FEAR ON CAPE COD
AS SHARKS HUNT AGAIN
Nina Lanctot sprinted toward a calamity she had long ago foretold. It was mid-September 2018. Moments earlier, Lanctot, an ocean lifeguard and former collegiate swimmer, was eating lunch in the parking lot at Newcomb Hollow, a beach in the town of Wellfleet on Outer Cape Cod. The season had ended and crowds had thinned. She was off duty and spent that Saturday morning surfing with friends, reveling in the satisfying vibe of local residents coming together at summer’s end. Then came shouts: “Shark bite!”
Instantly she was on her feet.
Earlier Lanctot noticed two men with boogie boards headed toward a break south of the lot. The pair, Arthur Medici and Isaac Rocha, were visiting from Boston’s suburbs, where Medici, 26, was dating an older sister of Rocha, 16. They walked past a shark-warning sign at about 9:30 a.m. and set up on the ocean side of a sandbar, at a depth of about six feet, and caught waves breaking in the shallows. The morning brought sunshine, lingering warm water and small crowds. Gray seals swam by — one here, two there, a procession. Rocha thought the animals were cool. Shortly after noon, he rode a wave into the foam. Medici hung back, waiting for his own.
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A scream pierced the air, unintelligible, without words. Rocha spun to see a large shark thrashing beside his friend. He kicked off his flippers, ran through shin-deep water and dove into a wave. After a few strokes, he looked up and saw water around Medici tinted red with blood. Rocha was a strong swimmer. He had to cover 30 yards. He halved the distance and lifted his head again. The shark was not visible. He thought, God, I don’t know where that animal is but please don’t let anything happen to me. When he reached deeper water, Medici, who was about 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, was limp and unresponsive. Rocha positioned his friend’s face above the surface and guided him onto the sandbar, where his own feet found bottom and he started pulling Medici to shore. The load increased as the depth decreased, until Rocha staggered with exhaustion. Strangers pulled Medici the last steps onto land.
Cresting the dune, Lanctot saw a circle of people about 400 yards south. At 26, she had been a lifeguard for nine years and an emergency medical technician for six. She could read a beach. No one remained in the water. Under an unsettling new pattern of Cape Cod life, suddenly empty waves meant the presence of a shark. Lanctot bounded down the dune as a composed inner voice kicked in, cautioning her not to overextend herself. A man was hurt, it said, and when she reached him, she would have to work.
“I am an E.M.T., and I have a tourniquet!” she shouted as she neared the crowd. “Get back!” People gave way, revealing Medici, unconscious in a wetsuit on his back with terrible leg wounds. Rocha sobbed beside him. Two doctors who had been nearby hunched over Medici beside Adriana Picariello, one of Wellfleet’s head lifeguards. Lanctot slid to the sand and looked down.
Medici was motionless and without expression. His pupils were fixed and blank. He was not breathing. She checked his pulse. There was none. Scanning, taking in information quickly, she examined his wounds. A chunk of flesh of one leg was missing, and the other leg was mangled. Worse, the wounds were not bleeding or noticeably seeping. Lanctot’s eyes followed drag marks leading from the water to Medici’s silent frame. There was not a drop of blood. His femoral or popliteal arteries had been severed, she figured, and his blood drained away. Without hemostatic clamps and immediate transfusions, he was past saving. The nearest hospital was more than 30 miles away. Lanctot knew this math. It was bad.
She heard a man in the crowd. “You’ve got to do something,” he said.
Rocha had tied a boogie-board leash around one of Medici’s legs. Lanctot slipped the tourniquet around the other, just under his groin, and twisted it tight, clamping quadriceps and hamstring hard to bone. The lifeguards and doctors worked frantically, pumping Medici’s chest with the flat of their hands while one gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Lanctot felt pangs of empathy. Medici’s skin was turning ashen. Rocha was inconsolable. She wished his mother were there to comfort him. She held Medici’s hand, hoping he would feel companionship, knowing he could not acknowledge it.
After several minutes an ambulance crew hurried down the beach with a backboard. Soon they carried Medici over the sand and loaded him into the ambulance, which pulled away with Rocha in the front seat.
Activity gave way to purposelessness. Lanctot was flanked by people she had known her entire life: surfers, beachcombers, lifeguards, friends. All eyes had been on Medici. Now there was nothing to do. Medici was dead. The official announcement would soon come. She accepted tearful hugs and had an urge to be clean. She and Picariello moved down the dune into shin-deep water. Lanctot fell to her knees, plunged her head under a wave and held it down. There, where no one could hear her, she screamed.
Nina Lanctot, an E.M.T. and former lifeguard, at Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, Mass.
Over the past decade the waters around Cape Cod have become host to one of the densest seasonal concentrations of adult white sharks in the world. Acoustic tagging data suggest the animals trickle into the region during lengthening days in May, increase in abundance throughout summer, peak in October and mostly depart by the dimming light and plunging temperatures of Thanksgiving. To conservationists, the annual returns are a success story, a welcome sign of ecosystem recovery at a time when many wildlife species are depleted. But the phenomenon carries unusual public-safety implications. Unlike many places where adult white sharks congregate, which tend to be remote islands with large colonies of sea lions or seals, the sharks’ summer residency in New England overlaps with tourist season at one of the Northeast’s most coveted recreational areas. Moreover, the animals are hunting in remarkably shallow water, at times within feet of the beach. This puts large numbers of people in close contact with a fast and efficient megapredator, historically the oceans’ most feared fish.
The influx has upended assumptions about using the water. There were three injury-causing shark attacks reported in Massachusetts in the entire 20th century; one, in 1936, was fatal. Since 2012, white sharks at Cape Cod have been implicated in five attacks, including two on swimmers, one on a boogie boarder and one each on a standup paddle board and a kayak with a person aboard. To a lesser extent, the presence extends through the region. In 2020 a white shark killed Julie Dimperio Holowach while she swam near her family home on Casco Bay, Maine. The incident was the first recorded shark attack in the state to cause injury and was especially jolting because many residents were unaware the animals were feeding along shore at all. “In Maine, we never knew we had great white sharks,” her husband, Al Holowach, said.
Risk of attack remains low. But the quantity of large sharks, and fears that have accompanied them, have caused a cultural trauma, reshaping how people experience the ocean and forcing coastal communities into a period of reckoning and adaptation. Many people have grudgingly yielded the water while scientists study the animals and public officials haltingly evaluate technologies and human behaviors that could mitigate risk, all while anticipating the next attack, which feels certain.
Near LeCount Hollow Beach in Wellfleet.
The origin story of white sharks gathering in New England is simple enough. In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon signed into law the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Championed by scientists, the act was part of a landmark body of environmental legislation from the 1960s and 1970s — including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act — that reshaped the country’s relationship with natural resources and ushered in protections for ecosystems, wildlife and people. Among its provisions, the act made it illegal in most cases to harm any marine mammal in United States territory and prohibited imports of marine mammals and marine-mammal products, closing a market for harvesters elsewhere.
