u/NotABoatAccident

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?

https://notaboataccident.com/i/8hp23n7?s=r

A researcher from the Rosensteil School of Marine Sciences, photographing a school of 20–25 silky sharks at depth with four colleagues in 1985, was contacted by one — and later distinguished the event in a detailed self-authored account as incidental, not a behavioural attack.

https://notaboataccident.com/i/49tzk5d?s=r

In 1902, a swimmer died in what contemporary sources explicitly described as the first recorded case of a shark fatally attacking a swimmer on the Italian coast. The incident was documented across at least twelve newspapers in multiple countries within weeks.

https://notaboataccident.com/i/nbw2dcj?s=r

1901, Simon's Town, South Africa: John Chandler, a Boer POW held at the Boulders camp, was seized by a shark while swimming off Windmill Beach. A Royal Navy witness told the Cape Times he fought it and nearly dragged it ashore. He died that afternoon.

https://notaboataccident.com/i/fkkpxvd?s=r

An account published in 1829 reads less like a tragedy than an engineering demonstration: a young shark-bite survivor, a London instrument maker, and a writing device that astonished the Lord Mayor's court.

Thomas Cargill, described in the press as a poor lad, was bitten by a shark while bathing in a river at Sierra Leone, on the West African coast. He lost both hands. The account is blunt about his condition afterward: "perfectly helpless."

What happened next is why the case was written up at all. On his return to England, a benevolent gentleman took an interest in him and gave him a letter of introduction to the Lord Mayor of London. The Lord Mayor sent him to Mr. Laundy — the surgeon's instrument maker who supplied St. Thomas's and Guy's Hospitals — with directions to do all they could for him.

Laundy later brought Cargill before the Lord Mayor to show "what could be effected by mechanical aid." The young man exhibited a pair of instruments that let him dress and undress himself, buttoning and unbuttoning his own clothes; another set for lifting and carrying great loads; another that let him carve his own food and help himself to anything he wanted.

The last device astonished the room: an instrument that enabled him to write. Cargill wrote his name in the presence of the Lord Mayor, with such facility that observers judged him capable not only of writing for himself, but of teaching others to write.

https://notaboataccident.com/i/ddwpm96?s=r

On the afternoon of July 2, 2004, a seven-year-old boy named Trenton Martin was jumping waves in waist-deep water off Gulf Shores, Alabama — 15 to 20 feet from shore, with ten to fifteen people within ten feet of him. The sea was calm, warm and murky green; he couldn't see his own feet. He had been in and out of the water all day, looking for shells with his grandfather.

He felt something bump him about six times in quick succession and thought his 16-year-old brother was trying to scare him. It wasn't. A shark bit his foot, let go, adjusted its hold and bit a second time — shaking his whole body, pulling him toward shore and submerging with him for a few seconds. His grandfather, Jeff Flanigan, had been swimming underwater nearby; he saw a shark, though he didn't witness any contact with the boy. When he surfaced, Trenton was screaming. Flanigan lifted him out of the water; the shark released the boy and sped off toward deeper water. Flanigan described it as four to five feet long.

Trenton reached the hospital within 30 minutes, underwent surgery on his foot, and was expected to regain full use of it. He went home after five days.

The detail that stays with you: the lifeguard on duty could recall only one other shark incident on the Alabama coast — in 2000, Chuck Anderson, athletic supervisor for Baldwin County's public schools, lost part of his right arm to a shark just east of where Trenton was injured. When Anderson learned of the accident, he went to the hospital to visit Trenton and his family.

Anderson's own case is in the archive too: https://notaboataccident.com/i/tf3npss?s=r

Full record for this incident: https://notaboataccident.com/i/bxxkcgg?s=r

For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing: every incident report on the site now has a "Seafloor & ocean depth" section. You get a cross-section of the bottom from the shore out past the incident location, a seafloor map, and a few derived stats, like how far out the water hits 100 m, where the shelf break is, and how steep the nearshore slope runs. Some locations get a character label like "steep dropoff" (Réunion is dramatic).

The depths come from GEBCO, the public-domain global bathymetry grid that most ocean depth maps trace back to, at roughly 450 m per grid cell. Their public API only serves the older 2020 grid and caps you at about 1 request per second, which was going to take days for the whole database. So I ended up downloading the full 2026 grid (8 tiles, about 7 GB) and running my own copy locally to sample profiles for all ~5,600 geocoded incidents in one go.

A bit on how the stats are worked out, since "which way is out to sea" isn't obvious from a single point on a map: from each incident pin I sample the grid along 16 compass bearings out to 150 km and keep the direction where the seafloor crosses 200 m soonest, basically the fastest route to deep water. Then I resample that one bearing finely, every 500 m for the first 10 km, and everything on the card comes off that profile. The deep-water and shelf-break distances are interpolated between samples, and the nearshore slope is the steepest seabed gradient in the first 10 km. The labels follow the standard oceanography cuts: shelf break at the −200 m isobath, "steep dropoff" when that break sits within 12 km of shore with a slope of 3° or more (continental slopes run about 3–6°), "broad shelf" when it's further out than the ~75 km global average. River and lake incidents get detected too (no ocean within ~8 km of the pin) and just don't show the section rather than showing nonsense.

One big caveat, and honestly it applies to every report on the site, not just this feature: incident coordinates are geocoded from the written location descriptions in the source records, which are often just "off the beach at X". A pin can easily be a few hundred meters off, sometimes a lot more, and the seafloor near shore can change fast over that distance. So treat the profile as context for the general area, not "the water was exactly this deep where it happened". It's also separate from the water depth reported at the time of the incident, where that was recorded at all.

Keen for feedback: is this actually useful context? Is there a stat you'd want that isn't shown? And if you know a spot well and its profile looks wrong, tell me and I'll dig into it.

Check it out on https://notaboataccident.com

Case SA-300 in the Global Shark Attack File, and one of the more unusual entries in it. On the morning of 29 June 1982, Alex Macun, 27, was surfing off a half-moon bay on the Transkei Wild Coast, about 95 km southwest of Port St Johns. He'd just ridden a wave in and was paddling back out when two surfers behind him heard him call out, turned, and saw a large shark on him. People on the rocks watched it happen close to shore. His body was never recovered. The remarkable part is how the species was pinned down. His surfboard washed up with a single large bite out of the right rail, an arc about 43 cm across. Five years later that board was examined by xeroradiography (an x-ray imaging method) to map the tooth impressions left in the foam. Their spacing and shape identified the shark as a white (Carcharodon carcharias), roughly 2.4 m long. That 2.4 m is worth pausing on. About 8 feet, a young white shark, well short of the 4-to-5 m animals people tend to picture in a fatal attack. Eyewitnesses described the shark too, so the ID doesn't hang on the board alone, but the surfboard is the hard physical evidence, and it's a strikingly early use of bite-forensics like this. Documented by Marie Levine of the Shark Research Institute and later published in her peer-reviewed survey of South African white shark attacks (Levine, 1996), where it's case 300: fatal, body not recovered, white shark confirmed by eyewitness account and bite pattern. Full account and sources: https://notaboataccident.com/incident/d9820853-e21f-484c-9c54-f63b2a334ad3