Welcome To Stab’s Shark Week
An editorial week dedicated to the large cartilaginous fish we share lineups with.
Welcome to Shark Week 2026. The rest of the pieces will be released as follows:
—Are There More Great Whites In California Than Ever Before?
– The Trauma Gap: Seeing vs. Surviving Shark Attacks (July 21 PST)
– How Reunion Island Escaped Shark Purgatory (July 22 PST)
– Op-ed: Why Australia Needs More Shark Nets (July 23 PST)
– Op-ed: Why Australia Needs Less Shark Nets (July 23 PST)
– Tools To Survive A Shark Encounter (July 24 PST)
– Rasta’s Shark Theory (July 25 PST)
– Sharks In Heat(s) (July 26 PST)
– The Great Shark Debate (July 26 PST)
Every time you surf, you are risking death.
That’s true of most activities in life, including getting food from a vending machine (~11 deaths per year) or being in the vicinity of someone popping a cork (~2 deaths per year). But going for a surf (~15 deaths per year) tops them both.
The biggest risk of dying while surfing is becoming unconscious, passing out in the water, and drowning. By a significant margin.
Mark Foo, Todd Chesser, Malik Joyeux, Sion Milosky, and Kalani David are just a few of the many world-class surfers who have succumbed in this manner, either due to injury, illness, or disorientation. Many others — Dusty Payne, Evan Geiselman, Kala Grace, Kohl Christenson, Koa Rothman, and more — have been out cold and would have certainly perished were it not for the quick and decisive actions of another attentive surfer.
That’s because unlike concrete or snow, water takes no prisoners. When consciousness is lost, death comes softly yet quickly. It can happen to anyone at any time, regardless of skill level or physical conditioning. This alone makes surfing a greater mortal threat than most other sports.
It also totally ignores the fact that, unlike other sports, we are constantly surrounded by apex predators while we surf. Fifteen-foot well-toothed torpedoes are constantly swimming around beneath us, mostly ambivalent to our presence, as we are mostly unaware of theirs. Unless of course you’re unlucky enough to have an encounter with one of them. Or worse, die by their doing.
It is this type of death — occasionally to crocodiles but most commonly to sharks — that despite being significantly less probable than drowning, fuels most surfers’ nightmares. It’s the type of death that makes us question paddling out. The type of death that, as you’ll soon see, splits surfers down vaguely political lines.
For many of us, the mere act of entering the water on certain continents at certain times of year elicits a fight or flight response. A survival instinct kicks in that tells us to sit in a group, don’t splash around too much, and pull up our fucking feet. And it has nothing to do with the kilojoules above or the reef/rock/sand below.
Sharks have always been present in the surfing consciousness, but never more than today. In the world’s two primary surf hubs — California and Australia — attacks on surfers hit all-time highs in 2025, and the fear is palpable.
“I started fighting it as best I could, kinda pushing it and punching it on the nose and trying to get my legs free,” James Eastman, an English teacher from Northern California, remembers from his attack in 2025. “I’m glad I was still on top of my surfboard. I think if I wasn’t, it would’ve been a very different situation.”
“There’s so much fear around surfing at home right now, for everyone,” explains Saxon Reber, a Manly lifeguard and QS surfer who was among the first responders to a bull shark attack in Sydney earlier this year. “His whole calf muscle had been taken, and he’d pretty much bled out by the time I got there. There was a little bit of blood on the water’s edge, but there was no blood in his body to pump around. Just seeing how helpless you are to one of those animals is the hardest part. They’re so powerful and quick, you’ve just got no chance against them.”
These are just two of countless incidents you’ll hear about in Stab’s forthcoming Shark Week. Starting tomorrow, we’re dedicating seven full days to the big fish in our favorite salt pond. And several of those stories dissect whether Saxon is correct when he asserts we’ve got “no chance against them”.
A sense of what’s coming:
Why Are There More Great Whites In California Than Ever Before? (July 20 PST)
The Trauma Gap: Seeing vs. Surviving Shark Attacks (July 21 PST)
How Reunion Island Escaped Shark Purgatory (July 22 PST)
Op-ed: Why Australia Needs More Shark Nets (July 23 PST)
Op-ed: Why Australia Needs Less Shark Nets (July 23 PST)
Tools To Survive A Shark Encounter (July 24 PST)
Rasta’s Shark Theory (July 25 PST)
Sharks In Heat(s) (July 26 PST)
The Great Shark Debate (July 26 PST)
Shark Week will conclude with something that I’m personally quite passionate about: a debate between two Australian surfer-scholars on the topic of culling sharks. While many readers have already made up their minds on what role sharks play in surfing and how we, as humans, should or not interfere with their movements, I find myself firmly in the middle — confused and ambivalent, but far from indifferent about the topic of human-shark intervention.
So we invited two experts to speak with one another. One from each side of the divide.
First we have Fred Pawle (lower right in photo above): a career journalist who’s spent the last 11 years covering shark-surfer relations and funding/directing the film Heart of Sharkness. He’s an outspoken proponent of culling and self-proclaimed steward of “common sense” policy with a focus on human safety above all else.
Next we have Dr. Michael Mehmet (top right), an Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong who has performed over eight years of shark management research, and who generally disagrees with culling insofar as the science has failed to prove its efficacy of protecting humans or serving the broader marine environment.
It’s a fascinating debate, and one that will likely change some opinions and solidify others. That’ll be coming at the very end of Shark Week, on Sunday, July 26 (PST).
In the past, we’ve covered plenty of sharks on this site (see below for a list of our most intensive stories), but never in such a focused, intentional manner. The goal of Shark Week is not to resolve the issue of sharks in surfing, but to better understand current trends, explain how to prepare for incidents, how to avoid them where possible, and how to process them when they occur.
We also wanted to give a nod to Surfing World, who dedicated an entire issue recently to the topic of sharks. Their mag includes several fantastic pieces of big-fish literature and a mini-doc (below) that’s well worth your time. We built our Shark Week around the same time as their issue but tried to avoid unnecessary overlap.
Anyway, the water’s nice. You coming in?
Past Stab shark pieces to peruse:
We asked about sharks 3,000 surfers answered
Op-ed on the South Oz shark epidemic
Making sense of recent shark attacks with Marine biologist Brinkley Davies
Reunion Island’s post-shark-war boom
Fred Pawle’s film, Heart of Sharkness