Biologists cheered the protections’ potential to reverse bleak trends. At the time the act became law, many marine-mammal populations had crashed under pressure from market hunting, habitat loss, incidental catches in fishing gear and other threats, and activists were soon to begin emotional campaigns against foreign whaling and sealing industries. Some species, like North Atlantic right whales, were critically endangered. Others endured in other countries but had been extirpated in the United States.
Such was the case with gray seals, gregarious carnivores that can reach lengths of 10 feet and weights exceeding 800 pounds. The animals are lumbering on land and graceful at sea, where they can dive deeper than 1,500 feet and stay down an hour, and are highly developed predators, feeding on fish, squid, octopus and, occasionally, seabirds or marine mammals. Their comeback, at first barely discernible, has been astounding. In 1972 there were almost no gray seals in the United States to protect, aside from rare migrants from Canada. Fast-forward 49 years, and gray seals have reclaimed old turf from Maine to Rhode Island.
Seals crowding a sandbar along a Cape Cod beach. The resurgent gray-seal population is the biggest draw for white sharks feeding close to shore.
Seals crowding a sandbar along a Cape Cod beach. The resurgent gray-seal population is the biggest draw for white sharks feeding close to shore.
The 1990s marked a curious moment in the rebound. The animals were recovering, but few people had seen one. Watermen were the exception. Nick Muto, who grew up in Orleans, Mass., and is now a commercial fishing captain, had an early fascination. “When I was a kid, it was a big deal to spot a seal at the beach,” he said. “I remember following one for a half mile to get a better look at it.” Matt Gage, a carpenter and luthier, also recalls the first indicators. In the 1990s he was working as a shellfisherman. Each day he ran a skiff with a clam rake and a longboard from Chatham to Monomoy Island, dug bushels of steamers, then covered the shellfish with a burlap sack and carried his board to the island’s ocean side. “There were a few seals around, and we’d go surf with them,” he said. “I was like, ‘Isn’t this great, I am surfing with nature.’” Gage said he would see eight or 10 seals a trip. A few years later, he was surfing among 300.
Recent population estimates in northeast American waters range to as many as 50,000 animals. Such figures cohere with what anyone can observe. The eastern side of Monomoy is now often coated with seals, a ribbon of animals lying side by side, thousands in all. Estimates for the total Western Atlantic stock hover near 500,000 animals. Stranded gray seal pups have been documented on Long Island. Adults live year-round at Point Judith, a Rhode Island fishing port, and have established a small haul-out site on Block Island. On Outer Cape Cod, gray seals have reached near ubiquity. They crowd the inlet to Pleasant Bay, rest in piles on sandbars and loiter at the Chatham Fish Pier, attracting tourists who gather to watch them.
Where seals concentrate, white sharks often follow. “It’s a whole new ecology,” said Lisa Sette, a biologist with the Center for Coastal Studies, in Provincetown. “Sharks and seals are signs of a healthy ecosystem, and that’s a good thing.” But she acknowledged how disorienting the animals’ return has been for some water users. Not long ago, she said, “the greatest threat on the Cape was ticks. Now we have to rethink how we enter the water, as we have an apex predator that has returned.”
Lifeguards training to treat victims of shark attacks at Nauset Beach in Orleans, Mass.
The first of the recent attacks occurred in late July 2012, when Chris Myers, a Colorado resident, was swimming with a teenage son about 400 yards off Ballston Beach in Truro. A white shark bit his lower legs and yanked him down by his left ankle. Myers yelled as the animal hit and began to kick the fish’s face repeatedly with his right foot. “I could feel my heel slamming into its nose and teeth,” he wrote in The Boston Globe Magazine. “I was kicking at something massive and immovable — like an underwater refrigerator covered in skin.” The shark let go. Flushed with adrenaline, Myers was free. The fish rolled across the surface and displayed a huge dorsal fin.
Good luck traveled with bad. The bite neither disabled Myers nor caused unstemmable bleeding. Though he and his son were defenseless, the shark did not double back. They swam to the surf, where people helped them ashore. The bite — a type scientists call “exploratory” — tore open Myers’s lower leg and severed tendons. Several days later he checked out of a hospital in Boston with bundled legs.
That August, communities on the Cape formed the Regional Shark Working Group to enhance public safety around white sharks. Its membership included representatives from the Cape Cod National Seashore, local emergency responders, the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, a new nonprofit group dedicated to white-shark conservation through research, education and advocacy for a marquee wildlife species. The working group had no budget and no Cape-wide authority but positioned itself as an advisory body that could study steps taken in other areas with populations of large sharks and bring considered suggestions to beach towns.
Two summers after Myers was bitten, in September 2014, two women, Kristin Orr and Ida Parker, were paddling kayaks on Cape Cod Bay near Plymouth. They had set out to enjoy the cool evening and photograph harbor seals, a species that also rebounded with protection. The animals often rested on boulders off Stage Point. Orr and Parker were side by side about 100 or 150 yards from shore in perhaps 15 feet of water, enjoying the company of curious seals. It was almost windless. Still blue water mirrored a rich blue sky. Parker reached to take the camera from her friend.
A white shark slammed into Orr’s kayak. The impact heaved her from the cockpit and flipped Parker’s kayak too. Orr and Parker found themselves face to face with the huge fish. Parker saw its snout, eyes and gills an arm’s length away while it gripped Orr’s kayak in its teeth and pushed it almost five feet above water. Then it was gone. Orr managed to scramble back into her boat, which now was leaking through punctures in its hull. Parker remained in the water, unable to right her capsized kayak. The current had carried their paddles away, stranding them on the bay.
They shouted to the beach for help. Orr remembered her phone. It was in a dry bag in her boat. She used Siri to call 911. “We’re stuck in the water, and there is a shark,” she told the operator, who appeared to doubt her. An ordeal of waiting began. After a few minutes, a man paddled out from shore. They warned him of the shark, only to hear him casually tell someone on his phone that he saw no evidence of an attack. When the Plymouth harbor master and firefighters arrived by boat, the men who pulled them aboard also did not heed their account; the dispatcher had not told them of the presence of a shark. They acted, Orr and Parker said, as if two women had capsized, then turned hysterical. “They were like, ‘You need to stop crying, you’re hypothermic,’” Orr recalled. After bringing them aboard, the harbor master slid Orr’s kayak onto the deck, revealing a bite imprint about 18 inches across. “I told you!” Orr said.
Like Myers before them, Orr and Parker were lucky: Their vulnerability had been extreme, but the shark did not strike again. Upon measuring the bite, state fisheries officials told them that they survived a predatory attack by a shark 12 to 14 feet long. As children, each woman was enthralled by white sharks; Orr wanted to be the first to swim among them without a cage. The attack left her afraid of swimming in dark water, including in lakes. “I can tell you, there is no fear, nothing, not even close, to having a white shark knock you out of your kayak and to be bobbing in dark water,” she said. Parker said her heartbeat quickens and chest tightens when she swims, but “I have tried getting my relationship back with the water,” and she does swim and kayak still, albeit in shallower water. Both women are child therapists with a nuanced understanding of trauma. They took an accommodating view of their reactions and of the attack. “It was an honest mistake on his end, because he thought I was a seal,” Orr said of the shark. “If he wanted to eat us, he could have.”
