“What’d they expect would happen when they protected Great Whites and whales?” It was old Freddy, the fisherman, coming up behind me on the rocks where I was looking at the remains of the dolphin that had been washed in with the swell and tide. “Would have had to have been at least three metres, maybe four, judging by the bite circumference. She wouldn’t have even known what hit her. Unless she was chased, poor thing.”

It’s true what Freddy said about the population of sharks and whales. There’s more of them on the East Coast than at any other time in the 50 years I’ve been surfing here. The sharks are decimating the dolphins, just ask George Greenough, who says no-one’s interested in this inconvenient truth. The death of dolphins is too complicated a competing story-line for mainstream media to publish, given its simplistic addiction to other fear based narratives.

Hell, last year I was out in the middle of the bay when a three metre White started thrashing about ten metres from where I was paddling. The mullet were running and mackerel were chopping up the water like a southerly buster. It was a terrifyingly slow and quiet paddle back into the beach, desperately trying not to attract any attention to myself. A few hours later, the smart drumline hooked a three-and-a-half metre White a hundred metres offshore. God only knows if it was the same one. There could be hundreds of them out there.

I asked my friend working on the boat that relocates the hooked and tagged sharks if they return to the smart drum line for another feed. “Na, they swim straight out to the shelf and dive as deep as they can, ‘bombing’ we call it, before heading north or south. Sometimes, they don’t resurface for days or even weeks.”

Some surfers don’t like how many more sharks there are out in the water, but I don’t mind. I think we would’ve known by now if we were on the menu. A few months ago, while the whales were heading north for the winter, I saw a pack of sharks feeding on a whale two hundred metres off where I surf with my friends most mornings. It was unmistakable what was going on. Instantly recognisable as a feeding frenzy of large sharks thrashing about as they cored chunks out of the helpless animal.

Believe it or not, I like being back in the food chain. It’s super exciting to be in a situation where every breath might be your last. I mean, it’s highly unlikely that anyone reading this will ever be attacked, and while I’ve talked to quite a few shark attack survivors, statistically, I’ve got far more of a chance of being knocked down by a car on my E-bike than bitten in half like that dolphin.

I love that surfing is so hard-core. It’s way more fun than playing it safe. While practicing what other sport is there a chance you will be chased down by a prehistoric animal who attacks you with its face full of sharp teeth and tears you to pieces? Perhaps an alligator might take a nip at you while putting on the 18th hole at Mar-a-Lago with the Orange Man; but that will probably be a CIA robot. Or a Polar Bear could smell you from five miles away and track you down while you were cross-country skiing in the Arctic. It’s far more likely a drunk lunatic will sucker punch you while playing darts down at the Bowlo.

It’s easy for me to be cocky, sitting here tapping away at my keyboard, but when I think about the worst-case scenario, the true story of the USS Indianapolis in 1945, as described by Robert Shaw playing Quint in Jaws, I shudder. This is my favourite monologue in the history of literature and cinema.

“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.

Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.

Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces.

You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist.

At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.

Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”