Number crunching: what are the odds of a shark attack in Scotland?

A nine-foot, 400lb porbeagle shark similar to the one caught off the Fife Coast in May PIC: Jerryrogers/Bournemouth News/Shutterstock

Shark fear: every surfer has experienced it at some point, and the ones that tell you they haven’t are lying. Even though the chances of being killed by a shark are vanishingly small (one in 3,748,067, apparently, compared to a sobering one in 79,746 chance of death by lightning strike) there’s something about the idea of being suddenly dragged off your board by an enormous, dead-eyed killing machine that makes the blood run a little chilly.

It’s not a constant fear, of course – if it was, nobody would ever go surfing again – but even the most rational wave-riders are susceptible from time to time. The kind of scenario that spooks people usually goes something like this: it’s late in the day, perhaps around sunset (which, as everyone knows, is feeding time) and after a busy afternoon the beach is mostly deserted. You’ve promised yourself one last wave but there’s a lull, so you find yourself sitting out there all alone in the gathering dark, in deep-ish water, with nothing much to occupy your mind. You have your eyes on the horizon, waiting for the next set to lump into view when – “gloop” – you hear something break the surface of the water just behind you. You turn around but all you can see are ripples. Was it a fish jumping? A seal popping up his head to check you out? Or something bigger? Surfers don’t typically envy kayakers, but this is one situation in which having your legs encased in a big plastic lozenge seems infinitely preferable to having them dangling down into the big blue.

Of course, some places are less sharky than others, and one of the advantages of surfing in Scotland is the relatively low chance of encountering the men in grey suits. That said, however, the news last month that a fishing boat operating off the Fife coast in the Firth of Forth had encountered a porbeagle shark – a smaller but not-that-much-smaller cousin of the great white – was a reminder that sharks are not entirely unknown in these parts. This one was between seven and eight feet long and, judging by the video footage, almost entirely composed of pure, blind fury.