Shark spotting drones.
Mick isn’t happy. He’s got the early shift at the bottle shop and his usually sunny aura is incomplete today. Mick likes a regular wave off Ballina’s Lighthouse Beach north wall and the drone being operated by a bloke up at the top end of beach is giving him a serious case of the tom-tits.
‘Mate,’ he says to me, wrapping up my two bottles of $8.50 bubbly, ‘the bloody thing keeps swooping over us and warning that a shark is nearby, maybe a dozen times in a session, it’s enough to put you off your stride.’
Now Mick’s no mug, he’s been surfing these waters for most of his life.
’I know it’s a river mouth,’ he says of the Richmond River entrance nearby, ‘and I know sharks roll up here for a feed as regularly as me wife goes for a shop at Woolies. But when the bank is firing you have to go. Right?’
No argument from me, I’m old enough to remember the big toothy shadows that slipped beneath us when we surfed the old pier across the road from Walkers Slaughterhouse at Byron. The one that had a waste pipe that emptied the slaughter floor waste and blood into the sea only metres away. Nobody we knew was taken back then excepting Ginty Marr, whose grievously punctured tinny was found just off Julian Rocks in the sixties ; of him there was no sign.
Lighthouse Beach at Ballina though has more serious form.
July 2015. A great white attacked a body boarder at Lighthouse Beach, seriously injuring his legs.
November 2015. A bull shark attacked a surfer at Lighthouse Beach, seriously injuring his thigh.
September 2016. A great white attacked a surfer at the same beach, injuring his lower leg.
November 2018. A great white attacked attacked a surfer at the same beach.
Then we have these.
April 2008. A body-border killed by a shark at Lighthouse Beach.
February 2015. A surfer was killed by a great white between Sharpes and Lighthouse Beach.
February 2019. An experienced swimmer disappeared of Lighthouse Beach during one of his regular surf swims.
So Mick, it looks like you might be stuck with the local drone for a while.
