Shark cage diving...the experience of a lifetime!

Some of the New South Wales Waratahs have got up close and personal with a great white shark - and not the Greg Norman variety.

Adam Freier, Sam Norton-Knight, Will Caldwell, Benn Robinson, Daniel Halangahu, Troy Takiari, Tim Donnelly, Brett Sheehan, Alex Kanaar, and Ben Jacobs went shark diving at Gansbaai, east of Cape Town, as they took some recreational time out during the team's tour of South Africa.
White Shark Diving Company, run by Springbok Robbie Kempson, put the players into a cage and they got to touch a 2.5-metre monster.

Halangahu beamed:

It was unbelievable, just thrilling. I've never been that close to any sort of predator and I actually got to touch the fin of the great white, an amazing experience.
As for big Dell... well, he missed out.

Memories of swimming with great white shark

It is extremely rare to see a great white shark in Hawaiian waters and it is even more unusual to get a photo. But Jimmy Hall not only took a photo of one, he got out of the shark cage, took incredible video and even touched the great white. He calls it the best experience of his life.

KHNL News 8's Beth Hillyer spent the day with Jimmy Hall and the crew of Hawaii Shark Encounters to find out why Jimmy went face to face with perhaps the scariest creature on earth.
When I first saw video of Jimmy swimming with the great white, I admit I thought he was crazy. But having gone diving with him, well I have learned he has been swimming with sharks most of his life. And he considers them magnificent animals, not man-killers.

When you go diving with Hawaii Shark Encounters you see more than a dozen sharks but last December there was only one. At first those in the shark cage they mistook it for a humpback whale.

"When she first showed up the people in the cage were yelling, there's a giant shark here," said Jimmy Hall. "Oh my God, it's a great white and we ran forward to get our cameras so what the people in the cage thought there is a giant shark saw crew panic and run away."

He climbed inside the cage and was stunned by her size.

"We saw a white shark in Hawaii which is incredibly rare and then we saw one so big it would be rare even in South Africa, Guadalupe Island where they see white sharks," said Jimmy Hall, "then she was calm the water was clear I could get out and interact with her."

Hall calls the encounter, "one of the greatest gifts of my whole life."

To understand Hall you must know a little about his childhood. He grew up in the ocean. "I was always in the water trying to take pictures with my camera the rule was if shark bigger than me have to get out of the water."

Well he obviously broke the rule when swimming with the great white. He has had encounters with local tiger sharks also known for their ferocious attacks.

And he has caught a ride beside an enormous whale shark.

Among sharks, great whites are the most ferocious, and most feared, but Hall feels great whites don't deserve their bad reputation.

"I was able to get out and swim with this giant great white shark. People are just terrified but you can see she's not the mindless killing machine some people like to think."

He captured amazing images and even reached out to touch her.

"Being that close to a shark that big was very humbling very emotional probably the high point of my life," said Hall.

He wants the folks on his tours to understand the importance of the endangered sharks to our environment.

Benchley went from author of "Jaws" to protector of this specie

"NEARLY half the fish had come clear of the water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh and bone and rubber. The boy's legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom."

So ended the life of a child on an inflatable raft in Jaws, Peter Benchley's first and most successful novel. It spent more than 40 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list in 1974 and has sold more than 20 million copies.

Its success was cemented the following year with Steven Spielberg's film - the director's first with a big budget - propelled by John Williams's wonderfully baleful score. The film was Hollywood's first summer blockbuster, ending the notion that summer was a dead season in the cinema.

Benchley, a freelance journalist before this success, was able to live comfortably off his creation, following it with two more novels of watery menace, The Deep and The Island, also made into films. Yet he would come to regret his treatment of the great white shark as a murderous predator.

Benchley was the son of the writer Nathaniel Benchley and grandson of Robert Benchley, founder of the literary coterie known as the Algonquin Round Table. He learned about sharks on regular family trips to Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, where they would set out in a boat to catch swordfish but succeeded only in hooking sharks.

The idea jelled much later in 1964, when Benchley heard a news report that a fisherman had landed a 2060kg great white off Long Island: "I thought to myself, What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn't go away?".

After studying at Exeter High School and Harvard, Benchley made a living as a freelance journalist, supplying publications such as Life and The New Yorker. He became a journalist for the Washington Post and then an editor at Newsweek. He wrote some pieces about sharks, in which he maintained a keen interest.

Peter Congdon, an editor at the publishing house Doubleday, was sufficiently impressed with Benchley's journalism to approach him about writing a book. To Benchley's surprise, Congdon was most interested in his one fiction idea: the marauding shark that comes to rely on a steady diet of holidaymakers.

But it was not a smooth process. The first 100 pages were rejected and Benchley had to begin again.

Jaws was such an immediate success that Universal hurried to capitalise with a film, taking a gamble with the up-and-coming Spielberg. Benchley co-wrote the screenplay with Carl Gottlieb, but his choices for the story's masculine trio - Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen - were rejected. He quarrelled with Gottlieb about the script and was eventually ejected from the set for criticising the film's explosive climax.

Spielberg's film set new benchmarks in film-making. He was the first to use the forward-tracking zoom out technique to capture Roy Scheider's horror upon discovering the mutilated body of the teenage girl, known to all film students thereafter as the Jaws shot.

Scheider's small-town policeman, caught between the shark and local politics, was a likeable character, well balanced by Richard Dreyfuss as the fish geek and Robert Shaw as the hard-bitten shark hunter.