The year of that attack, 2014, Nina Lanctot was 22 and had been a beach lifeguard for five years, a period that aligned with the wildlife shift. Changes started gradually — Lanctot saw her first white shark at least three years earlier — but soon the shark presence felt as if it were rising exponentially. Each year, it seemed, more seals roamed the shoreline, and more white sharks hunted them. “The sharks come right up to the beach,” she told friends. “You can literally jump onto their backs.” Seal carcasses were washing up with slabs of flesh sheared away, and lifeguards were routinely whistling swimmers in after spotting sharks in the surf. She wondered why beach crews in all the towns were not given trauma training, why no one addressed dead spaces in cellular service needed for 911 calls and why supervisors did not stock lifeguard stands with tourniquets and bandages infused with blood-clotting compounds. She reached uncomfortable conclusions: More attacks were inevitable, the towns and national seashore were not prepared and it was on her to be ready. She carried her own tourniquets and bandages to every shift and surf session.
Bill Lytton at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. In 2018, he was attacked by a shark while swimming at Longnook Beach in Truro, Mass.
Bill Lytton at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. In 2018, he was attacked by a shark while swimming at Longnook Beach in Truro,
Public awareness and safety initiatives recommended by the shark working group began to take effect. Towns and the park service installed signs alerting visitors that white sharks were present, as were riptides and risk of dehydration and sunburn. Beach communities disseminated tips for “shark smart” water use, including avoiding swimming with seals, or alone, or in murky water, or near schools of fish. The conservancy gained stature and influence, underwriting science, writing shark-related curriculum for schools and advancing a shark-conservation message. In 2016, it released an app, Sharktivity, that gave near-live locations of shark sightings (and eventually of sharks tagged with acoustic pingers that passed by nearshore transceivers). The app was popular. But it was not intended as a fully viable alarm system, as sightings and tagged sharks amount to a small fraction of the shark population, and transceivers, exposed to ocean waves and elements, are susceptible to damage. (This year the transceivers at Nauset and LeCount Hollow ceased functioning by July; the technology is new and its use at the Cape part of a state trial.) A new shark-awareness flag began flying over lifeguard stands. Purple with a silhouette of a white shark, it meant to register a message: These animals are here.
In August 2017 a white shark struck a standup paddle board at Marconi Beach in Wellfleet. The waves were clogged with brown weed, known locally as mung, making it difficult to see into the water. The paddle boarder, Cleveland Bigelow, a retiree who started surfing in Maryland in 1965, was at a spot he visited so often that people called it Cleve’s Cove. He rode a wave toward shore, turned around and was paddling back in a prone position. While he was standing up, his board stopped, as if snagged on bottom. He was perplexed. There are no rocks here, he thought.
The board rose sharply into the air. The force smacked the board into his legs and threw Bigelow clear, a sensation, according to his statement to a park ranger, “like being hit by a car while riding a bike.” Bigelow never saw the animal, which swam on. He hurried to the beach, right leg bleeding, and rushed to an instructor at a surf school. “Get the kids out of the water now,” he said. He suffered a hematoma and cut on his right leg and a scrape to his left. The board showed a bite imprint about a foot wide. At a lifeguard stand minutes later, the guards iced the hematoma and cleaned the cut. At summer’s end, they took down their new shark flag, signed it and presented it to him as a gift. On it, he said, they wrote: “Master of Cleve’s Cove, Cheater of Death.” Four years on, Bigelow says he believes that he hit the animal first, not the other way round. The sequence he finds most plausible is that his board collided with the shark, prompting the bite.
The attacks in 2014 and 2017 were remarkable in that sharks struck plastic, not people. Good fortune did not last. In mid-August 2018, Dr. Bill Lytton, a computational neuroscientist and physician at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, was swimming south from Longnook Beach in Truro, alternating between sidestroke and breaststroke, moving parallel to shore in water about eight feet deep. He planned to swim 30 minutes, and checked his watch about every five. Around the 20-minute mark, pain flashed through his left thigh. A white shark had clamped down just below his hip. Lytton could see the pale side of the animal’s head and one big eye, black like a puck. He had the sensation of being twisted, as if the animal wanted to turn him over. “It felt like it was torquing me,” he says. He punched toward its gill slits, which were sharp and severed tendons in his left hand.
The shark released him. Lytton’s upper leg looked as if it had been raked by knives. A half-dozen roughly parallel gashes extended from below his hip to above his knee; at least one reached his femur. Lytton noticed blood in the water but felt alert and strong; somehow the shark’s teeth missed the femoral artery, sparing him exsanguination. He flipped onto his back. Within six or eight strokes a wave deposited him on sand, where two men he did not know lifted him to dry ground. Soon people slipped a blanket and towels beneath him, and with this makeshift litter carried him to an ambulance that sped him to a helicopter that flew him to Tufts Medical Center in Boston. Lytton felt cared for throughout. “It was surprisingly comforting,” he said, right up through the aircraft’s descent to the hospital. Surgeons went to work. He woke days later, dry-mouthed, sedated, bandaged, alive.
One month later, a shark killed Medici.
A white shark in the waters off Cape Cod.Video by Mick Chivers
Knee-deep at Newcomb Hollow, Lanctot lifted her head from the water, salt from sea rinsing away salt from tears, and stared at the ocean. For as long as she could remember, the surf had been the sanctuary she entered for exercise, to release tensions and to be with friends. Now she was numb. Cape Cod’s surf was her safe haven no more. “It was a stranger,” she said.
Depression settled over her in the coming days. When she looked at the break, she felt nauseated.
Twelve days after Medici died, a few hundred people filed into Wellfleet’s elementary school for a community meeting. Laurie Voke, founder of a sports-marketing firm and mother of four ocean lifeguards, placed blame squarely on government officials she characterized as more excited by wildlife than by commitment to safety. The recent attacks, she said, were “the results of misguided and outdated government policies” that led to a resurgent seal population and white sharks hunting among swimmers. It was an implicit dig at the shark working group, which had six years to foster a better state of preparation. “We all knew someone would be killed by a white shark on the Outer Cape, and yet we did nothing to prevent it,” Voke said. She urged efforts to control the seal population and limit where they hauled out, and proposed an end to the state fishing ban for white sharks. Gail Sluis followed. She was present when Medici died. “That poor boy looked like a bomb went off on him,” she said, her voice quavering. She suggested staging A.T.V.s on beaches to evacuate victims. Then she echoed Voke’s call for reducing the seal population. The crowd erupted in applause.
