The overwhelming feeling of knowing that you are part of the food chain
Fortunately, many will not meet the requirements to be part of this exclusive group in which all its members have something in common: having survived a shark attack in Australia.
In 2011, Dave Pearson was surfing at Crowdy Head (New South Wales) when a three-meter bull shark lunged at him, snapping the surfer's board and arm in its jaw as it pulled him underwater.
The stitches used to reconstruct his arm draw the silhouette of a perfect bite. ; a constant reminder of such a terrifying experience.
Today he wears on them a proud tattoo of a shark and the word survivor (survivor). Three days after his attack, nurses were already joking with him, calling him "shark bait."
Fortunately, many will not be part of this club
At the end of that same corridor was Lisa Mondy, who also had just suffered a seizure while she was wakeboarding.
Unlike Pearson, Mondy took her luck worse, so he tried to cheer her up by talking about the accident as only two people who share such trauma can.
This is how Dave Pearson realized that once the reconstructions, operations and rehabilitation are finished, There are other types of sequelae that are not treated in hospitals.
Determined to do something about it and tired of all the hate he received on social media (for surfing at sunset, for entering shark territory...) he decided to found The Bite Club.
His goal is to support victims of an attack and their families, delve where the medicine stops acting to heal those other wounds: the nightmares, the traumas, the fear.
It is a club where members share their experiences; but in the end he goes beyond the sharks, becoming a space of camaraderie, of searching for meaning to something so random that could have happened to you and not to them.
Dave Pearson Tattoo
The beginnings of the Bite Club were not the easiest. Imagine being in a hospital bed when you get a call from a lunatic claiming to be from bite club …
Now the club is so well known in the surf and water sports fans that, when an attack happens, it is usually the family or friends who contact Dave.
"The realization that you're just part of the food chain is pretty daunting, to say the least," says Dave Pearson.
And it is that despite continuing to be something residual and that each year more people die in Australia by drowning (291 in 2017 alone) than by shark attacks, these follow ranking first on the panic scale.
Nevertheless, attacks have become more frequent and the stretch of coastline from Byron Bay to Port Macquarie accumulates much of the 78 incidents produced in the last three years, five of them fatal.
We do not know the extent to which Spielberg traumatized future generations with Jaws, but listen Survivor accounts far exceed fiction.
Among the activities they carry out is diving with sharks
Stories like those of the bodyboarder Dale Carr , who to free himself from a shark had to stick his finger in its eye; wave of Bruce Lucas , when he jumped into the air from the impact of the shark. They all agree in remembering it as if a car had hit them.
The three, together with Pearson, they have gone back into the water, even on the same beach where they were attacked.
The role of Bite Club has been key in this reconciliation process and, contrary to what one might think, many of its members they do not want the indiscriminate hunting of sharks.
“We try to understand why suddenly there are so many sharks on our beaches. We inform ourselves and actively collaborate with the scientific community”, explains Pearson.
In addition to telling his story "hundreds of times," the surfer takes advantage of the attention of his listeners to talk about how to reduce the risk of an attack, currents in the sea, etc.
His inspiring story has led him to lecture around the country, in addition to to work with the Australian government to scale up treatment for victims of attacks.
Fact is stranger than fiction by Spielberg
“I am proud of what we have achieved. I started Bite Club simply as a space where we survivors could talk about how we felt, without being attacked or ridiculed and now we are working with the university and the mental health department to come up with a plan.”
As well as meeting to talk, club members do activities like shark diving at the Manly Beach Aquarium or donating blood at Red Cross campaigns.
Surfers, divers, triathletes, swimmers and even fathers and mothers whose children are no longer here. Survivors who, despite having marked skin, have been able to make peace with the ocean and, for the most part, with the sharks. His worst injuries remain invisible, but that's where being a member of the Bite Club makes sense.