‘I could have reached out and poked it in the eye’
Below the Surface is a Stuff series by Hamish McNeilly about five shark attacks in the 1960s and early 70s off the coast of Dunedin. Three men were killed and two more seriously injured, devastating families, traumatising survivors, and sparking hysteria
Wagging school to surf, Barry Watkins was just two rides in when he and his board were pulled under the water.
‘‘I was impacted as hard as hell.’’ Thinking he was hit by a boat, he could see nothing above him and was suddenly driven back to the surface.
With panic setting in, he looked beneath him and there was ‘‘this huge head of a fish’’ holding onto this leg and his surfboard.
‘‘I remembered the eyes... these huge bloody eyes.’’
SHARKIE DAYS
This is the story of the teen, the shark and the narrow escape that never quite left him.
At one point, Watkins and the great white shark were face-to-face on his six-foot surfboard at St Clair.
The then 16-year-old was acutely aware of sharks, particularly after the deaths of surfer Les Jordan and fellow lifesaver William Black.
‘‘It was a freaky time,’’ said Watkins, who recalled the St Clair shark bell sounding every few weeks in warning. ‘‘We would watch the water for 15 minutes before entering.’’
Surfers even dubbed a particular Dunedin day – low cloud or mist with oily looking water – as ‘‘sharkie days’’ and would stay out to avoid becoming the latest shark statistic.
‘‘You always had to keep an eye out for them.’’
‘I HOPED IT WOULD END QUICKLY’
But on March 30, 1971, everything pointed to a good day of surfing at St Clair with the sun beginning to poke through the mist.
Watkins, who was wagging school with a few mates, entered the water after his friends. He had two decent rides before he paddled back into the rip, then ‘‘bam’’.
‘‘I felt like I had been wrapped by the bow of a boat.’’
After seeing the head of the shark, he began screaming as soon as his head broke through the surface of the water now turning blood red around him. ‘‘I hoped it would end pretty quickly.’’
Watkins says he didn’t try to kick or punch the shark. ‘‘I just froze.’’
Holding onto the board with a vice-like grip, ‘‘I knew if I let go of it that would be the end of it.’’ But the attack was far from over.
The shark – which bite marks suggested was between four and five metres long – took another lunge at his board. ‘‘I got separated [from the board] and that is when panic set in.’’
EYE TO EYE WITH A GREAT WHITE
However, Watkins says either God or a spirit was looking after him, as the shark took another lunge at the board and while thrashing it around ‘‘he threw it at me’’.
Scrambling back on the board, he watched as the shark lifted its head out of the water and ‘‘plonked it on the board’’. Watkins on one half of the board, a great white shark – almost three times his height – on the other.
‘‘I could have reached out and poked it in the eye, and then it slid back into the water and took one bite, got a really good hold and the board snapped in half.’’
The pressure of that bite forced Watkins and his now one-metre long surfboard out of the rip.
He watched as the dorsal fin did a slow turn towards the other half of his board. ‘‘That’s when I started to look around.’’
With a wave starting to break, Watkins thought: ‘‘I will take that.’’
‘‘I had about at three feet of fibreglass under me... I got picked up and basically belly-boarded five feet from the shore.’’
Bleeding on the beach, a tourniquet was applied to his thigh and he was rushed to Dunedin Hospital, given 90 stitches and later discharged.
A VISIT FROM GRIEVING MOTHERS
While recovering at home he was visited by the still grieving mothers of Jordan and Black.
‘‘I could see what those poor ladies were going through, they could see their son sitting in the bed.’’
They were crying and barely spoke. ‘‘I just felt so damn sorry for them, especially for Mrs Black knowing your son had been eaten. It is a horrible thing.’’
Watkins recalled his father giving him a whiskey to drink, not knowing
he was full of painkillers, before TV cameras came into his bedroom for an interview.
Mobile within two weeks, he recalled the Bayfield High School principal making a joke of the incident at assembly.
‘‘Let it be known to all you pupils it is not school policy to feed truants to the sharks.’’
‘‘I knew if I let go of it that would be the end of it.’’
Barry Watkins
TEEN HIT IN THE FACE BY SHARK’S NOSE
Some three years earlier, another teen had also survived a close encounter with a shark at the same beach.
It was Christmas Day 1968 when Gary Barton was at St Clair trying out his new surfboard.
The 17-year-old spotted something in the water, moments before a shark struck his board knocking him off.
Swinging his legs back on board he was then hit in the face by the shark’s nose, knocking him off once more.
‘‘I climbed back on again and started paddling as fast as I could for shore,’’ Barton told media at the time. He has not spoken publicly again of what happened.
Incredibly, he suffered only a grazed elbow and an imprint of the shark’s teeth in his two-week-old surfboard.
Those teeth marks were more than an inch deep. Adding to the hysteria was that a three-metre shark had swum under a surfer’s board, just four days earlier.
Concerns were raised that sewage discharged near Lawyer’s Head was attracting sharks.
The attack on Barton prompted a local company to offer a bounty of $2 a foot for each shark caught off city beaches.
The Otago Daily Times reported the first bounty was paid for a harmless five-foot sand shark caught off White Island, near St Clair, on January 2.
UNFAZED
Watkins, whose board was sliced in two by a shark, believed the high number of seals drove the sharks to the area. ‘‘It is not rocket science, the sharks go where the food goes.’’
He did not support a theory that a single rogue shark was responsible for the attacks, he was just in the wrong place – the shark’s environment – at the wrong time.
Yet rumours of a large shark off Dunedin persisted.
His was the last attack off the Dunedin coast and Watkins hoped there would never be another one.
‘‘It won’t do anyone any good, especially the poor bugger who gets done.’’
His close encounter left Watkins scared to get back in the water but not for long. He was back surfing after a couple of years and still does so near his home in Levin.
His fibreglass board, now housed at Otago Museum, was sent to America for analysis. Experts believed the shark got too much of the board and Watkins in its mouth and ‘‘couldn’t complete the bite’’.
‘‘If he had completed the bite I would have been left with a fillet steak for a leg.’’
Watkins said a few years after the attack he read the book Jaws – which curiously included another Watkins as the first reported shark victim – and then watched the 1975 blockbuster of the same name.
‘‘A small town with a beach population and this big monster comes to stay, there are some similarities all right,’’ he said.
‘‘I thoroughly enjoyed it. Totally fictional but bloody good.’’
SHARK NETS
Public hysteria over the three sharkrelated deaths in the late 1960s led to an attempt to protect Otago beaches with shark nets.
A Dunedin City Council report on the nets – first installed in 1969 – said the deaths ‘‘led to an extremely high level of public concern over the threat posed by sharks in Dunedin waters’’.
Unfortunately, they had been removed at the end of summer so offered no protection to Watkins during his ill-fated surf in late March 1971.
Former Otago Museum zoologist John Darby questioned their effectiveness.
He recalled news reports of enormous catches of great white sharks in the nets at St Clair but found not a shred of supporting evidence.
In fact, there was no evidence that the fisherman contracted to lay and clear the nets ever ‘‘caught a single one’’, he said.
The nets, each 110m long and 5.5m deep, were installed off St Clair and St Kilda (1969) and Brighton Beach (1976).
Department of Conservation shark expert Clinton Duffy said the nets were checked at least twice a week by contractors and were ‘‘spectacularly unsuccessful’’ in catching great white sharks.
‘‘They work by not forming an impenetrable screen but by depleting the local shark population where it becomes unlikely you will encounter a shark in the water.’’
The Dunedin City Council canned funding for the $35,000-a-year shark nets just over five years ago, following questions over their effectiveness and maintenance costs.