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CNN—

For golfers, staying out of the water could be the difference between winning and losing. At one course in Australia, it was the difference between life and death.

Because Carbrook in Queensland boasted （扬言）a membership unlike any other golf club on the planet: six resident bull sharks.

From their mysterious arrival to their devastating disappearance 17 years later, this is the tale （故事）of the sport’s （运动员的）most hazardous water hazard.

Arrival

A lake on a landlocked golf course some 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) from the Pacific Ocean may sound like a swim too far for any fish, but the bull shark has a reputation for dipping its fins into a range of habitats.

A lake on a landlocked golf course some 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) from the Pacific Ocean 主语，一个什么什么的听起来太什么而，但是什么有名声dipping its fins into a range habitals

River shark, freshwater whaler, estuary whaler, swan river whaler – the clue is in its other names.,While native to warm and tropical waters worldwide, bull sharks have organs(器官) specially adapted to retain （保持）salt, allowing them to venture（冒险） deep into freshwater environments that would prove fatal（致命的） to other sharks due to a loss of sodium.

Hence （因此）the presence of the stocky-built, blunt-nosed sharks in the Logan River – which slices inland from the sea halfway between Brisbane and Gold Coast before meandering （漫步聊天）around Carbrook golf club – came as no real surprise to locals in the 1990s.

Neither did severe flooding.

Twinned （成双成对）with the region’s subtropical （亚热带）climate, the club has been a hotspot for floods since its inception （开端）in 1978, inundated（淹没） with water on numerous occasions（场合，引起） including in 1991, 1995 and 1996.

The downpours （倾盆大雨）were so torrential（猛烈） that on the latter three occasions, the roughly 100-meter land bridge separating the river from the sand-mine-turned-lake beside the course’s 14th hole was totally submerged.

A new corridor（通道) was opened and – sometime during those three temporary(临时) windows – six bull sharks glided into uncharted (未知)waters.

As the land bridge dried and reformed(改革), the door slammed(猛烈) shut behind them. It would remain closed for 17 years, when the next severe flood event reforged(再次锻造) a path to the river in 2013.

Carbrook’s Nessie

Towards the end of the century, whispers (低语)began to trickle around Carbrook’s fairways – all originating from the 14th green.

There were reports of loud splashes(飞溅, large dark shapes moving below the lake’s surface, even laughed-off claims of a tall dorsal fin knifing through the water. “The Carbrook Shark” became a kind of folk legend, Australia’s own Bigfoot,（大脚丫） Yeti or – most similarly of all – a local version of another famous lake-dwelling mythical beast.

“The Loch Ness monster （尼斯湖水怪)is pretty similar to what it felt like,” Carbrook general manager Scott Wagstaff told CNN.

“It seemed possible but there wasn’t enough truth to it at that point.”