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What the? Found ONCE in a hundred years...

Yep, remember the "Summer of the Shark?." All the news reports of how many shark attacks there were? Media hype. There were fewer attacks that year than most years. About half a dozen. Then 9/11 took the sharks out of the headlines.

Governor of Virginia even set up a "Shark Task Force" like there was anything he could do about it.

You don't want to be attacked by sharks?

don't wear shiny jewelry
don't pee in the water
don't swim at dawn
don't swim at dusk
don't go in the water with an open wound
wimmin don't go in the water if it's "that time"
if you see the birds hovering that means there's fish. don't swim there.

Do that and you'll most likely be okay. The sharks are out there on the sand bars, but if you swim during the heat of the day, they're not active. The attacks that happened in Virginia and North Carolina that year both happened at 6:00 p.m.

NOTE: If the lifeguard is off the stand, it means it's time to get out of the water.

Do that and you'll most likely be okay.

Those directions will probably help reduce the risk. But there are 205 known cases where people followed all that and still got attacked by Whites (not including other sharks):

MAPS of Confirmed Unprovoked White Shark Attacks

So IMO anytime you get in the ocean it's a small but calculated risk, which is larger or smaller depending on where you are and what you do. I don't believe in overhyping the risk (except to scare Ruthy, LOL!) but I also don't believe in downplaying it like I see a lot of nature shows do. I saw one show where Valerie Taylor went down in a chain-mail suit, deliberately started a feeding frenzy among blue sharks, fed them fish by hand during the frenzy, and got her glove ripped off and almost lost her hand along with it. When she came out of the water her first reaction was, "It wasn't the shark's fault; it was my fault--I was in it's territory!" Um, yeah, I'd say so :)