- Joined
- Jan 17, 2010
- Messages
- 4,522
- Reaction score
- 5,483
Then they vanished
By Jack Bantock, CNN
CNN — For golfers, staying out of the water could be the difference between winning and losing. At one course in Australia, it was the difference between life and death.
Because Carbrook in Queensland boasted a membership unlike any other golf club on the planet: six resident bull sharks.
From their mysterious arrival to their devastating disappearance 17 years later, this is the tale of the sport’s most hazardous water hazard.
Arrival
A lake on a landlocked golf course some 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) from the Pacific Ocean may sound like a swim too far for any fish, but the bull shark has a reputation for dipping its fins into a range of habitats.
River shark, freshwater whaler, estuary whaler, swan river whaler – the clue is in its other names. While native to warm and tropical waters worldwide, bull sharks have organs specially adapted to retain salt, allowing them to venture deep into freshwater environments that would prove fatal to other sharks due to a loss of sodium.
Hence the presence of the stocky-built, blunt-nosed sharks in the Logan River – which slices inland from the sea halfway between Brisbane and Gold Coast before meandering around Carbrook golf club – came as no real surprise to locals in the 1990s.
Neither did severe flooding.
Severe flooding opened up a route for the sharks to cross from the river (left) to the course's lake.
Twinned with the region’s subtropical climate, the club has been a hotspot for floods since its inception in 1978, inundated with water on numerous occasions including in 1991, 1995 and 1996.
The downpours were so torrential that on the latter three occasions, the roughly 100-meter land bridge separating the river from the sand-mine-turned-lake beside the course’s 14th hole was totally submerged. A new corridor was opened and – sometime during those three temporary windows – six bull sharks glided into uncharted waters.
As the land bridge dried and reformed, the door slammed shut behind them. It would remain closed for 17 years, when the next severe flood event reforged a path to the river in 2013.
Carbrook’s Nessie
Towards the end of the century, whispers began to trickle around Carbrook’s fairways – all originating from the 14th green.
There were reports of loud splashes, large dark shapes moving below the lake’s surface, even laughed-off claims of a tall dorsal fin knifing through the water. “The Carbrook Shark” became a kind of folk legend, Australia’s own Bigfoot, Yeti or – most similarly of all – a local version of another famous lake-dwelling mythical beast.
“The Loch Ness monster is pretty similar to what it felt like,” Carbrook general manager Scott Wagstaff told CNN.
“It seemed possible but there wasn’t enough truth to it at that point.”
The presence of bull sharks (pictured, 2012) at Carbrook was something of an urban legend in the 1990s.
That was until the early 2000s, when the Brisbane-based Courier Mail turned folklore into fact by publishing a picture of one of the sharks, Wagstaff recalled. Yet despite having played at the club for years, he had never seen them with his own eyes when he started work there in 2010.
Determined to satisfy his curiosity, Wagstaff ventured down to the lake armed with his camera and some meat. No sooner had the bait hit the surface, a shark duly appeared.
The stunned Wagstaff snapped some shots before taking a short video on his phone to post online. The footage was – by his own admission – “terrible,” but the internet lapped it up: the viral YouTube video has amassed more than 2.3 million views to date.
By Jack Bantock, CNN
CNN — For golfers, staying out of the water could be the difference between winning and losing. At one course in Australia, it was the difference between life and death.
Because Carbrook in Queensland boasted a membership unlike any other golf club on the planet: six resident bull sharks.
From their mysterious arrival to their devastating disappearance 17 years later, this is the tale of the sport’s most hazardous water hazard.
Arrival
A lake on a landlocked golf course some 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) from the Pacific Ocean may sound like a swim too far for any fish, but the bull shark has a reputation for dipping its fins into a range of habitats.
River shark, freshwater whaler, estuary whaler, swan river whaler – the clue is in its other names. While native to warm and tropical waters worldwide, bull sharks have organs specially adapted to retain salt, allowing them to venture deep into freshwater environments that would prove fatal to other sharks due to a loss of sodium.
Hence the presence of the stocky-built, blunt-nosed sharks in the Logan River – which slices inland from the sea halfway between Brisbane and Gold Coast before meandering around Carbrook golf club – came as no real surprise to locals in the 1990s.
Neither did severe flooding.
Severe flooding opened up a route for the sharks to cross from the river (left) to the course's lake.
Twinned with the region’s subtropical climate, the club has been a hotspot for floods since its inception in 1978, inundated with water on numerous occasions including in 1991, 1995 and 1996.
The downpours were so torrential that on the latter three occasions, the roughly 100-meter land bridge separating the river from the sand-mine-turned-lake beside the course’s 14th hole was totally submerged. A new corridor was opened and – sometime during those three temporary windows – six bull sharks glided into uncharted waters.
As the land bridge dried and reformed, the door slammed shut behind them. It would remain closed for 17 years, when the next severe flood event reforged a path to the river in 2013.
Carbrook’s Nessie
Towards the end of the century, whispers began to trickle around Carbrook’s fairways – all originating from the 14th green.
There were reports of loud splashes, large dark shapes moving below the lake’s surface, even laughed-off claims of a tall dorsal fin knifing through the water. “The Carbrook Shark” became a kind of folk legend, Australia’s own Bigfoot, Yeti or – most similarly of all – a local version of another famous lake-dwelling mythical beast.
“The Loch Ness monster is pretty similar to what it felt like,” Carbrook general manager Scott Wagstaff told CNN.
“It seemed possible but there wasn’t enough truth to it at that point.”
The presence of bull sharks (pictured, 2012) at Carbrook was something of an urban legend in the 1990s.
That was until the early 2000s, when the Brisbane-based Courier Mail turned folklore into fact by publishing a picture of one of the sharks, Wagstaff recalled. Yet despite having played at the club for years, he had never seen them with his own eyes when he started work there in 2010.
Determined to satisfy his curiosity, Wagstaff ventured down to the lake armed with his camera and some meat. No sooner had the bait hit the surface, a shark duly appeared.
The stunned Wagstaff snapped some shots before taking a short video on his phone to post online. The footage was – by his own admission – “terrible,” but the internet lapped it up: the viral YouTube video has amassed more than 2.3 million views to date.
