“Hit the shark in the eyes and gills,” says Sarah Waries, the chief executive of Shark Spotters, an organization in Cape Town that employs 30 specialists to scan the city’s beaches with binoculars from the cliffs and sound the alarm when they see one in the water. The bay along the city’s coastline is home to one of the largest aggregations of great whites in the world; spotters have recorded some 2,200 since the program started 14 years ago. Attacks are exceedingly rare, even in Western Cape Province, where 57 people have been bitten, 13 of them fatally, since 1920.

Violently hitting and clawing at a shark in its most tender regions can scare it off. “The nose is also sensitive, but it’s dangerously close to the teeth,” Waries says. Should you happen to have something hard, like a kayak paddle or a surfboard, put it between you and the shark.

Try not to panic and splash, which can provoke it. Instead, maintain eye contact. Many sharks are ambush predators who prefer to take their prey by surprise. If it sees you watching, it may forgo an attack.

When a shark does bite a human, it is most often what biologists call an “exploratory bite” — the fish is investigating and will let go. Even a brief encounter with shark teeth can result in profuse blood loss and severed limbs. Get out of the water as quickly as possible. “It’s critical to stop the bleeding,” Waries says. Her spotters carry shark-attack kits with tourniquets, pressure bandages and saline drips, and she suggests anyone who regularly puts themselves in proximity to sharks (surfers, say, or abalone divers) should pack a similar kit.