The book, by contrast, was an airport novel; formulaic, as predictable as it was occasionally shocking and raunchy, and with characters so hard to empathise with that Spielberg admitted, on reading the book, that he had wanted the shark to win.

Benchley's triumph was to release, like a primal scream, something that had loomed unexpressed in America's collective unconscious. Whether the sense of horror, and the pleasure readers took in experiencing it, was entirely to do with Carcharodon carcharias or something more Freudian is still hotly debated. Certainly no discussion of the psychoanalysis of cinema can avoid the book and poster illustration: the nubile female swimmer about to be taken by the creature that rises, jaws agape, like a missile from the darkness.

Jaws 2 (1978) was based on Benchley's original characters, but he had little to do with the increasingly ridiculous Jaws movie franchise, attended by a rash of films - Orca (1977), Piranha (1978), Tentacles (1977).

Benchley's second novel, The Deep (1976), was a well-conceived tale based on the story of the Constellation, a World War II ship sunk with a cargo of pharmaceuticals which became mingled with the cargo of two Spanish galleons sunk centuries before on the same reef. With sex, voodoo ritual, a voracious eel and Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt, the film did fairly well.

The movie adaptation of his third book, The Island, was a flop, and Benchley's novel-film strategy was abandoned until 1998 with the release of The Creature, based on his 1994 novel White Shark. The name of the novel was changed on reprint to agree with the film, but for little reward. Its key concept - a genetically mutated shark created in a lab for military purposes - informed the premise of Deep Blue Sea in 1999. Similarly, Benchley's Amazon, a television series in 1999, was eerily similar to Lost, which has enjoyed much greater success.

Benchley came to regret his misrepresentation of sharks, particularly the momentary spasm of macho nonsense whereby men would charter boats for shark-hunting trips after seeing Jaws. "When I was writing Jaws ... very few people knew anything about sharks, especially great white sharks," he said. "I attributed to them a kind of marauding monsterism that became what Jaws was. Now we know that sharks do not attack boats."

He made amends in a series of documentaries and appeared on ABC's American Sportsman series, where he befriended the ocean conservationist Sylvia Earle and the shark expert Eugenie Clark. He joined the National Board of Environmental Defence and made speeches for several marine concerns, using the ignorance of the oceans evident in Jaws as his starting point.

With the release of Shark Trouble (2002), a collection of sea stories, he was asked if he had turned into a shark-hugger. He replied: "What I have become, to the best of my ability, is a shark protector, a shark advocate, a shark appreciator, and above all a shark respecter."
Benchley is survived by his wife, Wendy, and by a son and daughter.

Rembering shark attack

Kenny Doudt talks about the longest 15 seconds of his life. It happened 25 years ago in the split second moments when he found himself in the jaws of a great white shark. The attack happened in the chilly waters off the coast of Oregon.

November 27th, 1979 was a crisp day with waves breaking at Doudt's favorite surf spot off Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast.

"I'm laying on it just like this paddling out. It's top jaw got my back," recounts Doudt.
The shark's sharp teeth sliced through Doudt's wetsuit. He appears to take pride in showing where the shark bit through the thick material. "This is the back of the wetsuit and this is the bitemark on my back".

The shark left a 15 inch scar on his back.

Doudt explains, "When he first got me -- comes out water and takes me like this. Takes me underwater as I'm prone on board paddling out."

Judging from the teeth marks, the shark that attacked Doudt weighed upwards of 3,500 pounds and was at least 17-feet-long.

The shark left a jaw imprint on Doudt's surfboard.

"Those are his front teeth. You can see how the board is gouged. And see those slices. That's when I'm in his mouth and he's shaking me back and forth. Those are the teeth going back and forth," says Doudt.

The shark had him for about 15 seconds, then let him go. Doudt says at that point, "I had already said my prayers and was ready to die. I said see you later you know".

Fellow surfers saw the shark attack and rushed to help.

"When I made it to shallow water I was laying there. They thought I was okay until they turned me over and my whole wetsuit flaps open - and blood pours out".

Doudt says he died twice, and only had a pint of blood left in him.

But he says he fought to stay alive for his little boys.

"Oh, I totally need to raise those boys. That was a big part of why I survived," recalls Doudt.
Now his sons are grown and Doudt is now a grandfather. He surfs with his boys on Kauai these days. He says surfing was the best therapy during his long recovery.

"Surfing has been healing for me."

Looking back on the day a great white left him for dead, Doudt says, "It was just my lucky day to survive."

Doudt wrote a book about surfing with a great white. He also is available as a motivational speaker.

You can find out more about Kenny by visiting his website, www.shark-bite.com.

2005 saw a drop in shark attacks

Shark attacks dropped in 2005 because people are fighting back more often when threatened and the ranks of ocean predators are thinning, a University of Florida report said on Monday.

Worldwide there were 58 shark attacks in 2005, down from 65 a year earlier, and fatalities fell to four from seven, said George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File housed at the university's Florida Museum of Natural History.

Attacks have been on the decline for five years, since reaching a record high of 78, 11 of them fatal, in 2000, Burgess said in the center's annual tally of shark attacks reported by scientists around the world. The center has kept records since 1958.

Human-shark encounters are dropping partly because there are fewer sharks, a decline caused by overfishing of the species, which generally is slow to reproduce, Burgess said.

Humans are also taking greater care to avoid areas where sharks gather and fighting back when they get bitten, Burgess said. A surfer bitten by a great white shark off the Oregon coast on December 24 drove it away with a punch to the nose, he said.

