Panic on Cape Cod After Killer Shark Invasion

Three if by Land!

There are but three ways to get to Cape Cod by land. You have a choice of two vintage 1939 bridges. The Bourne Bridge is shown above.  There is also the 1939 Sagamore Bridge.  The third option is a seasonal only train ride from South Station in Boston to Hyannis.  You'll cross onto the island by riding over the vertical lift train bridge shown above, behind the Bourne Bridge.  When built many decades ago, it was the largest of its type in the world. 

Panic on Cape Cod After Killer Shark Invasion

     by Bill Russo

When the real-life version of “Jaws-the Movie” came to Cape Cod in the Summer of 2018 there was panic on the beaches as well as in the town halls of the 15 communities that make up the island resort area off the coast of mainland Massachusetts.

The season started as usual with the area’s population of 200,000 people playing host to millions of tourists, vacationers, weekenders and day-trippers.  In quirky Provincetown, the village’s 2,000 year-rounders welcomed upwards of 100,000 daily visitors on the busiest days.  

The first sign of the looming invasion of killer sea monsters took place the previous summer in the early afternoon of August 22.  Hints of trouble abounded throughout the morning.  There were almost a dozen reports of shark sightings from the halfway point of the Cape, Harwich; to the end of the island at Provincetown.  

In the words of many media outlets including the Boston Globe and CBS Radio/Television, ‘There was panic on a popular Cape Cod Beach…after a shark attacked a seal just a few yards offshore.”

It happened at Nauset Beach in Orleans and was witnessed by scores of horrified swimmers and hundreds more reclining on the sand. 

"I looked up and saw the dorsal fin and the tail of what was a Great White Shark," said Taylor Wade who recorded the gruesome site on a video, part of which was shown on the nightly TV news programs.

"You didn't know if it was a seal or a human, so it was kind of a heart stopping moment," he told reporters who were quickly dispatched to the town, which lies at the end of “Suicide Alley” a narrow two-lane highway that is the lone roadway to Lower Cape Cod. From this point on, the Cape is only one to two miles wide.

As Mr. Wade was making his video, horrified spectators desperately pleaded with the swimmers to get out of the water.  The sea became a red, swirling mass where the fatally wounded seal flopped around, trying to avoid the next gulp of the Great White. But the shark seemed suddenly to veer away from the seal and glide toward two vacationing New York City teenagers. 

When the boys became aware of the seal attack they dashed to shore as did the dozens of other swimmers, leaving only the dying seal to face what might have been the fate of a human being.  

"It was a close call but thank God we're all safe," one of the simmers said. 

However, dozens of the fear-struck people standing just 60 feet from where the bay ran red with seal blood, wondered when the next victim would be not a seal, but a person. 

Almost one year later the savage ambush came – on August 15, 2018. It was 18 miles from the seal attack site at Orleans, in the town of Truro, almost at the end of the island.  On a sunny, warm Thursday afternoon, 61 year old William Lytton of Scarsdale, New York State was wading in waist deep waters just off shore at Long Nook beach.  

He didn’t know that the bay was full of shark candy - a pod of seals.  He may not have realized that seals are like ‘fast-food’ to sharks; or perhaps he didn’t notice that they had been swimming near him.

Without warning, Lytton was struck a ferocious blow from behind, most likely by a Great White. Amidst searing pain, he struggled to shore with blood streaming from knife-like tooth cuts to his legs and torso.  Airlifted from the island, he was helicoptered to Tufts Medical Center in Boston.  With life threatening injuries, he spent one month in the facility before being released in ‘good’ condition but with deep scars from the puncture wounds to his limbs and body.  

This report comes to you from Harwich, the beginning of the Lower Cape. As of this writing there have been no sightings in the Harwich Villages, but Orleans, where there have been many sightings, is just one town down the Cape, so by 2019, I'm pretty sure they will be here!

Just one month later, on a sundrenched mid-September Saturday the next bite came – and it was the dreaded fatal one.  A 26 year old man from a Boston suburb had come to Cahoon Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, the only town on the western border of Truro village. 

He was boogie boarding not far from shore when the shark struck him.  Another boogie boarder bravely went to his rescue, but it’s believed that the man succumbed very shortly after being struck.  It was reported that he was lifeless when brought to the beach and that he had just ‘bled out’.

Once again there was panic not only on the beaches but in the streets and in the town halls. In Wellfleet hundreds of frightened townspeople flooded an elementary school to demand better protection against future shark attacks.
  

Suzanne Grout-Thomas, the Wellfleet Director of Community Services, opened the meeting by detailing the measures officials have taken to increase awareness in previous years, including more training and updated first-aid procedures. 

She had an ominous warning however, saying,.. 

“We cannot put anything out there that will guarantee that you’re never going to run into a shark, that no one will ever be attacked by a shark or tasted by a shark,”

Angered residents, like Gail Sluis of Brewster, a village in the middle of Cape Cod, made a desperate plea to town and County officials.

“They’re eating our fish, now they’re eating our children. No sharks or seals are worth a young man’s life — they’re just not,” she said in tear choked emotion. 

All fifteen towns held meetings.  Ideas and suggestion were made, but virtually everyone agrees that the only way to stop future shark attacks is to have a zero swimming at beaches policy – and since tourism is the Cape’s biggest and most profitable industry by far – that “ain’t gonna happen”.

See you on the beach next Summer!