Great White Shark Attack Paddle vs Pedal Numbers

[GregAndrew]

Originally Posted by PAL

I hear you, but who has the time (or the data) for that?

That is likely why the risk of suffering a shark attack is typically expressed in terms of the overall population. For instance, you have a better chance of getting killed by a falling coconut than you do a shark... blah, blah, blah. That's no help other than in simplistically illustrating the low overall occurrence of death by shark.

Someone who never dips a toe in the ocean has no chance of succumbing, not even if they are Austin Powers (just maybe if the sharks have fricken laser beams).

Life is one big judgement call.

Sharks don't have laser beams? Sorry, my pet peeve is people using data as statistics, especially politicians and environmentalists.

[PAL]

NCKA poster Northern Boy posted this. I think he's right. If all attacks had involved Hobies or none had, the trend would be convincing:

I'm not so sure about that. Statistics is an exact science, but the design and interpretation of statistical tests is not.

There are a lot of factors to be considered in the latter - the importance of those depends on the strength of the effect - to give a simplistic example - if the 12 attacks had all been on Hobies, then I don't think anyone would be worrying about whether Hobies spend more time on the water or what color they were.

However, as it is, the descriptive statistics available are indeed pretty muddled (I had not seen those before, they are very informative) and thus the small sample size is a problem, as are the other, potentially confounding, factors like the number of Hobies vs paddle etc. Hopefully not a 'problem' that will be fixed anytime soon.

NB

[pbb]

I agree you have a limited number of occurrences. Most likely it is the full universe of occurrences (at least for recent years). And this is different from the sample size. I'm working on a study of occupational injuries where about 13000 people were screened for (asked about) occupational injuries and less than 200 such injuries were identified. You sample size in that case is the 13000.

Here again, we really don't know how many hours people are spending on the ocean, so we have neither a sample nor a denominator for a rate of attacks.

But given that you have a similar number of occurrences, you would have to believe that the hours spent at risk (i.e., on the ocean) by the two groups was very different to conclude that you might have a higher risk for one group.

My sense (and here we depart from anything statistical or scientific) is that there aren't orders of magnitude lower person hours spent in Hobie Mirage kayaks on the open ocean compared to paddle kayaks, hence I don't see anything in the data that I would find to be convincing that there is a difference.

It wouldn't be scientific, but you could try to get a sense by creating a "poll" on various California kayak fishing forums about how many hours users fish or kayak in the ocean during an average month in mirage drive or paddle kayaks. That might give some more information, but it wouldn't be conclusive since it would be a convenience sample rather than a probability sample of kayak anglers. But I can't think of any feasible way of doing the latter, except possibly asking DFG to add that to their CRFS survey when they survey kayakers. (I guess you could ask DFG to let you do a mail or email survey to everyone with a fishing license and and ocean stamp, if you had a lot of money to burn).

[pbb]

BTW, it's not sharks with laser beams you should worry about if you are not in the ocean, it's the sharknados.

[PAL]

Originally Posted by pbb

BTW, it's not sharks with laser beams you should worry about if you are not in the ocean, it's the sharknados.

You're right! That's scary stuff.

[GregAndrew]

Originally Posted by pbb

My sense (and here we depart from anything statistical or scientific) is that there aren't orders of magnitude lower person hours spent in Hobie Mirage kayaks on the open ocean compared to paddle kayaks, hence I don't see anything in the data that I would find to be convincing that there is a difference.

I would wager that there were and still are magnitude differences in the numbers. Even in local SoCal markets, where Hobie does very well, they do not represent half of the kayaks or hours on the water. LJ might be the only notable exception to this, but only if you only consider fishing kayaks and not rentals. And the further you go back toward the inception of the Mirage drive, the larger the difference is going to be.

[pbb]

Originally Posted by GregAndrew

I would wager that there were and still are magnitude differences in the numbers. Even in local SoCal markets, where Hobie does very well, they do not represent half of the kayaks or hours on the water. LJ might be the only notable exception to this, but only if you only consider fishing kayaks and not rentals. And the further you go back toward the inception of the Mirage drive, the larger the difference is going to be.

I've done all my kayak fishing in SD, so I have no meaningful impression of whether the share of Hobie Mirage yaks here is representative of other parts of the state. But here in SD, I would buy that 42% of open ocean kayak fishing hours are on Hobie Mirage kayaks

And I agree that the share of the kayak fleet that is Hobie Mirage driven has increased over time from zero before 2007. In which case the question is whether the share averaged over the past seven years was near 42%, rather than the share today, which we agree is higher than the 7 year average.

[radastaff]

how bout a comparison of attacks vrs. size of kayak?
seems to me smaller sized yaks get hit more often than larger 14'+ sized.
well it would make me feel better if so anyway.

had my first hammer head encounter yesterday
pulled my yellow onboard just in time
hammer was within 2 feet of it when I noticed

was just dunkin to keep it fresh

bastard followed me almost to the kelp
before it veered off

somewhere north of LJ


P