Another Day at Nauset Beach

“GET OUT OF THE WATER!” A man screeched from the fire department’s rigid hull inflatable boat. It bolted through the shallow water just feet away from me, leaving a small wake in its path that rolled in and lapped against my waist. Red and blue lights flashed and sirens howled, disrupting the calm of the early August beach day. On the beach, bronzed lifeguards descended from their towers and jogged down the shore, blowing into their whistles and waving at the swimmers. Somewhere nearby, a great white shark coasted underwater.

“All right everyone, we’re going to take this one in!” I told my surf lesson group in an aggressively cheery voice. They scrambled to get onto their boards, not even fully aware of what was going on. To be fair, the mother had voiced her shark concerns many times before the lesson, so I needed to act cool and composed. And, actually, this mass exodus from the water had become the norm for me. Not exactly ho-hum, but still – what was once fodder for a terrifying movie had now become just another day at the beach. This was my fifth year teaching surf lessons at Nauset Beach, and I would soon learn it would be my last as more and more sharks took to summering on Cape Cod. 

The family scrambled onto their boards, wobbling to balance on their bellies and suspend their limbs out of the water. I placed my hands on the tails of two of their boards and pushed them forward, sending them in on the wake-formed wave. The others frantically splashed as they paddled in – I rushed over and gave their boards a shove too, and they glided to shore. Swimmers around us hurried, heedlessly thrashing through the water. Behind the chaos of swimmers dashing to get out, I waded through the thigh-deep glassy water, the last one to shore.

I stepped out of the water and hobbled over the rocks to join my clients and boss, Brian, on the beach. Under the beating sun, we stood in our rubbery wetsuits as saltwater dripped off our pruned fingertips and matted hair. Beachgoers got up from their chairs and towels, looking around for answers.

“What’s going on?”

“Is there a shark?”

“Did you see the shark out there?”

“Where is it?”

They approached Brian and me and bombarded us with questions, thinking we had some sort of authority. I can’t lie… I almost enjoyed being considered an expert. And as they asked, phones buzzed and beeped and pinged from the Sharktivity app, an app that notifies you when and where a shark is spotted or tagged. I smiled at the irony of phones knowing about the sharks before the people did. What the tourists secretly wished for, but openly wished away, had happened. And this wasn’t the first time, not even just this week.

The regional great white shark population has been on the rise for the past few years, largely attributed to the presence of a growing community of seals that have rebounded due to protection policies put in place in the 1970’s. Compared to 11,000 in 2005, the National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that there are now 30,000 to 50,000 gray seals around the coast of southeastern Massachusetts. In November 2019, researchers tagged the last great white shark in a five-year population study. They recorded 179 sharks with 17 new tags just this season. Plus, four seal attacks and two human attacks, including the first fatal one on Cape Cod since 1936, filled the news this year.

“Woman Rethinks Swim at Nauset Beach After Spotting a Shark,” “Shark Devours Seal Near Shore in Nauset Beach,” “'I Heard Him Screaming:' Friend Recalls Moment 26-Year-Old Was Killed in Cape Cod Shark Attack” are just some of the headlines that crowded the newspapers and internet. Articles popped up from all sorts of news sources – from the Cape Cod Times and Chronicle to the New York Times, Fox News, and CNBC. Plus, Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, television's longest-running event that boasted almost 35 million viewers this past summer, always spends a fair part of its programming on Cape Cod’s sharks. It is the talk of the season, every season.

Purple flags with the shape of a great white shark on it wave in the wind at every entrance to the beach, and large signs display a menacing, open-mouthed great white. Above the shark screams “BE SHARK SMART” in bolded capitals alongside safety tips and a plug for the Sharktivity application. There is no way to avoid sharks at Nauset Beach, in or out of the water.

Dick Hilmer, the Natural Resources and Endangered Species Specialist for the town of Orleans, has become the go-to guy when it comes to sharks at Nauset Beach. He spends his days in his office or driving up and down the beach on call for any animal commotion, from a stranded seal to an endangered piping plover nest to a beached pilot whale. His passion for his job is palpable, but the shark matter still gets to him as he, and every beachgoer, begins to question why the heck we all still go in the water.

“Is Brian really gonna come back? Is Emma really gonna stand in the water and watch people surf? I’ll tell you right now – I’m a water person, not frightened at all of the ‘ifs’ of it, but that’s something strange to me” he tells me.

Brian Niezgoda, a Cape Cod native, works at Blue Origin during the year as an engineer, but he opened Nauset Surf School in 2014 and has been teaching surf lessons each summer since. With hair and eyebrows so sun-bleached they’ve turned white, Brian spends all and every summer day at Nauset Beach, barefoot and in his wetsuit. I, too, grew up surfing at Nauset Beach. I met Brian in the water and later joined Nauset Surf School as an instructor. This summer, almost half of our lessons were either cancelled or cut short due to sharks in the water.

