The Dive Site blog

Ultra swimmer kills sharks

24 June 2011, 09:55

Penny Palfrey, a 48-year-old Australian ultra swimmer and grandmother, recently
set a world record for a marathon ocean swim of over 67 miles. So far so good, well done Penny, but it seems there is more to the story.During the swim she was approached by three oceanic white tip sharks (conservation status 'vulnerable'), which her support crew lured away with bait and then hacked to death with a machete.

Now I have a real problem with this. Imagine for a moment that she was a marathon runner attempting to set a record running through a wildlife area and her support team shot any lions that came close. Would that be acceptable? Of course not, but very few people are making a fuss of the shark killing.

It seems we have a long way to go on shark conservation. And Penny, the next time a shark comes close to you the correct response is to get out of the water! It's his teritory, not yours.

Here is the original article from Adventure Journal.

Penny Palfrey, a 48-year-old Australian ultra swimmer and grandmother, set the world record last weekend for unassisted solo ocean swim, logging 67.25 miles between Little Cayman and Grand Cayman islands. She was in the water for 40 hours and 41 minutes, and when she walked onto a Grand Cayman beach her face was so swollen she was nearly unrecognizable. She was released from a local hospital on Tuesday after two days of recovery, but still could not speak.

Palfrey was hailed for her accomplishment, which was four miles longer than the previous record, but was criticized by conservationists for the killing of three sharks that approached her during the swim. Four oceanic white tips came near her, and several times at night during her swim she was bumped by something large. One of the members of her support team traveling in a small inflatable, a local fisherman named Charles Ebanks, distracted the sharks with dead fish, then killed three of six- to eight-footers with a machete.

Left: an oceanic white tip
Right: ultra swimmer Penny Palfrey

“It was not in any of our plans for that to happen,” Chris Palfrey, Penny’s husband, told the CayCompass. “I was not aware it was going to happen until after the event. Our goal was to do a swim. It was not to do anything to the environment.”

Media reports generally have praised Palfrey for her brave swim through “shark-infested” waters, with little but passing acknowledgment to the killing of the sharks. And even the criticism by environmentalists has been muted.

The director of the Cayman Islands Department of Environment, Gina Ebanks-Petrie, said, “Given the importance of sharks as a top-level predator in the marine environment, the DoE would have preferred to have seen this incident handled differently.”

Um, hello? Three full-sized sharks were chopped to death so some woman could achieve personal glory by swimming for almost two days? Let’s have a little perspective here. Imagine an ultra runner wants to set a new record racing across the bear-infested northern Rockies. Four bears approach her while she’s running along the trail and her support crew uses some manky bilious road kill to lure them away, where they’re shot dead. Sharks might not be the friend of swimmers or surfers, but the fact that they’re predators and this took place in the ocean, where bloody deeds quickly fade from sight, makes it no less of an abomination.

Oceanic whitetips are classified as “vulnerable” under the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s assessment of species, and one-third of the world’s sharks are “threatened”, according to IUCN. In the Gulf of Mexico, it’s estimated that their population fell 99.3 percent from 1950s to the 1990s. The main culprits are drift nets, longline fishing, and overfishing, and their fins are prized for shark fin soup.

Palfrey’s crew certainly had reason for concern. Whitetips are responsible for more human deaths than all other shark species combined — although not fast swimmers, they stay close to the surface cruising for food and are quickly on the scene in shipwrecks and downed aircraft. But the recommended response if one comes within the vicinity of a diver, swimmer, or surfer is not to hack them to death. It’s simply to get out of the water. Apparently, Palfrey’s desire to break the record (it was her third attempt) was more important than that.