Daniel Hoort, Wellfleet’s town administrator at the time, gently replied that culls were illegal; federal and state rules protected white sharks and seals alike. “I hope that this meeting will not get into a debate of ‘Do we want to cull the seal population, do we want to find a way to get rid of the sharks?’” he said. “I don’t think those are realistic solutions. It would take an act of Congress for that to occur.” Sentiments were split. Dana Franchitto, who was surfing at Newcomb Hollow when Medici was killed, shared that he, too, was afraid of white sharks. But he expressed exasperation with the “If it moves, kill it” mentality toward wildlife. “I am really appalled by this arrogant attitude that we have a right to play God in the ocean, given our record on this planet,” he said. His statement was applauded, too.
In the months after the meeting, the shark working group recommended first-responder and public-awareness improvements. Supported by a $383,000 state grant, towns and the national seashore posted new shark-warning signs with a more imposing image and installed stop-the-bleed kits, with tourniquets and bandages, in bright orange boxes along the coast. Orleans upgraded its beach communications. (It previously formed a cadre of beach E.M.T.s with oversand vehicles.) Wellfleet, where Lanctot worked, bought taller lifeguard stands and a vehicle to evacuate people needing medical care and installed landlines at beaches that ring directly to public-safety dispatchers. It also began offering up to $100 reimbursements to guards who purchased polarized sunglasses, which reduce glare and make sharks easier to see. The national seashore installed call boxes on six beaches to cover cellular service gaps. The towns and park service also started training lifeguards in emergency trauma care and extended free training to the public.
Simultaneously, the working group set out to broadcast safety messages more robustly. Language became blunt. “We manage wild places, and we cannot eliminate all risks,” said Leslie Reynolds, the seashore’s deputy superintendent, who is a co-leader of the working group. “One of our main messages is always stay close to shore. That doesn’t mean something won’t happen, but it does mean that we can get to you.” In practice, this meant lifeguards would instruct visitors not to enter the water beyond their waists. Visitors in 2019 arrived to a changed beach ethos. “In the beginning we were soft-pedaling the signs because we didn’t want to scare people,” said Suzanne Grout Thomas, who supervises beach safety in Wellfleet. The reboot explicitly showcased danger.
Lanctot appreciated the urgency. But her fears lingered, as did memories of being ignored. She knew the anguish of Cassandra. She remembered how people rolled eyes years before when she spoke of rising dangers and the frustration of carrying her own tourniquets because most beaches did not stock them. “How come I, as a teenager, could see it and understand it, and the towns were doing nothing?” she said. Medici’s death changed how she lived. She became a surf nomad, traveling to Maine or Rhode Island for waves. In 2019 she accepted a job as an operating-room technician in Maine and left the Cape entirely, driven away by fear.
Coast Guard Beach in Eastham, Mass. Cape Cod has improved shark-warning signs and installed medical kits along the coast.
Cape Cod has improved shark-warning signs and installed medical kits along the coast.
Scientists speak of “fear ecology,” a concept describing the effects predators have on members of a prey species that do not get eaten but whose predator-avoidance strategies carry costs. An example might be a seal that feeds inshore rather than venturing to richer feeding grounds offshore if the swim requires passing a gauntlet of predators. Although people are not preferred shark prey, the concept applies to human behaviors too. After Medici’s death, some surfers switched to stand-up paddle boards, which largely keep limbs out of the water and offer greater visibility. Others, like Lanctot, quit surfing on the Outer Cape. Some kept surfing, but with whistles, so if a shark appeared they could clear people fast. Shawn Vecchione, a surfboard shaper, experimented with installing Shark Shield, a device that emits an electromagnetic field intended to deter sharks, into his boards, and tinting the bottoms with black stripes that some surfers say imitate sea-snake colorations that sharks avoid. (The efficacy of these measures is subject to debate.) Sam Fuller, a lobsterman, took to surfing with a tourniquet stuffed in his wetsuit. Rocha, who watched his friend die, did not boogie board again. (He is 19 now and a private first class in the Army.) Swimming from the beach for conditioning became rare. “I gave up going in the water except for surfing,” said Drew Taylor, who used to do open-water swims. Nick Muto, captain of the 36-foot lobster boat Miss Evelyn, said white sharks forced him to change how he and his 7-year-old daughter, for whom his vessel is named, enjoy their home. “I grew up out here, and I had a pretty good experience,” he said. “We swam, we surfed and could go in the ocean all summer.” As for Evelyn, he said, “I don’t let her in the water past her knees.” Khristian Bennett, co-owner of Mooncusser Tattoo & Piercing Studio in Provincetown, ceased entering the ocean altogether. He owns a houseboat, Bait’s Motel, with a slide that used to be popular but now, he said, “no one uses.” Adaptations had profound effects. “It hovers over the region: the fear that sharks are going to ruin this idyllic place,” said Patrick Ott, one of the doctors who tried resuscitating Medici on the beach.
Shawn Vecchione, a surfboard shaper in Orleans, has experimented with boards designed to deter sharks.
That notion is difficult to test, in part because it is hard to separate the role of the coronavirus pandemic from other changes in economic or visitor activity. Some residents worry the seal-shark dynamic will discourage tourism, shutter businesses and drag real estate values down. Available indicators contradict one another. Simeon Watson, manager of Blackbeard’s Bait & Tackle in Eastham, said a tackle shop he worked in closed as seal numbers soared, because seals ruined beach fishing. In coastal Rhode Island, where I live, tourists have turned up in recent summers saying they chose Rhode Island for vacation over the Cape because they could enjoy the water without worrying about sharks. At the same time, house prices at the Cape have risen and the Outer Cape’s roads in summer remain jammed with traffic. Wildlife advocates also speak of the species’ contributions to a “blue economy,” based on the sea. There is no question that the animals have been monetized. White sharks became staples in Cape kitsch, adorning T-shirts, hoodies, hats, bottle openers, coffee cups, bumper stickers and the rest. One sticker reads “Cape Shark,” suggesting the megapredators compete in the public psyche with the fish for which the cape is named. Some businesses give the shark puzzle a knowing embrace. The Wellfleet Drive-In Theater offers summer screenings of “Jaws,” the 1975 movie about a white shark terrorizing a beach town.
It goes on and on. Massachusetts issues white-shark license plates, each of which results in a $28 donation to the conservancy, then a $40 donation at biennial renewal. (Two-digit plates require a $5,000 donation.) Interest is even measurable by tattoo. According to booking records at the Mooncusser studio, in 2016 its artists inked 10 shark designs on clients. This year by early October artists had tattooed sharks on at least 77 people. “People associate sharks with Cape Cod,” Bennett said. (He has his own white-shark tattoo, above his left ankle.) Further, sharks and seals are both the stars of ecotours, in which guides shuttle tourists by boat to the animals’ habitat to observe and photograph them. Shark tours cost about $2,500 for a half-dozen people, including the service of an aircraft to find the animals. Marianne Walsh, education director at the shark conservancy, said the conservancy’s ecotours for August were sold out by June. “There are a lot of people who are fascinated by wildlife, and that drives their tourism,” she said. “These people are coming here.”
