Tests ahead for surfboard wax designed to repel sharks
ADELAIDE surfer Neil Campbell has spent the past year perfecting a new organic surfboard wax designed to repel shark attacks.
ADELAIDE surfer Neil Campbell has spent the past year perfecting a new organic surfboard wax designed to repel shark attacks.
The former cameraman quit work and committed all his savings to create the Chillax Surf Wax that he wants to have scientifically tested and hopefully, developed for commercialisation.
He had already sold batches around South Australia through his business The Common Sense Surf Company after being spurred into action after a close call with a bull shark in New South Wales.
Mr Campbell described his wax as a pungent brew of essential oils and powerful spices designed to take surfers off the shark’s menu — but now he needed to prove it worked.
“As far as I’m concerned this is already protecting me and I want to share that protection around,” Mr Campbell said.
“But proof is so important to give us some legitimacy to manufacture and commercialise it.”
He has enlisted support from Flinders University lead researcher with the Southern Shark Ecology Group Professor Charlie Huveneers and applied for funding through a NSW shark strategy project and the SA innovation voucher program.
Flinders University’s New Venture Institute program Venture Dorm already had helped get the product off the ground after Mr Campbell was impelled to pursue his theory that a powerfully scented concoction could deter sharks as they relied heavily on their sense of smell.
“I started work on it after a close encounter with a bull shark at Long Reef in Sydney last year,” Mr Campbell, who has contributed all his savings to the project, said.
“I was very close to being shark excrement.
“I was furious with myself because I knew I had this idea and I hadn’t got around to doing anything about it.”
Current research through Flinders University showed shark attacks were rare but had increased in Australia from 6.5 to 15 incidents per year in the past decade.
Mr Campbell hoped to pull together about $60,000 for three days testing of the product in active Great White Shark waters off Neptune Island near Port Lincoln.
There was also currently a crowd-funding attempt underway with Mr Campbell keen to attract investors.
“It is my contention that the shark, not unlike the grizzly bear, dog, brown snake, leech, dengue fever mosquitoes and the tsetse fly, is an essentially olfactory apex predator,” he said.
“They all smell their prey.”