Sharks

I get asked this a lot and yes of course it's a concern. I don't necessarily worry about a shark jumping out of the water and grabbing me. There are situations that I know can happen and it's almost inevitable that they will. Such as a big great white or tiger shark (I'm talking close to 5m) will come check you out. Hopefully they'll just go past and have a look a couple of times and not try to bite the kayak. If that happens I'll probably end up in the water. At that point I hope the shark gets scared too, otherwise I'm in a bit of trouble.

I've seen big shadows twice that I think were a great white, but I have yet to see something I can be certain of. Honestly I don't worry about sharks. The only time I'm scared of them is when I've got my feet in the water. If I'm not mistaken, the only known kayak fishing death is from a guy that had his feet in the water when a tiger shark (or perhaps it was a bull shark) bit him and he died from blood loss. Don't keep your feet in the water!

This is probably the closest I've come to a bad encounter. The hammerhead shark looks small but it was close to 3m. I worry a bit about hammerheads as I know they can be territorial.

Other than that we catch blacktip sharks all the time and bronzies sometimes. They're small though. I've only had two occasions where I've had to cut the line because the shark was too large to deal with. Every shark gets some surgery and is released.