Witness describes banal horror of Great White attack on northern Californian surfer, “I saw the dorsal fin and the tail fin of the shark go down in the water… It definitely wasn’t a quick attack. It was nice and slow.”

"It looked like he had a red stripe on his wetsuit… that was actually blood."

A witness to yesterday’s Great White attack on a surfer at Salmon Creek, a pretty wild sorta beach north of San Francisco, has described it as “nice and slow.” 

Jared Davis was paddling into the crowded lineup with a pal around nine when a swell rose and revealed a man floating in the water. 

“When he was back into view, I saw the dorsal fin of the shark and then I saw the tail fin of the shark kind of going down into the water,” Davis told KPIX. “It definitely wasn’t a quick attack. It was nice and slow.”

The surfer screamed “shark” and “help”; Davis paddled alongside him to the beach.  

“He had kind of caught up to me and I saw his leg. It looked like he had a red stripe on his wetsuit, which is pretty common but that was actually blood,” said Davis. 

Paramedic Jonathon Bauer asked the victim, a man in his thirties, if he saw the shark. 

“And he did get a chance to see it and it was a pretty large shark that did bite him,” Bauer told KPIX. “He actually said he had a struggle with it, as well.”

The man’s surfboard, a Libtech Ringer, was marked by a ring of bloody teeth marks. 

It ain’t the first time Whites have hit surfers at Salmon Creek, although the name would suggest there might be a reason why. 

Two years ago, a local surfer, Katie Wilson, was a hundred yards offshore when a White bit her leash and started to yank it and thrash around. It broke and she got outta there. 

In 2005, another surfer Megan Halavais, was hit by an almost twenty-foot White, the shark’s bite just missing the femoral artery in her leg.

“I had thought about being attacked, but never really pictured it in my head. I didn’t think the shark would be that big and yes it was very very powerful,” said Megan in an interview with Surfer. “I thought I was going to die. I screamed, but everyone said that it wasn’t a high-pitched loud scream, but a blood-curdling yell for help. I just remember thinking I was gonna die, then the desire to survive.”