Don’t vilify sharks, asks local biologist

After footage of a great white shark swimming between a group of surfers in Plett has gone viral amid tones of doom, one of the surfers involved has come forward expressing her dismay at the manner in which the incident, which she has described as calm, has been depicted.

The encounter, which was caught on drone footage captured by Plettenberg Bay local Zach Berman, took place late in the day on Tuesday 23 June and showed a sizeable great white shark swimming among a group of six surfers and paddlers.

But according to Caitlin Judge, a local biologist and conservation communicator as well as an avid surfer who was in the water at the time, the brush lasted no more than 30 seconds and is nothing she hasn’t experienced before. “I have had numerous encounters where they are visibly close by and probably many more I won’t know of. This isn’t abnormal. Plett is a great-white hotspot and they naturally aggregate here,” Judge explained.

“In nearly all articles we were ‘lucky to be alive after a terrifying life-or-death encounter * Isaf describes unprovoked attacks as incidents that occur in the shark’s natural habitat with no human provocation of the shark.