None of this alleviates much of the dread. Sara Moran, a psychotherapist and artist in Wellfleet, was surfing at Newcomb Hollow with her husband the day Medici was killed. Her husband, Dean, a carpenter and artist, came close to a feeding white shark in 2017, when a shark ate a seal at Marconi Beach. He was about to wade in when it shredded its prey. “The surface was like this gurgling pot, with ripples and bubbles, and it turned bright red,” he said. After Medici died, Sara stayed out of the water during warm season until July 2020. She felt shaky when she returned. At about that time, Dean had what he calls his “ ‘Jaws’ moment.” He was at LeCount Hollow and mistook a patch of mung for a cloud of blood. He placed his hand on his forehead in a shark-fin sign, and yelled for everyone to get onto the beach. “I had like a flashback, because it resembled that red blood bath I had seen,” he said. Sara’s understanding of hypervigilance is personal and professional, and she accepted these reactions as natural, even necessary. “I think fear is important,” she said. “You don’t want to amplify it, but it’s there for a reason, and I don’t want to push it away.” She has treated several clients living with fear of sharks. “It was really devastating for the local people,” she said, “as far as their relationship with the water.”
White sharks were firmly lodged in the human psyche long before beach vacations and ocean sports became middle-class routine. In a world in which terrestrial predators capable of swiftly killing and consuming a person were vanishingly rare, they ranked among the last of the planet’s wild megafauna, beasts not yet isolated in captivity or tracts of wilderness, much less dethroned. In the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau flagged the species’ notoriety on Cape Cod, where, he wrote, they “will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it.” He added: “I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.” This reputation — ancient beasts with murderous designs, lurking just beyond where land meets brine — grew as more people spent time by the sea. White sharks were “man killers” and “white death,” ever ready, in the words of Victor Coppleson, an Australian surgeon who wrote a 1958 book on shark attacks, “to take their savage toll.” Coppleson remains notable for showing how even medical literature was sensationalist. In 1961 G.D. Campbell, a South African physician, peppered a medical paper on shark-bite treatment with descriptions of sharks as sometimes “pathogenic” and “virulent” organisms for whom “the bathing human must represent a very succulent and easily-acquired morsel.” When discussing monsters, it seemed, any scary metaphor would do.
Many white-shark-as-leviathan strands came together in “Jaws,” in which a white shark with a taste for people attracted the services of Quint, a fishing-boat captain with a harpoon gun who pursued it for a bounty. In 124 minutes, set to an ominous musical score, the shark killed a woman, a boy, a man in a dinghy and a commercial fisherman, before cracking the hull of Quint’s boat and killing him too — racking up a shark-bite body count equal to that of the entire state of Massachusetts since 1751. (The shark also appeared to eat a Labrador retriever, a category of victim overlooked by mayhem chroniclers of yesteryear.)
A screening of “Jaws” at the Wellfleet Drive-In Theater.
Such depictions flow from the impressiveness of the species itself. White sharks can grow to lengths of roughly 20 feet and weights running past a few thousand pounds. With mouths lined with serrated, triangular teeth, they are equipped to sever arteries, snap bones and tear away tissue — wounds that drain life even from prey four or more times the mass of a typical person, like gray seals. As hunters, they can be surprisingly hard to see. Dark skin on their backs and light skin on their undersides blend into the water column. The animals also possess sensory organs that perceive faint odors, microvibrations and variations in electrical current. White sharks are slow to grow and mature; radiocarbon analysis of their cartilage suggests the largest specimens might be as old as 70 years. With age comes experience; many adult white sharks have gone through transitions in their feeding, from mostly fish to more emphasis on marine mammals, and are methodical as they hunt. This summer, one of my sons, Mick, flew a drone over dozens of white sharks at Cape Cod, sometimes as sharks stalked seals, once as a shark scavenged a dead striped bass, several times as they passed people on the sand or in the surf. The animals traveled with measured movements, emanating alertness, athleticism and a capacity for discernment. And they were stealthy. With one exception, no one noticed when the animals were near. (Mick alerted beach officials when sharks were present.) Such composed locomotion belied their almost explosive reserve power, with which they can breach. White sharks tagged with accelerometers have been documented swimming in bursts of up to 15 miles per hour, many times faster than most people can swim. Some research suggests they can go faster than that.
Unsurprisingly, a species with such traits attracts inquiry, and advocacy, too. Chris Fischer, founder of OCEARCH, a nonprofit research organization with a 126-foot vessel that sails on shark-tagging expeditions around the world, is among those who have studied the species. He argues that white sharks are unfairly maligned. The fish, he said, are anything but marauding: They are cautious, intelligent and exceptionally perceptive. For all their proximity to people, they almost never harm them. A boogie boarder wearing fins, Fischer said, is a living imitation of a seal, and white sharks pass by them all summer long. “We’re dressing up like their food and swimming among their food, and we still hardly ever fool them,” he said. “People will drive down to the beach while they are texting and then they worry about getting bit by a shark?”
Quantifying risks of being bitten requires knowing more about the species. But white-shark research faces obstacles, leaving much shrouded in a stubborn inscrutability. Excepting the few places where white sharks predictably gather, they are hard to find. Further, because they are difficult to subdue, gaining specimens for weighing, measurement or dietary studies has historically been frustrating. To overcome the impediments, OCEARCH’s fishermen and rotating groups of scientists catch white sharks on baited hooks and guide them onto a lift, where they insert or attach acoustic and satellite-linked tags, perform ultrasound, take tissue, blood, semen and stool samples and then release the sharks to swim free and transmit data. The idea, Fischer said, is to maximize the research value of each animal. “We have over 40 scientists doing over 20 research projects on every shark we touch,” he said. This year OCEARCH worked in federal waters within sight of Cape Cod before moving to New Hampshire and Canada. To date, its crews have tagged 83 white sharks in the northwest Atlantic, including three in a day in Nova Scotia. On Sept. 30, one of those fish, an immature female almost 10 feet long, pinged in Cape Cod Bay. (The ping was publicly shared via the organization’s Shark Tracker app.) On Oct. 2, she pinged tight to shore in Provincetown.
When white-shark numbers will peak at Cape Cod is anyone’s guess, but their presence along the beach has already reached levels no one alive had previously seen. Gage, the former shellfisherman, first heard of them in the 1990s. “I had a friend say, ‘I just saw a seal get eaten by a shark,’” he said. “We were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, right.’” He looks back on it as a sign of what was to come. In 1997, citing the slow growth and low reproductive rates of white sharks, as well as overfishing, the federal government prohibited retention of the species in federal waters, which typically begin three miles from shore and extend to 200 miles. Some states, including California in 1994 and Massachusetts in 2005, extended protections inshore. The changes codified an understanding that apex predators are essential to ecosystems and were milestones in white-shark reputation repair. How protections influence numbers at the Cape is unknown. One fact is inarguable: Lethal tactics intended to reduce the incidence of bites in other countries, notably the deployment of nets and baited hooks beneath buoys in South Africa and Australia, are not legal in the United States. Were “Jaws” set in 2021, Quint would have no role.