"If you're being approached by a shark, you certainly want to act aggressively toward the animal. They're a predator, they respect size and power," Burgess said.

"If you can smack them on the nose, certainly do so ... sharks seem to respect pops on the nose."
Those already in the jaws of a shark should "claw at the eyes and the gills to impress the animal that you're not going to go down easily," he advised.

Surfers were the most frequent victims last year, with 29 incidents, followed by swimmers and waders, 20, and divers, four.

U.S., AUSTRALIA LEAD

Despite the worldwide decline, the number of attacks in the United States rose slightly, to 38 last year from 30 a year earlier and well below the recorded high of 52 in 2000.

Most U.S. shark attacks occur in Florida. The state had 18 shark attacks last year, compared with 12 in 2004, a year in which a spate of hurricanes kept people out of the water. The record was 37 in 2000.

After the United States, Australia was the most likely spot for an unfriendly encounter with a shark. Burgess tracked 10 attacks in Australia, four in South Africa and one each in the Bahamas, St. Martin, Mexico, Fiji, Vanuatu and South Korea.

Australia has seen a relatively high number of shark attacks in the last two years, but the per capita rate of shark attacks has not risen over the past century, Burgess said. The increase coincides with a booming human population and Australia's growing attraction to tourists in recent decades, he said.

Of the four fatalities in 2005, two were in Australia, one in the Pacific island of Vanuatu and one in the United States.

The U.S. attack occurred June 25 along Florida's Gulf Coast, when a 14-year-old boy was attacked by a bull shark while swimming off Sandestin. It was the first death from a shark attack in four years in Florida.

Stalked by a great white shark

STAR Port Adelaide footballer Josh Francou has had a brush with a great white shark - and has the pictures to prove it.One day after a 2.4m bronze whaler was caught at Brighton beach, the Power on-baller encountered a great white he estimated to be 4.5m long, about 10km out from Brighton.

Francou was fishing for garfish and King George whiting at noon on Sunday when the shark "floated up like a submarine" at the back of his 5.3m boat and had him scurrying for his camera.
"We had caught a few gar and were just getting ready to go when we saw it, it was unbelievable," Francou said.

"It rolled on its side so you could see its white belly, it nudged the boat and for a moment looked like it was going to grab the outboard."

The shark circled Francou's fibreglass boat, owned by his father, Maurie - a hardman with North Adelaide in the 1970s - for about 10-to-15 minutes before disappearing into the ocean.

"I couldn't believe how big it was," Francou said. "I was in awe of its size.

"I've seen Jaws (the movie) and shark shows on television, but you don't appreciate how big these fish are until you see them in the flesh. It was massive."

Francou, runner-up in the Brownlow Medal in 2002 and third in 2001, was fishing with cousin Michael Brister and good mate Paul Bahr, who he joked was "not real brave" and was "physically shaking" at the encounter.

A regular angler with teammate Stuart Dew and former teammates Stuart Cochrane and Roger James, Francou said he always took a camera on his fishing trips in the "odd chance" that he would see a shark.

Author of "Jaws" passed away at 65

Peter Benchley, author of the bestseller "Jaws" that was the basis for the blockbuster movie that terrified beachgoers and kept many out of the water for years, died at his home at age 65, his family said on Sunday.

Benchley, well-known for other water-based suspense fiction including "The Deep" and "The Island," which also spawned films, died of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, his son-in-law Chris Turner told Reuters.

Benchley was diagnosed with the condition last autumn and his health had been diminishing, but his death at this time had not been expected, according to Turner.

"It was peaceful," he said, adding that the writer's wife Wendy and other family members were by his side at their Princeton, New Jersey home.

In addition to the fame he achieved as a novelist, Benchley was a reporter for the Washington Post and Newsweek, wrote for magazines and a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1967 until January, 1969.

The Harvard graduate, who grew up in New York City and went to prep school in New Hampshire, was also the grandson of writer and humorist Robert Benchley, member of the renowned Algonquin Round Table that included personalities such as Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood and Alexander Wolcott.

But it was the 1974 novel "Jaws," about a series of gruesome shark attacks that cause panic in a placid beach resort, that Benchley won the kind of fame rarely accorded any writer of popular fiction.

The book has sold more than 20 million copies, and Benchley even had a cameo as a reporter in the 1975 Steven Spielberg film, which spawned a series of inferior sequels.

Benchley said he had been interested in sharks since his childhood days spent on the island of Nantucket off Massachusetts. Then, in 1964, he read about a fisherman who caught a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island.

"I thought to myself, 'What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn't go away?' That was the seed idea of 'Jaws,'" he said in an interview on his Web site.

But he didn't pursue the idea until 1971. By the time the book, his first novel, came out in early 1974, it had earned more than $1 million before the first press run, including $575,000 for the paperback rights and from sales to books clubs and the film's producers.

Benchley continued his lifelong fascination with the sea and its potential terrors with "The Deep," about divers looking for treasure, and "The Island," in which sailors are terrorized by modern-day pirates. Among his latest books was "Shark Life: True Stories About Sharks and the Sea," which was published only last year.

"Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about," Benchley said.

"In 'Jaws' I knew a great deal about sharks. In 'The Deep' I had been lucky enough to learn about Bermuda and to meet Teddy Tucker, a great Bermudan treasure diver, while doing a story for the National Geographic, and I learned about shipwrecks in Bermuda," he added.

But, he noted, he was never injured by any sea creature other than jellyfish stings or sea urchin spines, although he was nearly bitten by sharks a few times.

