Sharks on the prowl in N.C.
AVON, N.C. — It’s the golden hour, right before sunset, when the light is soft and pretty. The landscape looks like a postcard. Tourists stroll, kids run.
No one is in the water. No one wants to be a feast for a shark.
“This is a very sharky place,” mused 56-year-old John Kane as he stood on the Avon Pier and stared into the crashing surf.
They’re out there, somewhere, in the murky, antifreeze-green water. There are sharpnose and black tips, bulls and tigers. Maybe even a great white or two, if Twitter is to be believed. Always lurking, always swimming, always eating.
And too often, of late, their prey has been human: In a 28-day span, eight people have been bitten by sharks in North Carolina, a new high for the 80 years in which records have been kept.
The attacks have spanned a hundred-mile stretch of coastline, three of them along the barrier islands of the Outer Banks. Most of them occurred in shallow water. Injuries have ranged widely, from an 8-year-old boy who had only minor wounds to his heel and ankle to at least two others who had limbs amputated.
Authorities don’t blame the same shark, or even the same type of shark. They struggle to explain the sudden spate of attacks.
But there is no need to explain the fascination with this creature, or the fear it inspires.
“There could be a 10-footer in there,” Kane said, casually pointing to the dark water under the pier.
Kane was hoping to catch a tarpon or mackerel. He’s fished these waters for some 30 years. The only thing he snagged on Tuesday afternoon was a shark.
“About this big,” Kane said, holding his hands some three feet apart. “I just cut ’em loose. We have an understanding. I don’t eat them and they don’t eat me.”
If only people and sharks did have that kind of pact, maybe people would be swimming and bodyboarding and not canceling surf lessons.
Everyone is talking about sharks along the Outer Banks. At the sushi bar in Buxton. On the radio. At the Orange Blossom Bakery, where on a recent day 51-year-old Deanna Salken regaled customers with the story of her own too-close encounter with a shark.
She was swimming during the Fourth of July weekend when she felt something sharp graze her ankle. She looked down, and it was a four-footer. The shark’s teeth didn’t break her skin.
“I was dumbfounded,” she said, as she served customers waiting in line the bakery’s signature Apple Ugly pastry. “I kicked it and it swam away.”
She referred a reporter to one customer, Jordan Bartholomew. Shirtless, he identified himself as a local surfer who was bitten by a shark in 2008.
“It’s not normal for this many sharks and this many incidents to be happening here,” he shrugged. “Sharks have like sensory stuff pushing them to shore.”
Chuck Bangley, a shark researcher at East Carolina University, said unseasonably warm water brought more turtles and fish closer to shore, which means the sharks that eat those creatures are also drawn to shore. And the hot temperatures drew more people to the beach.
Also, the continental shelf is narrow in the area near the Outer Banks — like another area popular for shark bites, near New Smyrna Beach in Florida — which means sharks are “pushed closer to shore” there, said Bangley.
“Any time you’re in the water, the odds are good a shark is a few hundred yards away,” he said.
