots of people in the water; most of these attacks have been on the weekends, when the beaches are crowded. It’s been real hot the last couple of weeks, so if you are at the beach and it is 95 degrees, what are you going to do? Get in the water. A higher proportion of people who have gone to the beach are actually in the water.”
“Hopefully it is a one-year thing,” Owens said.
During the nine previous years, just 25 shark incidents occurred in North Carolina, none fatal. The same period in Florida, that number was 219, two of which were fatal.
The Florida Museum of Natural History cites probability of a shark attack as “one in 11.5 million” chances.
“Rip currents kill a lot more people than sharks do, every year we lose a half a dozen up and down the coast,” Cahoon said. “They’re much more at risk driving down here.”
For me, July is not really the best time to swim in the ocean, there are way too many people in the water, peeing. I’ll wait for August.