Other books included "White Shark," "Beast," about a giant squid, and "Rummies," about an alcoholic's journey through recovery and rehabilitation.

Besides his wife Benchley is survived by two grown children. Funeral arrangements have not been formalized.

Author of "Jaws" passed away at 65

Peter Benchley, author of the bestseller "Jaws" that was the basis for the blockbuster movie that terrified beachgoers and kept many out of the water for years, died at his home at age 65, his family said on Sunday.

Benchley, well-known for other water-based suspense fiction including "The Deep" and "The Island," which also spawned films, died of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, his son-in-law Chris Turner told Reuters.

Benchley was diagnosed with the condition last autumn and his health had been diminishing, but his death at this time had not been expected, according to Turner.

"It was peaceful," he said, adding that the writer's wife Wendy and other family members were by his side at their Princeton, New Jersey home.

In addition to the fame he achieved as a novelist, Benchley was a reporter for the Washington Post and Newsweek, wrote for magazines and a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1967 until January, 1969.

The Harvard graduate, who grew up in New York City and went to prep school in New Hampshire, was also the grandson of writer and humorist Robert Benchley, member of the renowned Algonquin Round Table that included personalities such as Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood and Alexander Wolcott.

But it was the 1974 novel "Jaws," about a series of gruesome shark attacks that cause panic in a placid beach resort, that Benchley won the kind of fame rarely accorded any writer of popular fiction.

The book has sold more than 20 million copies, and Benchley even had a cameo as a reporter in the 1975 Steven Spielberg film, which spawned a series of inferior sequels.

Benchley said he had been interested in sharks since his childhood days spent on the island of Nantucket off Massachusetts. Then, in 1964, he read about a fisherman who caught a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island.

"I thought to myself, 'What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn't go away?' That was the seed idea of 'Jaws,'" he said in an interview on his Web site.

But he didn't pursue the idea until 1971. By the time the book, his first novel, came out in early 1974, it had earned more than $1 million before the first press run, including $575,000 for the paperback rights and from sales to books clubs and the film's producers.

Benchley continued his lifelong fascination with the sea and its potential terrors with "The Deep," about divers looking for treasure, and "The Island," in which sailors are terrorized by modern-day pirates. Among his latest books was "Shark Life: True Stories About Sharks and the Sea," which was published only last year.

"Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about," Benchley said.

"In 'Jaws' I knew a great deal about sharks. In 'The Deep' I had been lucky enough to learn about Bermuda and to meet Teddy Tucker, a great Bermudan treasure diver, while doing a story for the National Geographic, and I learned about shipwrecks in Bermuda," he added.

But, he noted, he was never injured by any sea creature other than jellyfish stings or sea urchin spines, although he was nearly bitten by sharks a few times.

Other books included "White Shark," "Beast," about a giant squid, and "Rummies," about an alcoholic's journey through recovery and rehabilitation.

Besides his wife Benchley is survived by two grown children. Funeral arrangements have not been formalized.

"Taranaki Terror" has negative influence on community!

Of course, they saw it only when they stopped looking. It was Wednesday evening last week, the sun was beginning to set, and researchers Clinton Duffy, Demian Chapman and DoC officer Bryan Williams were bobbing off the coast of New Plymouth in their 6m aluminium boat, Orca. They'd been cruising the grey-blue waters all day, hunting for a great white shark, rumoured to be up to 6m long, that has enthralled the coastal community for the past three weeks. The local Daily News, delighted with a genuine summertime story, has dubbed it the "Taranaki Terror", a nickname which does not even slightly amuse researchers and DoC officers.

Duffy, 41, is a real shark fan, who was fascinated by the creatures even before Jaws inflamed our collective unconscious with that sinister cello heartbeat. He saw his first shark aged 4, sitting in the back of his dad's boat off the Wairarapa coast, open-mouthed as it swept through the dark below. Now a marine scientist, he has spent 15 years devoting weekends and holidays to his passion, attending international shark conferences and recording data on shark numbers around New Zealand.

When he heard the media reports of a giant great white off Taranaki the previous weekend, Duffy was on his honeymoon in the Bay of Plenty. He waited until Wednesday before rushing to New Plymouth to attempt satellite-tagging the shark. "I didn't break off my honeymoon - I'm not quite that obsessed." With Chapman, a researcher from the US-based Pew Institute for Ocean Science, Duffy tried spotting the shark from a hired plane, then went out on the water and spent about six hours spreading a trail of burley - a chopped-up bait mix of fishy swill.

As the light faded, they stopped in the Sugarloaf Islands/Nga Motu Marine Park to allow a cameraman, also in the boat, to get some pictures of the setting sun. "Then I just saw it, in front of us, at least 4m long, leaping out of the water after a seal, going a million miles an hour," Duffy says. "It's not polite to actually repeat what I said ... something like 'Oh **** look at this bloody big shark!"' Williams slammed the boat forward the 600m towards where the shark had been. But all they found were "three seals going for their lives towards the horizon".

It was luck and frustration - so close, but not nearly close enough for tagging, which would have helped increase scientists' scant knowledge of great white behaviour. Over the past three weeks, this shark - or several different sharks, or a pod of orcas, or "a complete load of bloody hype", depending upon whom you talk to - has been silently cruising up and down the coast, creating a frenzy on shore.

