Photo: Chris Hemsworth // Instagram
Chris Hemsworth is as comfortable on a board as he is on screen. Though best known as an Avenger, the Australian actor has been putting his surfing front and center in recent years. In an episode of the podcast Smartless, he shared a story about the sketchy experience of surfing in Byron Bay amidst a rash of shark attacks.
Chris and his family moved from Los Angeles to Byron Bay in 2015. As it happens, the change occurred just as the region was gripped by a spate of shark encounters in an area frequented by bulls and great whites.
“When I first moved to Byron Bay, there was a string of shark attacks (two deaths and then one guy survived) in the space of two weeks,” explained the actor. “One out the front of my house and one 10 minutes south of me and five minutes north and I was like, ‘Oh, where have I moved to? What have I done? This is crazy.’”
He went on to describe how the sense of impending doom was accentuated by police helicopters patrolling the beaches. “There was a period when there would just be helicopters going up and down the coastline, shark spotting, because there was, for whatever reason, this kind of feeding frenzy,” he said. “The police would come down with a big speaker and tell you to get out of the water.”
Of course, he clarified that the experience did little to dissuade him from paddling back out. “Oh, yeah. I surf every day,” he said. “You hear all the statistics that getting hit by lightning or driving a car is worse. I heard one that more people die in America shaking a vending machine trying to get chocolate or whatever and it collapsing on them.”
He did clarify that he wasn’t 100 percent certain on the accuracy of that last stat, but it does drive the point home that the chances of getting hit by a great white shark while surfing are still fairly slim.