Greg Skomal leads the state’s Shark Research Program, whose centerpiece work is a project that affixes sophisticated tags to the animals.
Greg Skomal leads the state’s Shark Research Program, whose centerpiece work is a project that affixes sophisticated tags to the animals.
Harpoon in hand, Greg Skomal stood on the pulpit of the Aleutian Dream, a 24-foot center-console boat motoring outside the inlet to Pleasant Bay. A plane circled overhead. The pilot directed the captain, John King, toward a shark swimming a few boat lengths ahead.
It was mid-July. Multiple sharks milled by the inlet, where sandbars are often packed with gray seals and their scent drifts seaward on dropping tides. Sharks seem drawn here the way people are lured by aroma to taco stands.
Enthusiastic and quick to smile, Skomal is Massachusetts’ most prominent shark scientist, a figure widely enough known that during our first conversation on the beach, a boy interrupted to ask to have his picture taken with the shark man. He leads the state’s Shark Research Program, whose centerpiece work has been a project that affixes sophisticated tags to the animals. The program tagged its first shark in 2004 but gained momentum after 2013, when the conservancy began providing resources, like free use of the Aleutian Dream and its skipper, King.
Up ahead the shark swam slowly. Skomal leaned from the 11-foot-long pulpit with the harpoon, which ended in a titanium dart attached to two tags. The first was a cigar-shaped acoustic transmitter designed to ping a distinct code every 60 to 100 seconds for a decade. Whenever a shark bearing such a tag swam within a few hundred yards of a receiver, its presence would be time-stamped. The second was an orange hydrodynamic container that held a camera and sensors to record the shark’s behavior for up to three days, including 11 hours of video, then float free for recovery.
Video collected by a camera tag on a white shark named Ninja, off Cape Cod.Video from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries
On this day the pilot had already directed King, a former captain of a 180-foot king-crab boat, to several sharks, and the crew had found another — a male, nicknamed Danny, that the state tagged in 2019 and that has been a seasonal visitor since. They also spotted a gray seal carcass on the sand at Monomoy and a dead seal floating outside the surf. Each bore bite wounds. The researchers call the area “Shark Cove.” It sits beside “the Coliseum,” a place where white sharks sometimes kill seals spectacularly.
This fish seemed untroubled by the boat. Megan Winton, a scientist with the conservancy, submerged a hydrophone to check whether the shark bore a pinging tag. It did not. King eased the pulpit forward so the animal was beneath Skomal, who jabbed the dart down with both hands. The shark bolted right, revealing the camera housing anchored to its back as it accelerated away. The crew cheered. Later, Winton said the shark was a female about 11 feet long and that she estimated weighed about 800 pounds, a subadult with splotches on its body.
Over the years the state’s research has grown in ambition. As of mid-October, it had tagged 276 white sharks; Winton says 223 tags remain active. Video analysis also identified 455 individual white sharks. Depending on context, these numbers can feel large or small. More than 450 white sharks along a small stretch of coastline are enough to startle people who once did not imagine such a gathering at the Cape. But visual surveys suggest a small proportion of sharks carry tags. When my son Mick flew a drone over roughly 40 white sharks at the Outer Cape this summer he saw no tags. Kristian Sexton, who has been methodically documenting white sharks with drones for three years, said 10 of 122 sharks he videotaped bore tags. (Both eliminated from tallies animals whose backs were not visible.)
Whatever the fraction of sharks carrying pingers, scientists have gleaned important insights. Tagging data has revealed when white sharks are most abundant locally and that some are transient and others recurring summer residents. Bit by bit, research fills in blanks and has led to the monthly shark-activity graph now posted at every Outer Cape beach. Science-based safety guidance, said Cynthia Wigren, a conservancy co-founder, helps people and sharks coexist. “It’s all connected,” she said, “the work we’re doing with the towns and the Cape Cod National Seashore to get the information out.”
Kristian Sexton piloting a drone to spot sharks in Truro.
The potential exists for finer-grained instruction. Bryan Legare, an ecologist at the Center for Coastal Studies, maintains arrays of acoustic receivers on the ocean bottom off Truro and Orleans. The receivers log pings. The array at Truro has shown just how present white sharks can be. In 2020, at least one tagged white shark was detected there during half the hours from late June until Labor Day. There are 168 hours in a week. In the busiest week in 2020, that of Aug. 9, at least one tagged white shark pinged during 165 hours — essentially a constant shark presence, night and day, during tourist season. The state and conservancy also support efforts to learn more about feeding habits, including via the trial of a 12-foot-long aerodynamic balloon this summer and fall to try to capture footage of sharks hunting seals. Taken together, the studies could yield information about shark presence in the surf relative to stages of tide, light levels and, when paired with time-sequenced photos, the location of prey.
For all the promise of science, shark research around the Cape is partly divided into camps. White sharks attract big personalities in ways jellyfish might not, and Skomal and Fischer, the head of OCEARCH, do not get along. Massachusetts denies Fischer’s group permits to tag sharks in state waters, and through this summer the state’s transceivers had not been programmed to recognize sharks tagged by OCEARCH, which prevented the conservancy’s Sharktivity app, which receives live data from the state, from notifying the public of any OCEARCH-tagged sharks in its system. This further limited the value of the transceivers to the popular shark-awareness tool. (Winton says the systems have since been updated.) Each side has complaints about the other’s methods and motivations. One result is that shark research in New England, which all involved agree is important for science and safety alike, is in disharmony, riven by what feel like grudges and turf.
Other regions of the world have long experience trying to keep sharks and people apart. Barriers, netting, baited hooks suspended beneath buoys, bounties, shark-spotting from aircraft or elevated perches — all have been used elsewhere with varying intensity and mixed results. After Medici’s death, officials on the Cape were inundated with animal-control and shark-detection proposals. The overtures mixed pleas from the public with sales pitches for products ranging from sonar-equipped buoys to balloons with cameras that transmit video to monitors, a measure resembling mini-blimps long flown over combat outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some proposals, including anything lethal and suggestions of forcing contraceptives on gray seals, were rejected outright. But managers conceded they had little budget or ability to assess others, and were stumped. “We’re open to anything we have to do,” said Tony Pike, the beach-safety director in Orleans. “But we’re a town beach, not a research agency.”