Surfers and jetskiers and fishermen have seen it (for it has become a singular beast in the public mind, this lone Terror) leaping for prey or hovering beneath their boats. A pair of kayakers claimed it ripped a seal to shreds, splattering them with blood. Oakura beach was briefly closed after one sighting. Surfer Stefan Freeman, 26, laughs about getting eaten, then picks up his longboard and runs out into the breakers. Tour-boat operator Dave "Happy Chaddy" Chadfield has rigged up four wooden shark-fins around the Sugarloaf Islands to thrill his customers. "I can guarantee you, by the time those pictures get back to England or Sweden or wherever, they will be real shark-fins," Chadfield says.

Everyone who comes in to buy a pair of bathers or a wetsuit at Taranaki Hard Core surf shop cracks a shark joke, says manager Phil Dwyer. All the boaties have heard rumours of hunters travelling to the coast to kill the shark for its jaw - potentially worth up to $30,000 - but all say they hope it will be left alone.

The recreational fishermen are irritated with DoC for trying to attract the shark, while DoC's Bryan Williams says reckless kayak fishermen are risking their lives by fishing in flimsy craft close to the shark's feeding spot, a seal colony. At the Hunting and Fishing New Zealand store by the port, $19.95 will get you a T-shirt emblazoned with "I'm not afraid of the Great White Shark" on the front and the more succinct "Bite Me" on the back.

The shark that zoomed out of the water 20m in front of Boyd Rutherford's boat last Friday was bigger than he had ever expected, nearly as big as his 6.5m boat Spot On, as he and friend Paul Drought slowly motored southwards along the coast after a morning's fishing. "There was a flock of birds sitting on top of the water and all of a sudden it just came rushing out. Nearly its entire body was out of the water ... You just have no idea how big they are until you see them," says Rutherford, 26, a quietly spoken butcher and fisherman, smiling at the memory as he guides the boat through the hilly seas around the Sugarloaf Islands.

After seeing the shark, Rutherford radioed friend Kevin Moratti, aboard a nearby boat. "You're not allowed to swear on the radio channels, so Boyd just said, 'Oh f.f.f ... far out, you'll never believe what we've just seen'," laughs Moratti, who is chairman of the Taranaki chapter of Recreational Fishers New Zealand. He thinks DoC's spreading of burley is putting divers and kayak fishermen in danger. "How would they like it if I trawled a silhouette of a DoC officer off the back of my boat and burleyed up?"

A group of six salty old surfie mates lean on their cars at the end of Belt Rd, reminiscing about their 40 years in and around these waters. John "Horse" McLeod admits to taking a very close look at a patch of seaweed which floated by as he was waiting for a wave on Thursday. "You forget about it once you're in the wave," McLeod says. "The sharks are just part of the playground." The great white record * The world's largest predatory fish, they are found up to 7m long and weighing two tonnes.* Got a bad name after the 1975 movie Jaws.*

Their common prey includes fish, seals, sealions and dolphins.* They are not as common as other large sharks - such as hammerheads - off our coasts.* Their hunting strategy is to strike once, inflicting massive wounds and leaving victims in an incapacitated state, and then return later to finish the job.*

Last known attack: February 2003, on diver Alistair Ferr in Foveaux Strait He needed 60 stitches in his arm.* Last known fatal attacks: the 1960s, off the Otago coast, where several occurred on surfers and surf lifesavers. And one fatal attack at Oakura, Taranaki, when 14-year-old Rae Keightley was mauled by a great white in 1966.

Some charters tours taking advantage of great white shark sightings

Dave Chadfield, who operates Chaddy's Charters, is taking groups on "shark sighting tours" around the Sugar Loaf Islands.

"We're trying to get a shark, so if you put your feet in the water, that would be helpful," he told passengers yesterday.

Numerous sightings of a 6m great white shark, known as the Taranaki Terror, have closed Taranaki beaches and created national headlines in the past few weeks.

To make matters worse, the Department of Conservation said yesterday there might actually be two great whites lurking.

Mr Chadfield, who operates his restored English lifeboat as a tourist boat, is making the most of the shark fever.

He has placed three plywood dorsal fins in the water around the Sugar Loaf Islands.

"I had people saying to me 'if I don't see a shark, do I get my money back?', so I thought I'd create one. They look real and people love it."

The most likely place to see a great white would be near the islands, he said.

"It's like a McDonald's out at the islands, with all the seals."

He said he spent 1½ hours swimming there on Saturday night.

"I had berley and bait all around me, kids fishing from my boat and I never saw one."

English couple John Alderson and Nik Ingrey are visiting family in New Plymouth and decided to take a Chaddy's Charters tour.

They said they were impressed with the realistic-looking shark fins.

"They're a good photo opportunity to fool the folks back at home with," Ms Ingrey said.

DOC programme manager Bryan Williams said people needed to be aware there were possibly two sharks still in the area.

One was reliably estimated at 6m, but one he saw last week was definitely smaller than that.
He encouraged people to contact the department if they saw a great white.

The shark had been seen near the dredge, off Port Taranaki, and he warned kayakers not to fish in the port's entrance. "They are living very dangerously if they use berley. In the murky water the dredge is creating, they wouldn't see it (the shark) coming."

Meanwhile, in the latest sighting, a New Plymouth chef thought he might actually be on the shark's menu yesterday.

Surfer Matty Bowling (23) was about 50 metres offshore at New Plymouth's Back Beach when he saw a shark fin 80 metres away.

"It was coming towards us," he said, clearly shaken by the encounter. "It was travelling at speed and I turned around and paddled for shore."

He warned about six other boardriders and they all caught the same wave in.