“Sharks are now mentioned in every third sentence at the beach,” Brian notes. “In any large group there is usually one person who is hesitant or does not go in the water. I mean, 80% of people bring up sharks – most end up joking about it,” he continues. Until this summer, I had never seen a shark with my own eyes at Nauset Beach. The chances of anything happening are so low, we would tell our clients (and ourselves?). And for a while we truly believed that. But it is clear that Nauset Beach and the surf community has seen a major change with the increase of sharks, especially after the first fatal shark attack that occurred this summer.

The question remains: what do we do? The towns have held multiple forums for people to discuss the best options. Seal birth control? Culling? Shark nets? All sorts of absurd ideas have been tossed out. But the reality is that we can’t get rid of seals, and the sharks are certainly not going anywhere. Instead, the plan is to continue to study the data and, essentially, prepare for attacks.

This past summer, Hilmer focused on developing his data-gathering and analysis, eventually able to anticipate shark appearances. “It’s gonna be really weird,” he says, describing this never-ending shark watch, “but that’s how we are gonna have to start playing the game.” If a shark is sighted up north in Truro or Wellfleet, for example, one can assume it will come down to Nauset with the currents and tide within hours.

Interestingly, this information is all public, especially with the Sharktivity app. After we were pulled out of the water halfway through one lesson, Hilmer drove past me in the parking lot and shouted: “There were five or six of ‘em! It looked like a Christmas tree!” – a term they’ve come to use to describe how the sharks light up on Sharktivity.

In terms of safety, the town has attempted all sorts of tactics, including closing the water to swimmers and having a lifeboat at hand. This past summer they would close the water for one hour after a shark was sighted – a seemingly random approach that assumes the sharks are gone after that one hour. They also now have a 10-foot inflatable lifeboat ready to deploy and rescue the swimmer after an attack. Only three trained specialists can use that boat, one of those: Hilmer. In fact, the team was on its last training session when a shark swam under the lifeboat, which is the incident I began this story with. It worked, warning swimmers to get out of the water, yet Hilmer is the first one to note how inefficient the lifeboat is. In the event of an attack, Hilmer says, “I’m just gonna jump in the water and pull the body out because we’ve got twelve to seventeen minutes [to save the swimmer], and that’s a hell of a lot more convenient for me than to jump into a boat after driving 20 minutes [to get to Nauset Public],” he chuckles over the phone. But the truth of it all is chilling. Twelve to seventeen minutes, that’s it. With help from data from places like South Africa and Australia, Hilmer understands that they have less than twenty minutes to get the swimmer out of the water and then stop the bleeding. “Medici died because he bled out. By the time he got into shore, he was gone,” Hilmer says.

Arthur Medici, 26, died on September 15th, 2019 from a shark attack – Massachusetts’ first fatal shark attack in over 80 years. Medici was boogie boarding at Newcomb Hollow, a beach just fifteen minutes north of Nauset, when a great white bit his legs. Beachgoers watched as the shark’s tail thrashed through the water. The shark tugged at Medici, and blood boiled to the water’s surface. People attempted life-saving measures on the beach as they frantically called 911 and waited for the ambulance to arrive, but Medici had lost too much blood to survive.

Now, the fatal attack is part of the lore, and experts have needed to move on to how to react after a shark strikes. To prepare for any type of attack in the future, they have offered many “Stop the Bleeding” classes, and Hilmer plans to outfit Nauset Beach with kits that have wraps and tourniquets. Hilmer describes how tourniquets have become critical: “I was always taught not to put on a tourniquet, that you’re gonna lose [the limb]. Whereas now, it’s good: let them lose the arm or the leg, but let’s save the body.” The fatal attack left the Cape Cod community heavy-hearted and with looming worry. But to say the buzz of sharks hasn’t peaked interest and boosted tourism would be false. The question is whether continued attacks will replace fascination with fear.

And what does it mean for the surf community? I asked Hilmer. “Like Bob Dylan’s song, times they are a-changin’ for the Cape Cod Surf Community!” He replied, adding, “Everyone is on high alert when entering the water, and a dark cloud hovers over all water people. The reality is that we may not get back to the way it was before September 15th. The free spirit to grab your board and run to the water does not presently exist.” Surfers have now painted stripes of black and white on their boards and wetsuits to disrupt the shark’s vision and mimic various fish and sea snakes that are known to repel them. They’ve even explored technological solutions like the shark shield, which is an adhesive that sends out electrical deterrents to the sharks. I haven’t gone so far yet, but it is tempting.

I mean, to say I’m not at all afraid would be a lie. Early morning sessions when the sun climbs up and over the horizon and late evenings when the sunset leaves pink clouds and dark blue water – those are the moments that I think about sharks: feeding time. But for me, the shark commotion has lost its initial thrill. The spectacle of it all has turned a bit monotonous. After all, it was their ocean long before it was ours. But to give up surfing and stay out of the water is simply impossible. To me, the sea remains the most fascinating realm on earth, sharks included.