Pike, the town’s former fire chief, projects can-do energy. A tattoo of a fish hook decorates his right biceps. A white shark with a Cape-shaped tail scowls from his left. A decade ago he was eager for decisive, man-made solutions. “I went to a meeting with all these experts, and the message was ‘You and sharks need to exist together, and now and then someone is going to get killed,’” he said. “I was incredulous. I was an E.M.T. and was like: ‘How can that be? This is predictable, and what is predictable is preventable.’” Experience taught him the puzzle was more complex than he assumed. Pike helps oversee seven and a half miles of sandy, ever-shifting coastline that on some days is beatifically calm but on others is slammed with bulging oceanic waves and swept by rip currents. The coast is also afflicted with mats of heavy weed. It’s not a place where barriers or detection buoys could be expected to function without fouling or damage. After Medici died, Orleans upgraded its beach medevac service and organized rescue drills that focus on retrieving wounded people from the water. Pike was unsure what other programs to put forward.
In 2019 towns on the Cape and the park service, along with the conservancy, commissioned the Woods Hole Group, a consulting firm, for a “mitigation alternatives analysis” to help towns decide next steps. The group returned that October with a report panning most technological and biological mitigation strategies as illegal, impractical, expensive, inhumane, wasteful, ineffective, fragile or some combination of them. “Findings in this report do not endorse any particular method or product,” its authors wrote, concluding there “is no solution available that can ensure 100% safety for individuals who choose to enter the water.”
A white shark on the OCEARCH vessel off Nova Scotia.
A white shark on the OCEARCH vessel off Nova Scotia.
A new nonprofit, the Cape Cod Ocean Community, was appalled. It formed in early 2019 in reaction to what its members saw as insufficient emphasis on how the shark influx affected people. It greeted the report as a nothing-burger that endorsed inactivity and lack of imagination, and happened to align with perspectives of those who paid the consultants’ $49,950 fee. Heather Doyle, a founder of the group, said the number of white sharks along beaches is out of hand. “It’s like a mouse in your house,” she said. “If you see one, there’s 30.” She derided what she described as an in-group of shark advocates who raise money or public profiles off sharks but don’t do enough to address human concerns, aside from urging people to stay in shallow water. “It’s very cool to be part of that, very philanthropic,” she said. “But it’s not public safety.”
Then came the attack in Maine. Julie Holowach and her husband, Al, natives of the Bronx, bought a house on Bailey Island’s western side about 15 years earlier, before Julie retired as a fashion executive. They had five children and six grandchildren, and spent more than five months a year on the island, hosting relatives and friends and frequenting the Catholic church. Sometimes Julie, a triathlete, donned a wetsuit, slipped into the bay from a neighbor’s dock and swam north toward a cove where lobster boats moored.
A heat wave settled over Maine in late July 2020, bringing sticky weather. Julie and her adult daughter, Alexandra, who was working from the home by Zoom, opted for an afternoon dip. They swam at an easy pace, chatting amiably about 20 yards out. The island’s shoreline is steep; the bottom drops sharply to depths of 50 or more feet. The swimmers approached a cottage where Katy Magill, a renter, telecommuted from a porch.
A tremendous splash propelled Holowach into the air. Magill saw a strange shape beneath her. Nothing made sense. Alexandra reached a boulder by shore and yelled for help. “Are you OK?” Magill yelled back. She and her husband, Charlie Wemyss-Dunn, pushed a tandem kayak off the beach and paddled out. Holowach’s body was floating on calm water, with a large abdominal wound. Now Magill knew what she had seen. Her husband said he was going to get in and help. “No, no, no!” Magill shouted. “This wasn’t a heart attack. This wasn’t a boat propeller. Don’t go into the water.”
A few minutes later, Holowach’s remains were ashore. News crews were not long behind.
The attack jolted coastal Maine and reminded the Cape Cod Ocean Community of how much it still wanted done. It had pushed for several steps. This summer Kristian Sexton, who is testing drone-based shark-spotting, developed a light-and-siren system for a dune overlooking LeCount Hollow. The system would emit alarms whenever a tagged shark pinged at the transceiver buoy off the beach. Heather Doyle invited public officials to a demonstration. Such alarms, she said, were necessary because the current system relies on lifeguards to receive alerts and clear people from water. But lifeguards at most beaches are on duty only during workday hours in high season, leaving no one relaying alarms in early morning, evening or the fall. The idea proved intriguing to town officials — “in theory it is great and the price point is reasonable,” said Grout Thomas, the beach supervisor in Wellfleet — and suggested the Cape Cod Ocean Community, an upstart with a confrontational streak, could see safety gaps the professionals missed.
Guiding a white shark onto a lift on the OCEARCH vessel off Nova Scotia.
Among critics of the white-shark status quo, disillusionment runs deep. Other members of the Cape Cod Ocean Community, including Drew Taylor, reject the reliance on nonlethal approaches. Taylor proposes challenging policy and amending federal law to allow communities to set preferred population levels for white sharks and gray seals and permit hunting or fishing to reduce their numbers. Conservation laws, he said, were understandable in intent but lack tools to deal adequately with rebounds of this scale. “How can you write a law that protects something in perpetuity?” he said. His views, like those heard in human-wildlife conflicts elsewhere, can be summarized like this: It’s perfectly reasonable to find lions or cobras or white sharks captivating but not want hundreds of them feeding in your neighborhood park. He blames federal policies for fostering biological and social dynamics that force people to yield without question or recourse to dangerous or nuisance animals. Marine mammals, he noted, enjoy protection that terrestrial mammals do not; a sole black bear that roamed Cape Cod in 2012, for example, was promptly tranquilized and removed.
Greg Connors, captain of the 40-foot gillnet vessel Constance Sea, which fishes from Chatham, said environmentalists and bureaucrats have not fully considered the gray seal recovery’s effect on people who live on the water. Seal advocates and scientists, he said, have not shown convincing evidence that the historic seal population in New England was as large as it is now and operate on assumptions that all increases are good. At some point, he said, other voices and interests should be balanced against those in control. “They never set a bar on how high they want it to get,” he said of the seal population. “It’s always just more. That’s a terrible plan.” Seals, he said, have done more than attract white sharks; they have driven fish farther to sea and steal catches from nets. Nick Muto, the lobster captain, said marine-mammal protections, as designed, defy common sense. Why, he asked, do protections apply equally to North Atlantic right whales, of which perhaps 400 animals remain, and gray seals, which in the western Atlantic number roughly half a million? He was surprised that Medici’s death didn’t change the official stance. “I thought once somebody died here,” he said, “it would be lights out for the seals.” Connors and Muto acknowledge there is little chance for an amendment, an assessment shared by their industry group. “We’re under no illusion that there is going to be a cull,” said John Pappalardo, who heads the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance. “Blood on the beach? People would not tolerate that.” But frustrations capture the degree to which one side feels overtalked and alienated by the other, including many people whose lives center on the water.
