iStockphoto / qldian
It is not often that golfers find themselves standing in the middle of ponds during a round of golf but it’s also not unheard of.
Most golfers use a golf ball retriever to collect any errant shots that landed in the drink but some spirited golfers will pop off their shoes and hike up their pants to hit a ball from the mud if it’s close to the lake’s edge. But absolutely not at the Carbrook Golf Club in Australia where bull sharks have taken over the water hazards.
With the LIV Golf Tour headed to The Grange Golf Club in Adelaide this week, the world of golf has its spotlight shined on Australia for the first time in a while. This has resurfaced a story of an Australian golf course where the water hazards have been overtaken by bull sharks.
The Golf Course’s Water Hazards Are Full Of Bull Sharks
The Carbrook Golf Club is located in Queensland just north of the border with New South Wales. It sits about halfway between Gold Coast and Brisbane, and it’s close to the Coral Sea coastline but quite a few miles inland.
What makes this a unique golf experience is somehow, over the years, between 6 and 12 bull sharks have migrated from the nearby Logan River and into the Carbrook Golf Club.
Bull sharks are able to spend their entire lives in brackish water, a mixture of freshwater and saltwater, but are able to survive for long periods of time in freshwater. In the United States, bull sharks have been found all the way up the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri.
There are YouTube 11-year-old videos of the bull sharks at Carbrook Golf Club. These sharks have been around for a LONG time and it’s quite possible their numbers are growing. But with LIV Golf coming to Australia, these sharks have gained a lot of attention again on social media.
Imagine hitting your approach shot on the 15th hole and you see this guy swimming by:
Golf Digest recently wrote about these golf course sharks (article link above). And people on Twitter were amazed. They wrote:
Is that supposed to be scary, awesome, or scary awesome?
— Phil Norby (@phil_norby) April 16, 2023
Big facts:
Pretty much everything in Australia can kill you.
— Kevin Heitz (@kheitz0920) April 16, 2023
They are voracious eaters:
Bill Sharks are terrifying tbh. They can swim up river and into your lakes and eat whatever they see.
— MICHAEL (@pgamva) April 16, 2023
A unique golfing experience?
I live in Florida. Every golf course I’ve ever played in this state has alligators. But I’ve yet to see a single shark on a golf course in Florida.
That’s not to say that there aren’t courses in the Naples or Miami area that don’t have bull sharks. It’s quite possible that at some point a bull shark found its way to the golf course ponds.
A few ways this can happen is by drainage pipes with bull sharks swimming up into the golf course waterways through storm drainage and getting stuck. Another way is a lot more amusing to imagine. Baby sharks could be picked up by feeding birds who bit off more than they could swallow and the sharks are then dropped in the golf course ponds.
There are a lot of golf courses in the Ft. Myers and Naples area of Southwest Florida with tarpon in the ponds, a saltwater fish that can also thrive in brackish water. So I wouldn’t at all be surprised to discover there’s at least one course in that area with a resident bull shark.