Every morning, Kenny Gordon, the 55-year-old maintenance manager at the Blue Water Point Motel and Marina, watches guests head off for the beach on this North Carolina vacation island. But if they ask him, he tells them to think twice before getting in the ocean.
“We know what’s in there,” he says, his peeling, sun-roasted cheeks cracking as he grins.
Sharks. “Thousands of ’em.”
It’s no secret to this island’s longtime visitors and residents that many varieties of shark patrol the turgid waters, just as they do along nearly every ocean coastline on the planet. Fishermen flock to the 20-square-mile barrier island near the North Carolina-South Carolina border each summer to catch, sell, mount and eat the wide range of shark species that frequent the area, including bull, tiger, hammerhead, nurse, sand and blacktip. A towering great white – in a plastic, life-sized form – has hung tail-up from the sign of a local surf shop for more than a decade, in homage to the great killer that is occasionally spotted nearby.
But this weekend, thanks to a recent, bloody turn of events, the deep association between the island and its wildlife will be weighing more heavily than usual on visitors’ minds, even as expected annual crowds flock to its sandy beachgrass-covered dunes to celebrate Independence Day.
On 14 June, here on Oak Island, a shark ripped into a 12-year-old girl who was standing waist-deep in the water. Ninety minutes later, and two miles down the beach, the same thing happened to a 16-year-old boy. Both youths survived the attacks thanks to quick medical attention on the beach and helicopter transports to a regional hospital. Each eventually lost an arm.
The attacks were the most vicious in what appears, to untrained observers at least, to be a spike in shark attacks along this southern state’s beaches. Since 11 June, there have been at least seven incidents of sharks biting humans on the North Carolina coast.
“The first I saw of it was when it was biting up my left arm, kind of. Then it got that off, eventually, and it swam,” the 16-year-old victim, Hunter Treschel, said in a video released by New Hanover regional medical center, where he has been recovering from his injuries.
“I got out of the water with the help of my cousin, then I got on the beach.”
Shark attacks on humans remain exceptionally rare. The University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File confirmed 72 unprovoked shark attacks in the entire world last year (33 more were considered to have been provoked by victims; in a handful of others, sharks tried to take a bite out of a boat). By comparison, in 2013, nearly 33,000 people died in car crashes in the US alone. Once you have survived the drive to the beach, you are several orders of magnitude more likely to die from falling, drowning, over-exposure to the sun, or getting hit by lightning or the fireworks you brought with you than you are to be killed by a shark.
That’s even more impressive when you consider how common both sharks and swimmers are. Gordon is right, according to the experts: there probably are thousands of sharks off the North Carolina coast during the summer, many near the shore. North Carolina state tourism officials estimate that there are about six million visitors to its beaches every year.
In fact, the rarity of attacks is what fascinates people.
“The idea of going to the beach and having a good time and something tries to eat you – that’s exciting stuff,” said Dr Lawrence B Cahoon, a professor of biology and marine biology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He noted that movie theaters across the US recently screened a special 40th anniversary edition of Jaws – Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, built, coincidentally, around a Fourth of July weekend. Scientists say the movie put a durable bundle of myths about killer sharks in generations of moviegoers’ heads.
“I think people are hyped,” Cahoon said.
The 14 June incidents on Oak Island raised more alarm than usual because, three days before a shark had bitten a 13-year-old girl’s boogie board on Ocean Isle, nine miles to the west. The teen’s injuries were minor and the incident received passing attention at the time. But with the Oak Island attacks now pointing to a possible trend, North Carolina media went on alert for more. And more came.
Shark attacks were reported on 24 June in Surf City; 26 and 27 June on Hatteras Island, in the towns of Avon and Waves; and 1 July on Ocracoke Island.
The seven attacks recorded in North Carolina are the most the International Shark Attack File had recorded in the state in a single year going back to 1935, said Lindsay French, a program assistant who helps maintain the database.
‘It could just be the summer weather’
As word of the attacks spread internationally, people began to wonder: why were there more attacks than usual? Why were they happening in North Carolina? And were the attacks an indication of things to come?
Shark experts and marine biologists admit they have no idea. It’s impossible, many note, to even to say if a significant event is occurring in the state.
“We don’t know right now, until we look at the long-term trend data,” said Dr John Carlson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Lab. “It could just be the summer weather. Maybe twice as many tourists are going to the beach in North Carolina.”
Some shark experts and observers have theorized that warmer waters, a local drought that has caused higher salinity in the water – which sharks and their prey both favor, an active sea turtle nesting season, fishing on piers near beaches or some combination of all of those factors might be making certain sharks more aggressive in North Carolina.
Some kinds of sharks can get more agitated when water temperatures exceed 80F (27C), said Dr Frank J Schwartz, who has studied the creatures for nearly five decades at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences – raising the possibility that global warming could lead to marginal increases in shark attacks over time.
