A hundred, hundred twenty years ago, Americans didn’t go into the water voluntarily. We mostly couldn’t swim and if we were in the Atlantic it was because we’d capsized, no predator neccessary for our resulting deaths. The idea of a man-eating fish was novel and amusing, when a shark got lost or desperate and travelled up river to where folks did swim a little, or splash around. That attitude is probably more reflective of the real level of danger we are in from sharks. Similar to fear of flying, it is terribly unlikely to be dangerous but the prospect is terrifying.

I swim in murky open water, a bay, and sometimes have to cut my swim short if no one else is in the water because there may be large predators around. There aren’t, but there might be, and sometimes there is no one to notice and alert me/help me. I swam last week in about 2 feet of water so that if there was anything big around, it couldn’t go that shallow. As I am describing this it sounds debilitating but honestly I am still out there, getting my workout.

I have previously worked through a visceral and long term fear of alligators through first educating myself and then going swimming within alligators’ range and asking locals about it. (They said if they see any they stay away from them. And that there weren’t any in the spring that day. The water was gorgeously swimming-pool clear, so that helped). Doing that for sharks did not totally work partly because there literally aren’t any large sharks where I swim, and partly because sharks really will exploratorily bite you if you are both in the same area and they wish to.