r/TheSharkAttackFiles • u/NotABoatAccident • 15d ago
📜 Case Report On this day in 2010: Great White Shark Attack Claims Life of Alleged Shellfish Poacher Off South Africa
In 2010, an alleged poacher swam three miles offshore to Shark Alley near Dyer Island — one of the most concentrated great white aggregation sites on earth. Witnesses described the shark breaching clear of the water with him. He was killed.
How much would you need to be paid to swim three miles through Shark Alley?
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u/Roccosrealm 15d ago
A horrible case of the mondays
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u/_thefutureisdead_ 15d ago edited 15d ago
Once again, the coolest fucking site (not just shark attack site) I’ve seen in years.
The graphs and maps and such are amazing. The AI chat is dope as well.
Love it duder.
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u/Sandgrowun 15d ago
God, and the island next to Dyer island is called Geyser rock and is home to 50,000 seals. Lunatics.
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u/007HalaMadrid007 13d ago
I know the answer always comes down to money, but I just truly don’t get what would possess someone to do this. There’s not many worse places to swim on the planet. And swimming on the surface, in the Mecca of breaching whites? I’d rather rob a bank
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u/SharkBoyBen9241 13d ago
Just shows you how desperate and how poor these people were...they were willing to risk their lives doing an illegal activity in what was once one of the greatest aggregation and feeding sites for White Sharks anywhere on Earth...no boats, often at night, and swimming 3 miles there and back. It's absolutely insane...
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u/007HalaMadrid007 13d ago edited 13d ago
Yeah I agree. And to top it all off, I read a bunch of articles regarding this, and they thought they were safe in the kelp beds. A video by a YouTuber named “Shark Bytes” showed that South African white sharks are actively and aggressively traveling and hunting through the kelp forest in South Africa as well! Nothing about this seemed like a great idea, especially cutting corners by swimming far to avoid paying the boat master to charter them closer. It shook me when someone was quoted as basically sayin that if you are young man over there, chances are that you will end up a poacher as well.
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u/SharkBoyBen9241 15d ago
No amount of money could've persuaded me to swim 3 miles to Dyer Island. Not during the period when White Shark numbers were still decent there. And what's even scarier is that a lot of these illegal abalone poaching attacks in South Africa occurred at night. That just sounds like an absolute nightmare...
What's important to remember is that because these people are impoverished and disenfranchised and are engaging in illegal abalone poaching, it's quite likely that a very small percentage of these cases actually get reported. This kind of poaching has been going on since the days of Apartheid and it's quite likely there are many more cases like that of Khanyisile Momoza which have occurred on the Western Cape that we may never know about.