I was telling a friend about sailing on Raritan Bay. She looked a little concerned. "Why?" I inquired. "Well", she informed me, "A Great White, swam into the Bay and up the river one day."
Apparently, it munched its way through several residents of New Jersey". "Eek" says I, although in a more manly way. "When pray was this?". "Oh, in 1916." my friend said.
OK, so it's a not exactly Bondi Beach-like in its frequency but a good tale all the same. Here's the story:
New Jersey Man Eater Story of 1916
Nearly 60 years before Peter Benchley's novel
"Jaws," a real man-eater lurked the waters of the New Jersey coast. It
was July 11th, 1916, and in Beach Haven the tourist season was in full
swing. The beaches were filled with sunbathers and the ocean with
swimmers. Everything seemed like just another hot July day. But this
day would be different from any other. A young Penn graduate named
Charles E. Vansant, a resident of Beach Haven, died after having been
attacked by a shark while out swimming. A lifeguard pulled him in and
tried to stop the profuse bleeding, but Charles could not be saved.
Scientists of the area wrote this off as a singular freak occurrence.
They could not have been more wrong.
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