IF you plan to hit the beaches of Australia during Spring Festival, take a good look at the water before you jump in. Michael Brown, managing director of Surfwatch Australia, says sharks have been feeding closer to the shore in recent months in order to eat bait fish displaced during storms. "They don't target humans," Brown told the Bloomberg wire service, "but they're hungry and they're close and they're in larger numbers than we have seen in a generation." Last week, sharks attacked three people in two days. On January 12, a 25-year-old man was bit while swimming south of Sydney. A day earlier, two others were attacked off the coast of Tasmania and New South Wales. According to government figures, 60 people have died of shark attacks in Australia over the last 50 years.