"...You yell 'Mako' and everyone says 'huh?'. You yell 'Great White Shark' and we've got a panic on our hands."
Back in 2008 I wrote something similar, when Wayne Davis produced the first authenticated photos of a white shark off Chatham .
Here is how it went:
Here is part of Wayne's e-mail to me:
“I reported it to the (newspaper) and they said they weren't interested 'cuz they'd done a few stories this summer already about people witnessing shark on seal attacks around Chatham. I thought the (newspaper) response was very strange, not only 'cuz I had a photo to go with the report, but because there were 6-10 surfers less than a mile south of the shark....& the shark was swimming SOUTH.”
I suspect we had life imitating art on Cape Cod. Remember the scene in “Jaws” where Mayor Vaughn is concerned about the Police Chief Martin Brody panicking the beachgoers with shark talk.
"Martin, it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, "Huh? What?" You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."
Only in this case on Cape Cod it was Labor Day weekend 2008.