Surfer Escapes Great White’s Bite At Cabarita Beach
12-foot shark snaps board in half, surfer dodges a bullet.
A close call this morning on the north coast of NSW, just a half hour drive south of the most crowded point break on earth, Snapper Rocks. A suspected 4m+ Great White Shark made a clean pass at a surfer’s board, snapping it in half, but, miraculously, not even grazing the human attached to it.
Just before 7:30 a.m., Brad Ross, a Cabarita local, paddled out at what looked like a glorious winter morning at Cabarita Point. Not long after, he was hit by the white.
The whole thing was caught on the Surfline camera, though it’s zoomed out, a little pixelated, and mostly just a blur of splashes. Still, unsettling. The footage is below, if you’re inclined to watch.
What’s crystal clear are the images flooding in of the perfect bite mark in the bottom left of Brad’s Vissla mid-length. The question — how the hell did it miss him entirely?
In the photos, Brad looks incredibly calm, leaning his head into the bite mark, smiling and laughing. Impressive, considering how close he came to disaster, though you’d have to expect the reality will hit him soon.
“It’s incredible he’s ok,” wrote Kelly Slater. “Great example of why I fear open ocean swimming so much. Surfboards have saved quite a few surfers with that tiny barrier.”
A bullet dodged.
This marks the second attack at Cabarita in under two months. In late July, a teenager was bitten through the bicep by a suspected bull shark, then followed all the way into ankle-deep water by the predator, which was caught on an iPhone as it stalked him to shore.
That incident came on a grey, rainy afternoon, basically the conditions you’d sketch up if you were asked to design a shark attack. Today, though, it was a crystal-clear, sunny morning, hardly the kind of day you’d expect a 12-foot white to show up.
After the incident, a drone followed the shark as it cruised past the headland, leisurely, unfazed by its earlier efforts. Watch below.
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