My back yard is potentially fatal

Out the back in the line-up, beyond where the waves break, it’s hard to head the regular announcements that the lifeguards make over the tannoy. Usually it’s something to do with rips and currents on the beach, thieves operating in the area (“They’re very intelligent – don’t leave your belongings unattended”) or other announcements designed to save the idiots that populate the beach from their own lack of common sense.

Surfers use the rips to get out past the whitewater, and you’d have to be a shrewd and desperate pickpocket to try and nick a wax comb from someone sitting on a board. Therefore, they don’t usually worry about the announcements. They, we, ignore them.

Luckily, I was on shore having lunch when this announcement was made yesterday.

‘The shark alarm sounded about 1pm after a local surfer spotted the shark, believed to be about 6ft. It was seen about 200m from the shore near the stormwater pipe on North Steyne Beach’

The stormwater pipe emerges from the beach just by my house. If the shark is 200 metres from the shore, it’s 500 metres from my couch. That’s too close. The reckoning is that it was probably a hammerhead, but there was a great white spotted about 20 minutes up the coast a month back, and last March a Bull Shark was caught off North head, 500 metres south of our bay. Throw in a tiger shark, and you’ve got the four major attack-dogs of the shark world.

Fin-tastic.

And if that wasn’t enough, apparently the second most venomous sea creature in Australia, the blue-ringed octopus, is also a resident in our local waters. From the Tele:

“It’s only a matter of time before someone dies,” marine biologist David Baxter said yesterday.
“It’s the second most poisonous sea creature after the box jellyfish, but we co-exist with it.”
Despite their small size and colours, a bite from a blue-ringed octopus quickly paralyses a person to a point where they fall unconscious and can’t breathe.

Great. Anyone fancy a dip? The water’s only deadly.