Some Oak Islanders speculated that shark fishermen attracting the animals to the coast with their oily bait, or by “chumming,” spreading fish parts into the water, were provoking the attacks. Still, North Carolina state fishing authorities declined to enforce a shark-fishing ban on Oak Island through the busy 4 July weekend.
“We’re asking fishermen to, you know, be cognizant of where they’re fishing, not to be fishing on crowded swimming beaches,” Patricia Smith, public information officer for the North Carolina division of marine fisheries, told a local news station.
Nationally, the numbers are less remarkable, casting doubt on whether there is a larger trend at play. There have been 25 shark attacks in the US this year – one fatal, in Hawaii. That is roughly on track to match 2014’s US total of 52. (Florida, with its larger numbers of tourists and year-round beaches, leads the national count, as always, with 11 attacks so far this year. The Sunshine State saw 28 shark attacks in 2014.)
Historical comparisons are also hard to make because there were fewer people travelling to beaches in the past. Counting attacks has also long been an imprecise science – for instance, fewer shark attacks were reported before the age of mass communications and social media, French said.
The attacks reported so far in North Carolina have been clustered in two areas: the north-eastern Outer Banks, where three of the attacks have occurred; and the state’s southernmost coast, including Oak Island, which lies more than 100 miles away. There is no proof yet that any are connected. Crucially, no one even knows what kinds of sharks have been involved. Many experts suggest a mix of sharks of different sizes and temperaments, as the incidents have ranged from minor injuries to aggressive attacks resulting in multiple life-threatening injuries.
Researchers will eventually try to determine what kind of sharks were involved using measurements of the bites and data on what kinds of sharks were in the areas at the time that the bites occurred.
‘A several-hundred-pound chainsaw with a bad attitude’
Generally speaking, the experts say, sharks try hard to avoid humans. To them, we’re dangerous, alien creatures that presumably don’t taste very good. When bites do occur, it is often because a shark has mistaken a person for another animal. To that end, the scientists recommended avoiding wearing ankle jewelry that could flash and be mistaken for a fish. Kids on boogie boards can also be mistaken for sea turtles – which may have been the case in the first recent attack on Ocean Isle.
Several of the experts recommended swimming in groups. That’s good advice in general, they noted, to cope with dangers far more prevalent than sharks, such as rip currents.
Many did agree with a commonly shared piece of advice – that hitting a shark on the nose will temporarily stun it, possibly creating time to get away. But opportunities to do so are even more rare than shark attacks. As in Treschel’s case, most shark attack victims never see the predator coming. If a powerful shark is truly determined to kill, it will be very hard to deter.
“It’s like trying to fight off a several-hundred-pound chainsaw with a bad attitude,” Cahoon said.
The best thing, the experts agreed, is to get out of the water as quickly as possible.
But again, they stressed, fear of the rare events should not deter people from getting in the water in the first place.
“I’m going surfing this morning,” NOAA’s Carlson said.
Following the Oak Island incidents, local authorities – in an apparent show of force and concern – organized boat and helicopter searches for the shark (or sharks) that had injured the young swimmers. It was not clear how they intended to locate the animal. In any case, they didn’t find it.
But despite the highly publicized case, and its apparent lack of resolution, business seems to be booming ahead of the major annual holiday. Five or six people canceled reservations for Independence Day weekend at the Blue Water Point Motel, where Gordon works, citing the shark attacks, said hotel manager Diane Beltz. But new reservations came in to replace most of them. She said she expects fishermen excited about catching a wild shark to make up the slack as summer wears on.
On Wednesday, ahead of the holiday, the nearby beach was full of vacationers playing frisbee, reading books under portable cabanas, and tanning in bikinis under the sun. A border collie chased a seagull. Along the waterline, fishing poles planted in the sand bowed toward the waves.
Sharks were not far from everyone’s mind, it turned out. But they were also not going to keep anyone from having a good time. It seemed everyone had a different idea on how to manage the problem.
“We’re not going in the water,” said Kristin Abbas, who was visiting from San Diego, said flatly as she played with her one-year-old son, Josiah, in the sand.
Yet a few yards away, right near the spot where Treschel lost his arm a few weeks before, the water was full of people, young and old, paddling kayaks, bobbing on boogie boards, and standing in the waves.
The Patterson family, visiting from nearby Burlington, preferred to laugh off the tension. Samantha Patterson, a 23-year-old nursing student, responded to a text about that day’s attack – 150 miles away in the Outer Banks – by going for a swim. Her 45-year-old mother, Tammy, stayed in a folding chair by the water’s edge, keeping an eye on their fishing poles.
“I’m going to do my part and catch a man-eater,” she pledged.
Jason Dewar, a 46-year-old high school guidance counsellor visiting from Denver, Colorado, came armed with a broader perspective.
“It’s like going out in the woods: there are bears out there, there are mountain lions,” he said as he and his 13-year-old son, Liam, carried their kayak in from the waves. “You just have to be careful.
“You’re going into their world.”