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| Eddie Fairweather be havin' fish or dinner! |
We've been very Nature-oriented this summer. This pattern will continue, as several ideas we're kicking around involve oysters, foxes, bluefish, owls, stripers and God knows whatever else walks/swims/flies in front of one of our cameras.
You're going to get all of that soon enough, but today we're going to issue a recap/filler article about our toothiest locals. Great White Sharks own the news around here, even though more people are hurt by schnauzers than sharks in Massachusetts.
This will be our tenth article devoted to sharks, not a bad total at all for a publication in a region with an 100 day swimming season.
Rather than make you wade through our archives for some good ol' fashioned Shark Talk, we're going to give you a list of these articles for you to peruse easily from this very location here.
If you get through all of this and still need more Shark in your life, you should probably just open a wound in your skin and jump into the waters off of Monomoy. We probably have a few Shark articles lurking on Cape Cod TODAY or perhaps even AOL, but this is everything for which we'll get paid if you read it.
Apologies in advance if you see us re-telling a few stories or even telling the same story twice with different details. We have several authors on this site, and occasional short circuits will occur.
What If? A Cape Cod Shark Attack Fatality
I'm very much in Mayor Vaughn's camp on this one, as I feel that a fatal Outer Cape shark attack caught on video would end Cape Cod's status as a vacation destination.
We were actually wrong about this, at least as far as we have been able to prove. Sharks have attacked a couple of people in Truro and also said howdy-do to a couple of kayakers in Plymouth. It seemed to have no negative effect at all on the Cape's tourist flow.
Aim high, fall far.
Historical Massachusetts Shark Attacks
If you want to know your odds, you have to get the stats.
Location is everything in this category, too. Someone who had done no research most likely would not be able to guess where our three shark attack fatalities went down in the Bay State.
We branch out to include Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut and New York.
Great White Shark Spotted Off Duxbury Beach
This, and the Plymouth attack, brought it all home to the Irish Riviera that sharks are not solely the problem of Cape Cod. You're more likely to be killed by a shark on the bay side of Cape Cod than you are on the ocean side, and the same goes for the South Coast.
This was a brief article, written the instant I heard the news,and more of a warning to my friends and family who live on that beach. If I go to Thanksgiving and have to sit with a one-legged niece with a very personal Duxbury shark attack story, I will very much need my "Well, you should have checked my site updates" guilt-block.
Best line? "Wow, and I thought that Duxbury didn't get Cape traffic."
Ol' Toothy, The Kayak Eating Shark Of The Irish Riviera
We discuss a theory of ours, focusing on the possibility that Cape Cod Bay only had one shark. That's why we named him. We had some theory that he was a rogue, who split away from his posse off Chatham for some reason that probably makes perfectly good sense to a shark.
This theory, like many of my theories, was wildly off-base. Shark tagging and receiver buoys proved me wrong pretty much right away.
I'm pretty sure that this article at one point also included a Stacey-conducted interview with the shark who dumped those two girls out of the kayak off Manomet. We may have had to remove the interview, as the shark's frank talk on race (he prefers white meat) and age (he steals a Mark Leyner joke about brittle-boned/osteoperosis-having old people being crunchier to the shark) would have been upsetting to a greater portion of our readership.
Best line? "I'm assuming that the shark was male. Boats are girls, Sharks are boys. That's how I roll."
How To Not Get Eaten By A Shark
This is important stuff to know if you plan to go into the water. In short, if it is at all possible to be attacked by a shark, there must exist steps which will lower those odds.
Some advice ("Don't swim where people are fishing") makes sense. Other advice ("Do nothing at all seal-like") we play off as a joke when the advice is actually sound. One ("Swim with people fatter than you") sounds like a joke but was not denied when I approached a nationally-known shark expert for his thoughts about my theory. Yet another ("Be local" ) is true factually, but true in a category with a body of evidence small enough to magnify coincidence.
"Follow these rules, and you'll have mad bread to break up. If not, 17 feet on the wake-up."
Sharks In Cape Cod Bay
Speaking of shark experts, we went to Duxbury to attend a lecture by shark expert Dr.Gregory Skomal. He's the guy you see on te news, tagging sharks.
We got to ask him all of our stupid questions ("Have you ever met a friendly, seems-to-enjoy-hanging-with-people Great White Sharks?" and "Can you make a Great White Shark do tricks?"), and we got to hear more serous people ask more serious questions.
I'm pretty sure that I'm the only journalist on Earth to ask a shark expert, at length, to weigh in on Dr. Hooper's territoriality theory from Jaws. It turns out that true Territoriality involves one shark claiming an area and driving off other sharks, something which isn't happening around here.
Written during a blizzard, I might add.
Where Exactly Do Our Great White Sharks Hang Out?
Dr. Skomal's efforts do give us some amazingly valuable information. We know where they go in the winter, and we also know where they go when they are up here.
This article tells us where sharks were registered as having swam to. It also tells you how many (tagged) sharks are working any particular stretch of coast.
This is another wake-up call for the South Shore and even the North Shore. Sharks show up from Cape Ann to Cape Cod.
Cape Cod holds the title, no doubt. While Plymouth, Scituate and Duxbury combined for 200 shark tag signals, Chatham had over 14,000 in that same period. Granted, Dr. Skomal spends his days tagging off of Chatham and may never have set foot on the South Shore, 14,000 to 200 is a pretty wide gap.
Can Orcas Chase Our Sharks Away?
This was actually our last article. If you're reading this, you most likely read that. It involves yet another theory of mine.
I still think that a robotic Orca could be employed by Outer Cape towns to drive away the sharks. even if it didn't, there must be some cool use for a 40 foot mechanical Killer Whale.
Deep-Sea Surfcasting Methods
I think that this article, concerning inventions we're working on to allow even novice fishermen to make casts out to sea that would fly completely over small towns if they casted towards land, gets into shark-fishing at some point.
Our best idea involves hooking a shark with a chain that is attached to a Jeep. Dr. Skomal somehow was able to avoid my question about a huge shark taking on a Jeep in a tug-o-war.
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