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Sharks pay for our interest
The colours which glowed along its flanks while alive - the bronze, brown and cream stripes which give the tiger shark its name - had gone to gunmetal grey, the signature hues of a carcass.

It was still intact, apart from its teeth, torn out to impress landlubbers at the pub later that day.

We'd caught the tiger during a gamefishing club point score day. It had swallowed a big mullet bait, set on the edge of the continental shelf, 20kms east of Centrepoint Tower, amid a burley trail of mashed mullet and stinking pilchards.

The tiger had weighed about 140kg, nothing special in Sydney shark fishing circles. Not one kilo was used for anything but the short glory of a few extra points added to the gamefishing club's yearly competition, based on accumulated points for the weight of the sharks and the strength of the line on which they were caught.

Weigh the noah (noah's ark is Australian rhyming slang for shark and of course being Aussies we have to reduce the vernacular further), fill in the scoring forms, take the motionless flesh back out to sea and dump it - that was the fishing routine.

This was a January day more than 25 years ago, and the waste is still a source of private shame. Tiger sharks don't taste great, and, being apex predators, are often full of nasty chemicals accumulated as they grow fat on smaller fish which themselves contain the poisonous legacy of our use of the ocean as a dump.

January '09 and another summer shark story frenzy is upon us. Summer '09 has been about great whites and little hammerheads.

The hammerheads, nicknamed "wigglers" by anglers and almost always less than 2m long, have set off the warning sirens on Sydney beaches and seen swimmers bolt for the sand.

The small hammerheads are, as far as I am aware, innocent of any attack on humans on our beaches. They follow the small baitfish which hug the coast and they often ride high in the warm summer water, small dorsal fins in the air.

Easy to see, quick to spark fear.

Great whites do kill people, as Jaws author Peter Benchley exploited so well. A great white knocked a kayak fisher from his plastic craft off Sydney's Long Reef on December 27. A great white ate a man snorkelling off a WA beach on the same day. A public autopsy at New Zealand's Auckland Museum of a great white, accidentally netted, on Thursday drew thousands of spectators. More than 10 million watched on the web.

Two decades ago, post-Jaws hysteria and when I stopped shark fishing, the only good shark was a dead shark to many people.

So it was refreshing to hear the relatives of the WA victim, Brian Guest, ask for no reprisals after he was presumably eaten - no body has been found - 14 days ago.

Their faces pale with grief, they said Brian had loved the ocean, and knew our place in it as transient visitors.

Brian's 24-year-old son Daniel Guest said: "Dad and all the family sort of knew that one day this or something similar may happen and it was always Dad's wish that if it happened that the creature not be destroyed.

"He didn't want people going out there willy-nilly destroying animals who were just doing what animals do."

We enter the water, we become part of the aquatic food chain. Instinct, not malice, killed Brian.

I hope his friends' and family's attitude becomes commonplace, as there will be more contact between humans and sharks in NSW and around Australia in coming years, and they will be both tragic, like Brian's death, and relatively benign, like the little hammerheads scaring swimmers, and close calls like the white hassling the Long Reef kayakers.

Great whites are making a comeback since they were protected in Australian Commonwealth waters in 1997. They are protected in state waters too.

Three months ago The Daily Telegraph revealed fishing DVD maker Al McGlashan had come across what could be the world's largest concentration of juvenile great white sharks, swimming within metres of one beach on the state's Mid North Coast. Twenty-seven baby great whites were spotted in one day.

Protection alone isn't the only reason for their rising numbers. Two of a juvenile GWS's favourite foods, Australian salmon and yellowtail kingfish, are also on the increase. The salmon are back because a cannery in Eden on the NSW South Coast has been closed down, the kingfish because brutally effective commercial floating traps have been banned in NSW.

The salmon in particular, not being to the taste of humans, have exploded in numbers. Vast schools can be seen thrashing the surface to foam as they feed on tiny baitfish. After years of drought, recent coastal rain has also kick-started the marine ecosystem, allowing more baitfish to breed.

There will also be more contact between humans and sharks because, quite simply, there are more people in Australia, and more of them are getting into or onto the ocean.

Surfing has boomed in the past 10 years, becoming so popular that wizened waxheads constantly whinge about the now-crowded waves. Ocean swimming is the latest trendy athletic marine pursuit.

Snorkelling and diving are also experiencing growth.

Game fishers and commercial fishers can still fish for the other sharks common off Sydney and NSW waters - blues, makos, big oceanic hammerheads and oceanic whalers, as well as the scary bullsharks which pose more threat than any other shark to humans here.

Attitudes among game fishers have also changed. Far more sharks are now tagged and released to help scientific research than are killed, and those which are kept are generally smaller examples which taste good, like makos. Tigers are still hoisted on gantries to be weighed for club competitions, but that is generally the pursuit of young men who are driven by their raging hormones.

Commercial fishing, on the other hand, is posing the single biggest threat to our sharks.

In an echo of what I watched a quarter decade ago, shark carcasses are again being sent spiralling into the depths. This time around they will have their teeth intact, but will be missing their fins, sliced off and packed in ice for the insatiable Asian demand for shark fin soup.
 
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