Motorised mako, not bronzie, is real danger

Ever since we were little Mount nippers old enough to dogpaddle and hang on to a flutter board at the same time, the sheer exhilaration of being shot into shore by a Shark Alley wave has never lost its licence to thrill.
Watching the wave form out the back off Wedding Cake Rock and get closer and closer to where we are paddling and kicking still holds the same sense of excitement today as it did way back in the day when Ted Davies hired out black rubber lilo-mats his Surf-O-Planes _ from a yellow shed for a shilling a shot.
What great times they were _ those lazy hazy summertime days on the Main Beach at the Mount, and still are today, as I found out yesterday when I took the young fulla out for a bit of a boogey on his boogey board at Shark Alley.
Sure there was no Dinah Lee doing the Blue Beat or Hello Sailors giving us a blue lady to help us through the night, as they did during the Sunset Soundshell concerts of the '70s. But there was still the same Mount magic happening right along the Main Beach, and we were up for it big-time.
To watch and relive my childhood memories through the look on our son's face was as good as it gets. Or as JK says on facing life's uncertainties: "It's the little things we can get the most enjoyment from."
Time after time he hurtled into shore among a frothing fountain of cascading surf suds.
And each time when he was bounced on to the beach like a Bangladeshi bowler, he turned around with a look on his face that begged like a batsman _ for just one more!
As I sat on the beach thanking Tangaroa and his cousin Neptune for allowing us to play in their Octopuses' Garden, I wondered why we hold such a fear for the great guardians of the ocean. I had thought about the bronze whaler shark caught and buried off Papamoa, and how we were all saved from something that had no intention of hurting anyone.
The more I thought about it I could not help but being drawn into the comparison of what the real dangers of life were. We seem to have this save the whale situation going on in one corner of the Pacific Ocean, yet we are completely comfortable with killing any shark that shows up on our shores for no other reason than it might have killed us.
When the truth is there has not been a shark fatality in our waters since 1975, off the coast of Te Kaha. So why not give the big bronzies a break? And pour all our life-saving, shark-hunting, sport-fishing, trophy-tagging resources into trolling for the schools of killer sharks I call tar-sealed terrorists. These motorised makos with more strike power than any white pointer really do threaten the lives of innocent bathers and bystanders.
Be it a quad bike on the beach or a souped-up 16-year-old on our streets, why not commit a fulltime team of land-based lifesavers to tag but not release these petrol-headed predators?
Not until they realise they can't keep running home to daddy's chequebook when the Jaws of Life comes calling for one of their casualties.
And burying their pimped-up rides on a Papamoa Beach sounds like a sensible sentence to me.
Maybe I am turning into a tree hugging, whale watching, Greenpeace activist, and there is the inconvenient truth that I am a bit of a beached whale myself when shooting into shore on a Shark Alley wave.
But it seems so unfair when we get such a sense of enjoyment from Tangaroa and his mate Neptune on one hand, yet we have this sadistic side that says it's cool to kill their kids because they may mistake us for a fresh feed of land blubber once every 35 years.
So Shark Alley for me will always be a place where we can play as little and big kids under the kaitiake (guardianship) of Tangaroa and his tamariki. When I look at the odds of being totalled by a boozed-up boy racer on our roads, and that of a shark on the Mount Main Beach, then for my two bobs' worth I will take my chances on a bronze whaler and a boogey board every time.
Pai marire broblack@xtra.co.nz