"I was pretty shocked. I have been writing it off, saying it's a myth – and here he came," he said.
There was also a black fin spied at Oakura about 4pm yesterday, but those who saw the creature leap out of the water were uncertain whether it was a shark or a whale.

Oakura mother of two Richelle Landers said she and her children saw a fin break the surface about 30 metres out.

"It was a big creature and pretty close," she said.

However, it was later confirmed that the black fin and leaping body belonged to an orca, one of a pod that swam off Oakura Beach yesterday afternoon.

The orcas were also seen by Kaitake Community Board members meeting in the New Plymouth Old Boys' Surf Club rooms.

Swimming race cancelled in Sydney due to shark sighting

Swimmers in an ocean race off Sydney faced their worst nightmare when a 10-foot shark was spotted heading straight for them, forcing race officials to quickly pluck competitors from the water.
Swimmers in the Cole Classic ocean swim, a six-mile race out through the heads of Sydney Harbor to the city's northern Manly Beach, were around the halfway mark on Sunday when the shark was spotted, local newspapers reported on Monday.

Safety boats following the swimmers out of the harbor quickly pulled competitors onboard, while officials on jet skis chased the shark out to sea.

The race was immediately called off, but a shorter race for amateur swimmers off Manly Beach went ahead.

Australia has had a spate of shark attacks in recent months.

A scuba diver off the Western Australian city of Perth survived an attack by a great white shark in January after fighting it off with his speargun and then his hands.

A 21-year-old woman died in January after she was attacked by three sharks while swimming off an island on Australia's northeast coast. She lost both forearms and suffered wounds to the legs and torso.

Australia's first recorded shark attack was in 1791. As of January 2006, there had been a total of 659 attacks in Australian waters, 193 of them fatal, according to the Australian Shark Attack File at Sydney's Taronga Zoo.

The new crystal cage is the best way to observe a great white shark!

For each person who dreams of seeing a Bengal Tiger in its natural habitat, there will be another who wants to swim with dolphins; for every whale, elephant, wombat or turtle fanatic there will be someone else whose idea of bliss is to sit in an English country garden sipping lemonade and watching butterflies.

If nominating an "ultimate" wildlife experience thus involves a certain degree of subjectivity, there can be little doubt that the chance to observe and interact with a Great White shark -- a fish that has variously been described as "the perfect hunting machine" and "evolution's masterpiece" -- brings with it a sense of awe and wonder that few, if any other animal encounters can possibly match.

And if getting close to a great white shark is one of life's magical experiences, it is doubly so when conducted from the interior of the so-called "Crystal Cage."

Perfect View

The cage is the brainchild of South African Kim "Shark Lady" Maclean, an oceanographic expert widely credited with introducing the practice of recreational cage-diving to South African waters in the early 1990s.

In traditional cage diving sharks are attracted to an area of ocean by "chumming" -- pouring a mixture of blood and fish guts into the water -- whereupon scuba divers are lowered into the water in a large steel cage and are able to view the approaching sharks through the bars.

Although the "crystal cage" works on the same principal, it offers a much more naturalistic, less intrusive interaction with the great white, not least because the "cage" is not actually a cage at all.
Rather, it is a 2.2 meter high, 1.5 meter diameter tube made of Lexan, a transparent, high-resistance polycarbonate plastic with 250 times the impact strength of glass.

The crystal cage allows you to feel at one with the shark and its environment

Lowered into the water inside this protective sheath, the diver experiences a feeling of complete oneness with the shark's natural habitat, his view unhindered by bars or other obstructions.

More important, the transparent Lexan blends completely with the surrounding ocean, making the diver's presence in the water far less disruptive to the shark and its environment.

"For the diver it is an awesome experience," says Maclean. "You feel there is no barrier between you and the shark, that you are completely part of their world. It is the closest you can get to actually swimming free with them.

"At the same time it is a much more relaxing experience for the Great White. Sharks are incredibly sensitive to magnetic fields, and when you put a great big steel cage in the water you are creating a lot of electro-magnetic disturbance.

"Being made of Lexan the crystal cage doesn't do that. And because there are no metal bars or sharp edges to bash into there is less chance of the shark getting hurt in any way."

Like watching a Tyrannosaurus Rex

The technology for the crystal cage is still relatively new -- Maclean developed it in conjunction with aeronautical engineers -- and while it has been used by film crews, the submersible continues to undergo testing and will not be available to the general public until mid-2006 at the earliest.

When it is, however, those wealthy enough to try it -- a day of diving in the crystal cage costs $1,800 -- will get the chance to observe at close quarters, and with no visual obstruction, one of the most ancient, majestic and awe-inspiring creatures on the planet.


As a species sharks have been around for 400 million years

"As a species sharks have been around for 400 million years," says Dr. Robert Hueter, Director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. "They are one of the last remaining groups of large predator, and the Great White is the largest predatory shark of them all.
"It is a hugely impressive animal, a marvelous swimming machine that exists right at the very top of the food pyramid.

"To have these animals still in the ocean and to be able to see them close up is the equivalent of still having dinosaurs on earth, of being able to watch a Tyrannosaurus Rex go after its prey. We should all be aware of how special that is."

Responsible Diving

While there are those who criticize the practice of diving with sharks, arguing that it is bringing sharks in too close to the coast and encouraging them to regard humans as prey, the expert view is that so long as it is done responsibly it can be beneficial both for the diver and the shark.
"As with anything, there is good and bad practice," says Ali Hood of the UK-based Shark Trust. "Where people behave in an appropriate manner, where the sharks are not whipped up into a frenzy, then it can be extremely beneficial.

