When I was a teen ager, living in Largo, Florida, I often went to the beach since it was a short distance from where I lived, usually with friends. We swam in the warm waters of Clearwater or Indian Rocks beach, sometimes daring to swim across a deep area to sandbars loaded with unbroken shells and starfish. Then, the movie Jaws came out, and suddenly my friends no longer wanted to swim out past the shallows of the beach. I told them nothing had changed. Yet nothing I said mattered. They were not swimming into the deep water anymore.
Around the same time, my dad obtained his pilot’s license for small planes and his company bought a f o u r- s e a t e r, Cessna 172.
We would fly over many places, but often over the beach which was great for doing stall maneuvers. For the first time, I saw many boats with people swimming around them just off the shore from the air. Many times, I swam past those very boats enroute to the sandbars, but on their level. Now, I not only could see the boats and the people swimming, but I could also see what was swimming beneath them—the sharks. I wanted to warn the swimmers of the danger beneath them, but I was too high up. Most of the sharks in the area were relatively harmless, but occasionally there were attacks made on swimmers by hammerheads or other aggressive types. Yet, seeing the sharks from the air, and their sheer numbers, gave me pause about swimming out across the deep water as well. The difference was perspective…