“I can typically find a Great White within two minutes…”

Two days ago, a swimmer was disappeared by a Great White while swimming off the southern end of Port Reyes in Marin County, thirty miles from dirty ol San Francisco in Northern California.

The man, who was fifty-two, was swimming in group of three between twenty-five and fifty yards from the beach when the shark attacked and dragged him under.

First responders said the ocean was red with blood.

“It’s pretty unusual…when swimmer is attacked and just completely disappears,” Dave Elbert, the director of San Jose State’s Pacific Shark Research Center told CBS News. “From predator standpoint it’s a good hunting time. You have young, inexperienced elephant seals and sea lions going in the water.”

Attacks by Whites ain’t new or a rarity in northern California.

Shaper Ben Kelly’s death by White a few years back still hits hard. They don’t call Marin County to Monterey County the Red Triangle for nothing, although as the writer Lewis Samuels once told me, he believed Nor-Cal Whites were less prone to fatal hits than the Australian and South African versions.

Lew, y’see, has five pals who’ve been attacked by great white sharks. One, Royce Fraley, has been attacked… twice. Lew was there for one of ’em.

“We were really far out to sea, literally, about a kilometre out to sea. It took 45 minutes to paddle out,” says Lew. “Out of the corner of my eye there was this explosion. And as I turned around, 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. There was no one else near him, just another friend way up the line, and so when the attack happened, what are you fucking going to do? You’re not going to leave your friend out there.”

(And don’t miss the subsequent Blood Feud between Lew and Royce here.)

Meanwhile, a few hundred miles south, swimmers, paddle-boarders and surfers are co-existing with the renowned man-eaters, although in this part of the world they seem anything but, the 2008 hit on a triathlete in Solana Beach notwithstanding.

If you swing over to the remarkable account of Scott Fairchild, you’ll find a San Diego swimmer being followed by a smallish, a relative term of course, juvenile Great White who eventually tires of the game and shoots off.

It’s one of dozens of peaceful interactions with a fish that, in southern California, seems mostly docile.

“It’s important that people realise the truth and that we protect these amazing and vital animals,” Fairchild told Oceangraphic. “I’m very direct with saying that my images are not allowed to be used unless it’s a shark positive piece…I have literally filmed hundreds of hours of footage and watched an incalculable number of encounters with great white sharks swimming right next to swimmers, surfers, stand up paddlers, and so on. This is the truth, the norm, the day-to-day reality of what happens in the ocean. Yes, bites tragically do happen but they are incredibly rare considering the hundreds of thousands of interactions around the world and the millions of possibilities if sharks really wanted to hunt humans.”

He also said, “I can typically find a Great White within two minutes…”

Oddly enough, I find Fairchild’s account wildly reassuring, a reminder that only in the rarest instance would a Great White consider me a sweetmeat.

Others might feel the opposite.

Where doth you sit?

 

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Thirty-one surfers pulled from death's claw by helicopter and jetski…

The pretty, if faded and well past its prime, French town of Biarritz has become the site of a mass surfer rescue after the same wild swell and high tides that lit up the Quik Festival in Hossegor threw the joint into chaos. 

Thirty-one surfers were pulled from the drink around the old port on Saturday, the same place your old pal DR used to sun his aged haunches while sucking on ice cream cones and dribbling the juice on bronzed tetons, thrilling to the rise and fall of those soft plums, all of ‘em hitting the panic button as high tides made getting in via the cement ramp an act of skill, luck and bravado. 

“We started to pick them up on the stairs located in front of the lifeguard tower,” said rescuer Franck Billard, adding the thirty-one man rescue formed the greatest event of his career. “The surf boards stopped in all directions. There was something panicky at that moment.”

As more and more surfers tried to come in, three lifeguards joined in the rescue, as well as jet skis and a police helicopter. 

“At first it was manageable,” he says, but it all went south, as they say, due to a curio of French surfing ie. if you see another surfer doin’ something, you must follow, whether that’s surfing a certain bank or getting in or getting out. “By snowball effect,” he said, “everyone wanted to get out of the same time.”

For a taste of the rescue, check out this old vid of surfers, and I use the term loosely, getting hammered on the same ramp.