Herd of juvenile Great Whites sets up home in Monterey Bay, northern California. Local beachgoers enthralled, says newspaper.

The recent arrival of a herd of juvenile Great White sharks in northern California’s Monterey Bay has been “enthralling beachgoers, residents, local media outlets and scientists,” reports The Guardian.

In the story, Shark park: group of great whites find unexpected home off California coast, we learn that scientists suspect warming ocean temperatures have driven the Whites north from their usual home on the US-Mex border and that now they’re enjoying “a pocket of warmth near the famed surfing beaches of Santa Cruz, California.”

Do you suck and nibble waves in this region?

Should you be worried?

Megan Petersen, a naturalist who works on a whale watching charter boat in Santa Cruz, told The Guardian that because juveniles are half the size of an adult Great White and they feed exclusively on small fish and squid they are “generally not a threat to humans, and they’re pretty docile.”

A marine biologist at Stanford University, Taylor Chapple, described Great Whites as “sort of like those giant dog breeds – like Great Danes or something – they just saunter around the ocean.”

Do you remember when the writer Lewis Samuels, who lives in San Francisco, seventy or so miles away from Monterey Bay, described watching his pal Royce Fraley explode out of the water in the mouth of a Great White? 

“I saw the shark breeching out of the water with him in its mouth. Then they fell down in an explosion of whitewater, like when a whale breaches. Fifteen feet is as big as a car and they’re a lot fatter in person than you’d think they would be. And he was in the fish’s mouth and there was this fucking impact in the water and then there was nothing there, gone, like a fucking whirlpool of displaced whitewater where he’d been.”

Or Fraley’s riposte that Lewis left him to die? 

Rogue Whites, perhaps.

Popular Brazilian new king of Huntington; commentator as etymological expert…

A dozen or so minutes ago, the Brazilian Yago Dora won the Vans US Open of Surfing in two-to-three-foot waves at Huntington Beach, a humming surf utopia also famous for its proximity to multi-cultural precincts such as nearby Little Saigon.

Dora is twenty-three years old and is the son of super coach Leandro Dora, whose skills helped elevate Adriano de Souza and Lucas Silveira to world titles in 2015.

Also in the final was Australia’s (maybe) next big thing, Liam O’Brien, a three-time WQS event winner in 2018 and currently en route to a WCT qualification in 2020. Before the US Open Liam was rated at tenth on this year’s qualifying series.

Of course, the big news, beyond Yago’s ease at landing airs – indeed he appears so comfortable in the air you can imagine him doing so with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the right as he examines the women on the beach one by one over the rim of his glass – was the LA Times’ story the day where it anointed Chris Cote the voice of surf.

“Cote is an etymological expert in this field,” wrote Jack Harris in his piece Frothy to Learn about Surfing? “He has been calling U.S. Opens for roughly 20 years and was the former editor in chief of the now-defunct TransWorld Surf Magazine. He helped compile the publication’s ‘Significant Surf Slang,’ a comprehensive catalog of jargon and phrases that became a prominent feature in its pages. He has a love for surfing lingo.”

Regular visitors to BeachGrit will already be privy to the genius of Chris Cote. Here, here and here.

Here and here, too.

Also worth noting in the piece is the elevation of the term, Surf Turkey.

“I’m still a surf turkey, even though I’m 32 years old,” Hodge said. “But you can tell someone that is a new surf turkey.”

Have you heard before?

Is it something you suck and nibble when you’re ruffled?

Who do you see?

Earlier today, much earlier for I spent most of it negotiating the horrors of Australia’s urban sprawl to find a once-isolated wave, which was subsequently onshore, I received an email from Matt Warshaw asking one question.

Who is the surfer, far right, in this photo?

Is it Bruce Irons or former world number two Shane Powell?

Easy, Bruce, I wrote.

Matt replied that his immediate response was Bruce as well.

“But,” he wrote, “having spent the last few days hammering together a Powell clip I’m now 65% convinced it is Shane.”

The photographer is the great Steve Sherman so the correct answer is only a telephone call away.

But who wants easy?

Shane or Bruce?

(Click on the play button for a primer on Shane Powell.)