| It's not every day that swimmers in this region meet with sharks, and the two whale sharks circulating near the North Beach lately have practically become pets. However, in summer 2008, one Eilati met a shark of a different kind altogether while swimming out from the Herod's Hotel beach. Rather than a big friendly vegetarian ‘Shrek' of a shark, this was the lean mean eating machine type.
The human was Victor Appelboim, a long-time Eilati resident who regularly swims early in the mornings with a group of other swimmers. On the day in question he had gone about 50 metres out when he saw a threatening black shadow go by. Not face nor fin nor tail was that of the filter-feeding whale sharks the bathers all know, but rather the kind featuring in scary stories or accident reports. Its owner began swimming around Victor in ever smaller circles. Victor, becoming more and more frightened, starting thrashing in ever growing panic in an attempt to reach the beach.
As Victor told reporter Yehudit Zilberstein (in Hebrew): "The bathers on the beach who saw the shark attacking me began to yell and scream. Their shouting got me even more stressed out and I tried to swim to the beach by force. The shark got closer and closer to me and only when we were nearly within touching distance, did I realise that the only way to save my life is to calm down and calm him down. I stopped beating at the water, and advanced toward the shore in gentle movements. The shark, when he saw he no longer had an opponent and was not in any danger, calmed down as well, and within a few seconds he lost interest in me and continued on his way."
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Victor Appelboim’s eventual response, keeping a cool head rather than giving in to panic, probably saved his life. While he was seeing eye to eye with the shark physically, the moment he remembered to do so in his mind as well, he ended the danger. By ‘thinking like a shark’ he stopped the thrashing and bashing that encourage a shark to attack, replacing it with behaviour that signifies neither threat nor ‘injured’ prey so that he could disengage.
In spite of their bad press, sharks in general do not spend their lives hunting humans to eat, and in fact we’re not very high up on their menu at all if there are better alternatives at hand. Sharks that pose a threat to humans are rare in the swimming areas in Eilat, and attacks are even more rare. Only three shark attacks in Eilat waters were recorded since the state of Israel was founded: one in the 70’s on a German woman swimming in off a boat in mid-sea, and ones in the early 80’s on a female British swimmer and on an Israeli navy diver doing rescue training manoeuvres.
(Image courtesy of NOAA)
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