Environment

What we don't know... does scare the pants off of us!

I want to tell you a story about something that happened to me a few years ago.  My sister and I lived together in Melbourne, Florida, and one day we went to Sebastian Bay, a man made inlet in the mid-east of the Florida peninsula, to learn to surf and to enjoy the beach.  I made a failed attempt at surfing and when our friend took back his surfboard, my sister and I decided to take a swim.

After swimming way past the level where we could touch the bottom, we heard the lifeguard's siren go off.  We looked back, saw that it wasn't for us and continued swimming.  A few seconds later it went off again.  I looked back and saw that he was beckoning us back to shore.

Reluctantly, we began our return to the beach, my sister in front.  After a few moments of swimming, I looked back to see the fin of a shark, which I figured at three to four feet long, gliding right past where my sister and I had been swimming.  It was feeding.  So as not to scare her I didn't inform her that a shark just swam by (at that point in life, she was terrified of sharks, and where we were at the moment had one of the highest rates of shark attacks in the States).  I kept calm and kept us swimming. 

When we arrived at shore, I told her what I saw, and the lifeguard verified it, except he said that the shark was about 7-8 feet long (as he knew better than I, he was probably right). 

We survived a near shark attack. 

The thing is, we were unknowingly swimming within attack distance of dozens of sharks, yet we didn't get attacked.  Why?  Because sharks don't "just" attack people.  Humans are their least favorite of the spectrum of flavors out there.  Though we were within 7 feet of a 7-8 foot shark, we didn't even go off as a blip on its radar.  Sharks don't even want to eat us - that's an ego popper.  They attack when hungry, curious or in danger.

After this experience, Hollywood lost all credibility for me.