The image of sharks as man-eating monsters is misplaced, conservationists say.
"It gives people a first-hand opportunity to witness sharks in their natural environment, to learn about them. At the same time it raises the economic value of the live shark, which is probably the strongest conservation tool you can have."

Education and conservation are two of the main drivers behind the crystal cage.
"The main reason I do this is because people are so misinformed about sharks," says Kim Maclean. "People have this idea that they are these man-eating monsters when the reality is just so different.

"I want people to see these amazing animals for what they really are. And being inside the crystal cage is probably the ultimate way of doing that."

Sighting of great white shark closes beach

Bernadette Lina and her dad, Roland, were less than 300m from the shore when they saw the massive shark leap from the water, just metres from their jetski.

They say the huge fish was a 6m-long great white.

The pair rushed to shore and alerted lifeguards. Swimmers were immediately cleared from the sea.

"We saw this big thing come out of the water with gaping teeth," Bernadette said. "I was scared I was going to fall off and it would eat me.

"It did a flip and had a white belly and I saw its fins. It was definitely a great white."

Mr Lina, a New Plymouth real estate agent, was worried the shark might flip the jetski, but remained calm for his daughter's sake. "Then I got the hell out of there."

On a recent trip by the family to the Bay of Islands, a pod of orca whales had played around their boat for about an hour. Mr Lina said they were about 6m long.

"The shark was the same size. It did a bit of a dolphin display – it was like Flipper."
The fish then headed towards the Sugar Loaf Islands.

His wife, Linda Simpson-Lina, was at the Oakura Beach Holiday Park, oblivious to what was happening out at sea.

"I said to them before they left, `Watch out Jaws doesn't get you', but I said it as a joke."
Mark Hopkins, of New Plymouth, was staying at the campsite for the weekend.

"I happened to look out (from the camp) and saw a massive splash," he said.

He was sure it was the shark crashing back into the sea: "It's a bit of a pain, because it's perfect for windsurfing, but I'm too scared to go out there."

New Plymouth Old Boys Surf Lifesaving Club captain Bruce MacDonald said there were about 50 people swimming between the flags and a few outside the patrolled area at the time of the scare.
Warning signs were erected, police were contacted and the IRB was dispatched to look for the fish.

"People came out of the water in a calm and orderly manner. There were several sightings of the shark leaping around."

He said the club could not force people to stay out of the water and a few ventured back in.
"Very rarely do we ever close beaches around the country, but we've got an exceptional instance with this shark in Taranaki waters."

Although the threat of a shark attack was minimal, it was the club's responsibility to discourage people from swimming, he said.

"We don't like scaremongering, but it wouldn't look good at all if we knew of the threat and didn't do anything about it and somebody was taken."

New Plymouth Mayor Peter Tennent was one of the swimmers at Oakura Beach on Saturday.
"We were having a swim with everyone else and the surf club told us, `You'd be swimming with a great white, make your own decision', and everyone got out of the water," he said.

He said the incident caused much excitement and everybody was talking about the shark afterwards. The beach was reopened at 5pm.

Jeff O'Neill, of New Plymouth, arrived at the beach about 5.20pm. He heard about the shark sightings, but was not put off going for a quick dip. "I just thought, I'm not going out too deep."
There were aircraft and a helicopter, thought to be privately owned, circling above the beach to check out the action.

Surf Life Saving Taranaki development officer Guy Honnor said there were no reports of shark sightings at other beaches in the region during the weekend.

He advised people to stay within the flags and not swim past the breakers.

Mr MacDonald said people were back swimming at Oakura Beach yesterday, with numbers about normal for a hot day.

There have been several sightings of the shark, dubbed the Taranaki Terror.

A week ago, the Department of Conservation issued warnings to swimmers, saying there was at least one large great white in North Taranaki waters.

Marine scientists issued fresh warnings last Wednesday when they failed to tag the shark. During their mission, they saw a shark, at least 4m long, dive out of the water near Seal Rock, off Port Taranaki.

The last time Oakura Beach was closed was in 1966, when 14-year-old Rae Keightley was attacked by a shark while swimming.

It is the only known fatality from a shark attack in Taranaki.

Kayaker's encounter with great white shark

Two people kayaking about a mile off Maui's Kihei coast reported an encounter with a large white shark at midday yesterday, according to state officials.

The shark, which was estimated at 18 feet long by a professional dive boat captain, exhibited "very interesting behavior," said Randy Honebrink, a biologist and education specialist with the Department of Land and Natural Resources.

"It had been hanging around by the kayak, came up close to it, bumped it, then continued to follow it for 10 to 15 minutes," Honebrink said he was told by the tour boat captain. "There was also a humpback whale and calf not too far away from where the kayakers were, so there were a number of things the shark could have been interested in."

"Apparently (the kayakers) were concerned enough to flag down a passing tour boat," which took them on board between Makena Beach* and Molokini Island, Honebrink said.

No beaches were closed, but nearby hotels were informed, said DLNR spokesman Clifford Inn. He did not have any information on the identity of the kayakers.

The Coast Guard was informed of the shark sighting at 12:12 p.m. yesterday and broadcast warnings about it for boaters in the vicinity, said Coast Guard civilian worker Chris Kimbrough.
"It could have been a white shark or a tiger shark," Honebrink said. "I don't think anybody's ever going to be able to confirm what it was."

