'Shark!': Cape Cod Recoils in a Summer of Sightings, Real and Imagined

It is in the three young men playing a game by the shoreline who do not swim out to retrieve their ball when it lands too far out in the surf.

It is in the panicked stampede out of the water when a seal swims by and someone on the beach mistakenly yells the word already hovering in the back of everyone’s mind: “Shark!”

It is feeling more than a little like Amity Island on the Cape this season.

Nearly a year ago, in September, a 26-year-old man named Arthur Medici died after he was bitten by a great white shark while boogie boarding on a beach in the Outer Cape town of Wellfleet.

There had not been a fatal shark attack in Massachusetts since 1936, but in recent years many people on the Cape had thought it was only a matter of time. Great white sharks had become increasingly prevalent along the Cape’s beaches, attracted by the expanding population of gray seals. A tourist had been bitten in 2012, and a month before Medici’s death, a doctor was bitten, surviving but requiring nine operations.

But if many people on the Cape, including local officials, had been able to ignore the shark problem or play it down, Medici’s death changed that. It has altered life for anyone who goes into the ocean and has set off intense debates over what should be done, from deploying buoys or drones that would detect sharks to culling the seal population.

It has also raised concerns about what will happen when there is another attack, which many expect there will be. Some people say they fear that eventually the Cape will become another Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean where swimming and surfing are severely restricted because of an abundance of shark attacks in its waters. Even without such a ban, some say, another serious attack could doom the Cape’s vitally important tourist economy.

“It hurts because you know it’s inevitable,” Marc Angelillo, a surfer and surf equipment salesman based in Orleans, a town in the Cape’s elbow, said of another attack. “We don’t have things in place. It’s just a matter of time, again.”

It is rare for sharks to attack humans. There were 66 confirmed unprovoked shark attacks in 2018, four of which were fatal, according to the International Shark Attack File by the University of Florida. Nearly half of those attacks occurred in the United States, and nearly a quarter of them in Florida.

But those statistics have not reduced the agitation on Cape Cod, where the saga that has unfolded has enough characters and subplots to fill out a “Jaws” reboot. There are the cautious town officials, wary of taking any measures to deter an attack that might give beachgoers a false sense of security and expose their towns to liability. There is the outspoken county commissioner, who has no formal role in managing beaches or wildlife but has fervently argued for killing sharks and seals.

Marine biologists and conservationists have been providing critical information to the towns, though some frustrated citizens deride them as “shark whisperers” who care more about animals than humans. Tourists have been dutifully going into the water no further than waist deep, as they have been advised, and exiting the water when a shark has been spotted, as has happened nearly once a day on a Cape beach this month.

And then there are the surfers. Their lives have been upended since Medici’s death, which made it no longer possible to ignore the risks of surfing on the Cape. Surfers are in a kind of collective state of mourning, some simmering with anger at what they perceive as a slow government response and others wrestling with whether they can still find joy in surfing the Cape’s waves.

“It kind of infects my mind,” Timothy Schirmang, a 35-year-old surfer from Provincetown, said, explaining why he would never use Sharktivity, an app created by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy to send alerts of confirmed shark sightings.

For now, the Cape’s six Atlantic-facing towns have focused on warning people about the risks and putting tools on the beach to respond to attacks, like trauma kits and 911 call boxes. They have hired an environmental consulting firm to analyze shark mitigation tactics. That report is expected in September.

Daniel Hoort, the town administrator in Wellfleet, acknowledged that the discussion of sharks had grown contentious and that many people wanted the towns to move faster.

“If we had a proven method that was proven to work, we would absolutely consider it, but right now we just have a lot of salespeople who are trying to sell us products,” he said.

Asked about criticism that a White Shark Working Group — which includes town administrators, public safety officials and representatives from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, the National Park Service and the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy — meets in private, Hoort said, “Sometimes we just have to be able to have open, frank discussions and not worry about who is in the audience that’s going to take something that we say out of context.”

“There are people out there,” he said, “who want to know why we’re not out killing seals and killing sharks.”

Among those people is A.J. Salerno, who works in financial services and lives in Eastham, just south of Wellfleet. His two teenage sons love to surf, but since Medici was killed, Salerno and his wife no longer let them surf on the Cape. Instead, the family drives two hours away to a beach in Rhode Island. Great white sharks are less of a concern on Rhode Island beaches, because the seal population there is much less dense than in Massachusetts, and in Maine, where the sharks spread out over a broader area rather than concentrating in places where people are swimming and surfing.

“Nobody wants to say what needs to be done,” Salerno said, adding that “the seals need to be culled yesterday, the sharks need to be fished.”

The marine biologists, Salerno suggested, were inherently conflicted. “The people that are keeping all the statistics on this are people who make a career out of studying sharks,” he said. Referring to Gregory Skomal, a scientist with the Division of Marine Fisheries and the state’s preeminent shark expert, he said: “The last thing Greg Skomal and his band of shark whisperers are going to say is the sharks need to go.”

The sharks and the seals are protected by law, the seals by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which made possible a rebound in their population, and the sharks by a combination of state and federal law.

Even if officials could cull the seals, it might not solve the shark threat, Skomal said. Because the 50,000 seals on Cape Cod are part of a population of half a million that moves throughout the western North Atlantic, he said, any small number of seals killed would quickly be replaced by others.

“Does the general public have the stomach to remove tens of thousands of seals?” Skomal said. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction, in my opinion, that is not likely to work.”

Some worried that the shark attacks would harm Cape tourism this summer; local officials consulted scientists and public relations experts about what to tell tourists about sharks, in order to be honest but also “maintain some confidence in the destination,” as one official put it. But so far there is nothing to suggest that the sharks have kept people away. The only businesses clearly affected are surf schools, some of which have closed, and surf shops, where sales of surfboards, body boards and wet suits have dropped.

One day last week, at Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro, further up the Cape from Wellfleet, lifeguards had to clear the water twice because they had spotted sharks. But most beachgoers seemed to be taking the sharks in stride.

Cara Abraham, a social studies teacher from Roxbury, Connecticut, was watching her children play in shallow water. She said she and her husband had grown up coming to the Cape and were not overly alarmed, although no one in the family would go very far into the water.

“I think what’s actually scarier to me is that they’re finding them on the Bay side” of the Cape, she said of the sharks. “Those are the safe beaches. That’s where you take your toddlers.”

The sharks have driven away Nina Lanctot, 26, a surfer, former lifeguard in Wellfleet and trained emergency medical technician. Lanctot was on the beach last year when Medici was attacked. She put a tourniquet on his leg and performed CPR while waiting for an ambulance.

She said she had known that such a day might come — she had kept tourniquets in her car for the last six summers. Still, she said she was stunned by what happened. In January, she left her parents and friends behind and moved to Maine, where she said she can surf without worrying about sharks.

As much as she loves Cape Cod and the ocean, she said, “It’s not worth risking my life over anymore.”

“I’m just lucky,” she added, “that I was given the opportunity to enjoy the Cape while it was somewhat safe, and I made it out alive.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.