Andrea Bogomolni, chairwoman of the Northwest Atlantic Seal Research Consortium, a program affiliated with the University of Massachusetts, Boston, that seeks to improve understanding of seals’ ecological roles, said at issue are gaps between biological carrying capacity, which is the maximum population size an ecosystem can support, and social capacity, the size at which a population becomes intolerable to people. The law, Bogomolni said, supports the former, and it’s the responsibility of people to adapt to recovering ecosystems. Adaptations are familiar to her. She grew up surfing in central California but gave up the sport on Cape Cod in 2008, because, she said, “it got sharky.”
A white shark eating a striped bass just off Nauset Beach in Orleans.
Three years after a shark killed Medici, one proposal has gained credibility: shark-spotting with drones.
In 2019 Sexton, an engineer with a commercial pilot’s license, founded a company, Moosh Systems, to experiment with drones and artificial intelligence to find and observe sharks. By 2020 his preliminary work with consumer drones demonstrated what amateur drone operators were discovering and spotter pilots already knew: In the shallow water and sandy bottom common at the Outer Cape, on most summer days the dark backs of sharks are silhouetted and easy to see from above. This often proved true even when water was thick with mung, through which a cruising white shark can leave a wake-like trail that Sexton learned to follow to the animal.
Public-safety applications became self-evident. More than once Sexton saw sharks approaching swimmers, ran down the beach and hurried people ashore. With time he noticed patterns. Among them were that white sharks in Wellfleet and Truro often swim slowly and parallel to shore, a finding that might merit flying drones on either side of public beaches to warn swimmers before sharks come through. The work also aligned with principles shark advocates and government agencies promote: It was nonlethal and noninvasive and yielded information with potential to enhance understanding of the species. It was also inexpensive compared with spotter aircraft, which cost about $300 an hour.
His effort has been hassled. Citing National Park Service policy, the Cape Cod National Seashore forbids drones to take off and land from property the park service administers, a policy sometimes misinterpreted as a ban on drone flights over the outer Cape’s coastline. While flying from a town beach in Truro this summer, Sexton was told twice by park staff to stop. He had read the rules closely and insisted he was no scofflaw. He kept flying. Brian Carlstrom, superintendent of the national seashore, acknowledged that the prohibition applies only to flights from property under park service administration and not from private property or beaches managed by towns, which can set rules for drones as they do for alcohol use, metal detectors and more.
Like the Cape Cod Ocean Community, Sexton chafes at bureaucracy and dismisses sections of the Woods Hole Group Report. He said its failure to recognize the potential for drones, based in part on aircraft tests elsewhere, revealed an ignorance of local conditions and validated official inaction. “The report was a betrayal of public trust,” he said.
Drones are not fail-safe. Their efficacy can be undermined by heavy winds, rain, pilot fatigue and battery life. Sometimes, especially after big surf, the water becomes too murky to see into at all. But on a majority of summer days, Sexton said, a drone paired with an alert pilot could inform lifeguards of a shark’s approach. “A drone operator is not going to pick up every shark, but in the right conditions is going to pick up nearly every shark that comes into the field of view, and the field of view can be large,” he said. It could also investigate suspicious sights, like a fin, that often are white sharks but sometimes are basking sharks or ocean sunfish, both harmless.
In late August when I met Jody Craven, one of Wellfleet’s head lifeguards, the first question I asked was about drones. Craven was sitting on an A.T.V. at White Crest Beach. He glanced at a bag on its cargo rack. “I have a Mavic 2 in my backpack right now, totally unsanctioned,” he said. “I think there is going to be some movement in the off-season to get at least one drone on each beach with a lifeguard trained to use it.” A Mavic 2 is a popular consumer drone. Craven bought his with his own money. Craven’s supervisor, Grout Thomas, said she is open to drone surveillance. Warning signs, she said, are ignored by many people. And while medical response has improved, she worries about future attacks. “I think it’s just a matter of time,” she said. In this environment, she suggested that officials need open minds and humility. “We’re not sure what we’re doing is right,” she said, “because we have never done it before.” Pike, in Orleans, said he planned to propose incorporating drones into beach operations next year. The town’s ocean beach was all but swarmed with sharks this August and repeatedly closed, even to wading knee-deep. Pike said he supports the conservancy’s and state’s approaches but is obligated to improve safety and relies too much on information from others. Drones, he said, would allow his staff to gather live information firsthand.
Surfers off Cape Cod.
Call it sign blindness, acceptance, psychic numbing, a result of therapy or an innate and ineluctable urge to be in the ocean. Whatever it was, on Sept. 1 Nina Lanctot showed up at the beach where a white shark killed Medici three years earlier. She had returned from Maine, rented an apartment and was working as an emergency medical technician at the Provincetown Fire Department. She wanted to sample the Cape’s surf in summer again. Her one previous attempt had been on a spooky, foggy day weeks earlier. She stopped after catching two waves.
Now clean, hip-high waves broke over a sandbar almost exactly where the shark bit Medici. The air was warm, the light soft, the breeze gentle. About a dozen surfers were in a lineup on the outer edge. In front was a boogie boarder; just beyond two men paddled stand-up boards. Kristian Sexton and Sara Moran were among the longboarders. Lanctot appeared, strolling down the beach in a sleeveless wetsuit, carrying a pale nine-foot longboard with a light-blue nose and a fresh coat of wax. She was retracing the route she had sprinted while clutching a tourniquet in 2018.
For a few minutes she watched the water. She was about to paddle out when the lineup broke up. Everyone was hurrying ashore. Again she read the beach. “Shark,” she said.
Soon the surfers were on land. The only predators in sight were a few terns screeching and dipping over a school of sand eels. A paddle boarder told Lanctot that a white shark had swum through. “The fin went right by,” he said. Several surfers left. Others agreed to stay put until the sand eels moved on.
After a while, Sexton and Lanctot grabbed their boards and headed out. Dread rose quickly within her. She was scanning for threats. When she peered down she envisioned a shark rising to strike. This was not quite reality. It was fear colluding with an imagination rooted in experience and fact.
A set of waves came in. Immediately Lanctot was up, riding to her right. Then it happened: Her mind went silent, the most relaxing sensation she knew, and she had the exhilarating feeling of floating on air. For 90 minutes she toggled between anticipating a shark bite and the familiar joys of her old sanctuary. She felt enlivened, sharp and satisfied. She caught wave after wave, practiced her cutbacks and rode a few to shore. She kept paddling out for more.
Later, Sexton realized the brief session contained the unsolvable puzzle. The waters of Cape Cod were not going to be free of white sharks or people anytime soon, and for all of his work studying the predators, he could not answer the most basic question. “It was awesome to be in the water and to see her there,” he said. “But should we really be in the water? I don’t know.”
Lanctot did not know either. “Felt really good to get back in the water,” she texted that evening. Then the old foreboding returned. By mid-October, peak season for white sharks near her home, she was unsure what to do. When she thought of surfing, her hands shook, her chest tightened, she struggled for a full breath. “If there were no sharks here, I’d be out in everything,” she said. “I’d go out in tiny waves, I’d go out in huge storms and everything in between. But it’s the end of an era now, of this being a carefree place.”
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