White sharks, also known as great white sharks, are known to be in Hawaii waters but not in large numbers and are not often seen, Honebrink said.

On Dec. 28, about three miles off Haleiwa, Jimmy Hall, owner of Hawaii Shark Encounters, videotaped and swam with a great white shark 18 to 20 feet long.

A great white shark that had some distinctive markings was photographed at Molokini about a year ago, Honebrink said. "I don't know if that one has been compared with (the video) footage of the one (in Haleiwa) a month ago or not."

Hawaii, not unknown to great white sharks

More great white shark sightings in Hawaiian waters are creating a buzz among locals, who aren't accustomed to hearing about up-close encounters with the ocean's most feared predator. Shark expert John Naughton, who works for the National Marine Fisheries Service, says, "This is quite unusual to be able to document a couple white sharks in a short time period."

A group monitoring whales off Kona on Monday photographed a 14 footer.

On Maui, a kayaker near Molokini Crater says he was trailed by a shark. Experts don't know why the sharks come here.

"They meander through the islands. For what purpose we don't know. We suspect it may be something to do with reproduction," says Naughton.

Naughton says he and his colleagues are tracking the movement of these sharks, working with mainland colleagues.

"They have photo archives with a lot of these sharks and we're trying to match the scars with the animal we've seen here, with the animals there."

Naughton says great white are a protected species in many areas. "White sharks have been overfished for years and their populations are decimated. We're actually trying to protect them, trying to increase the population. They're just a magnificent animal. They're really the tyrannosaurus rex of the ocean. We'd like to bring back the populations to a healthy balance."

Naughton says he's not surprised by all the recent shark sightings, and attributes it more to the prevalence of photography equipment rather than an uptick in visiting sharks.

Tagging failed but presence of great white shark noted near coastline

Marine scientist Clinton Duffy and former New Plymouth marine biologist Demian Chapman attempted to tag the terror of the deep with pop-off satellite tags to monitor its movements.
It would have enabled them to learn more about the species.

But their five-hour mission, which finished at 10pm, failed to lure the shark with berley.
However, during the mission Mr Duffy did see a great white at least 4m long dive out of the water near Seal Rock, off Port Taranaki.

It is the latest of several sightings in the past month, of the shark dubbed the Taranaki Terror.
"We stopped for the sunset and as we were watching I saw a huge white shark almost breach, it almost jumped completely clear of the water off Seal Rock," Mr Duffy said.

"We went back and three fur seals just nailed it out of there.

"At this time of the day (8.30), just as it gets dark the seals come down.

"It looked as if the shark had been patrolling the rock in quite deep water," he said.

Berley tuna, used for snapper fishing, was put on the water surface to attract the shark to the boat but it never reappeared.

However, Mr Duffy cautioned kayakers and divers about going near the Sugar Loaf Islands.
He said they should avoid the area unless it was absolutely necessary to go there.

Sharks hunted prey from the ocean floor, looking up at objects floating on the surface.

A diver, kayaker or surfer could be mistaken for a floating seal, whale or dolphin, he said.

Swimmers should also take care not to wander past the surf line.

He said the warning was not intended to scare people.

"It is sensible," he said.

"I think we can be pretty sure the shark is hunting seals around the island. There's no guarantee it's the only one out there, but there is at least one."

"It's possible there's always been one or more sharks moving up and down the coast . . . that's what we would like to find out by attaching these tags."

This morning, he and Mr Chapman were heading out to sea to again try to tag the shark.
Mr Chapman, a research assistant at Peu Institute in Miami, donated three satellite tags, worth $5200 each, to tag white sharks in New Zealand waters.

The tags are placed below the dorsal fin, using a pole and thin needle, and after nine months are released to the water surface, transmitting data to a satellite which downloads the information to the scientist.

Last weekend one of the tags was used on a 2.2m great white at Manukau Harbour – the first of any shark species satellite-tagged in New Zealand waters.

New device used to track sharks

Barry first encountered Neale in March 2001 when he was caught as part of a trial of satellite tracking white sharks. The research is part of a bigger picture for understanding the behaviour of white sharks; how sharks appear in certain places at certain times and the cues that they use for movement, explains Barry.

The goal is "for us to better predict whether we are likely to have interactions with sharks so that we can learn to live with them."The scientists travelled to Ninety Mile beach east of Wilson's Promontory in Victoria. looking for small white sharks. When Neale was first brought on board, Barry was feeling a bit sorry for him. "I gave him a hug," he says tongue-in-cheek. Neale was about 4-5 years old, 2.4m long and weighed about 150kg.

The team placed him on a foam mat and removed the hook, then attached the tag to his dorsal fin. The whole operation was timed to take only a few minutes. Scientists don't like to catch sharks much bigger than Neale as it's quite dangerous for both parties. Designed to be in water, shark organs aren't well supported on land. As the operation is also dangerous for the humans, they've worked out the least stressful way to catch, tag and release.

"By the time we bring them to the boat, they (the sharks that is) are usually tired enough that they're quite will behaved and will sit still," says Barry.The type of tag used requires Neale to come to the surface in order for signal to be picked up by the satellite. The scientists are alerted but don't always wait for the computers to tell them.

"We get too excited in the mornings and we like to dial into the satellite network," says Barry.While CSIRO spends much effort and money tagging and tracking the sharks, they don't neglect what happens after the batteries run down. An important point about the electronic devices is that once they are no longer functioning, the sharks don't need them so they should come off, says Barry. "So we design components into tags that allow them to do so."