For a couple of years as a kid, I swam on a winter YMCA swim team. I hated the practices so much that I often begged my mom to let me skip. Sometimes, I’d purposefully leave my Speedo jammer at home in hopes I wouldn’t have to practice once I got to the pool. If my memory serves me well, this gimmick backfired spectacularly one time, and I was forced to swim in my boxers.

Whenever the practice was hard and dragged on endlessly, and I was beginning to tire, I would imagine that a shark had swum into the pool’s drain system and was chasing me down from the deep end. This delusion pushed me to swim faster and harder, even if my arms felt like overcooked strings of pasta. The swimmer behind me, whose hand just clipped my foot, was, in my mind, a Great White shark, about to saw off my body, waist-down. 

Thirteen-year-old Aussie Austin Appelbee found a very different motivation as he swam through the choppy, shark-infested waters of Western Australia to rescue his family. 

Austin, his mom Joanne, his brother Beau, and his sister Grace were enjoying the ocean on a kayak and two paddleboards. However, as is the case with so many tragic drownings, the family didn’t realize how far they........

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