OF THE
TIMES
A true R.C. Event:Truth.
In Florida, it’s rare that surfers will get out of the water from merely seeing the likely culprits above: Black Tips and Spinner Sharks.
Bull sharks WILL get SOME folks out of the water, but never all.
Indeed, if you got out of the water every time you saw a shark around here, you'd never learn how to surf, which is a HARD THING to learn to do. Kinda like snowboarding an avalanche. EVERYONE IS A KOOK for their first 18 to 36 months and that’s providing that they nonstop ‘keep at it.’
Indeed, In all my time in the water on good days, I've only seen ONE TIME where a shark cleared the water of EVERY surfer out there. It was at St. Augustine "Blowhole" around 1979 when I was attending U.F. in Gainesville. (A great time to be alive, it was.)
Blowhole is a drive-on beach where you drive about a mile north of theentrance and you’re at “Blowhole”. It’s a beach break with a lot of coquina shelfs that act like reefs do in helping waves break better.
One day, with good solid waves; there were about 120 folks spread about 300 yards along the beach.
Now back then and there, there was a well known Hammerhead - they are VERY territorial and often will ‘hang out’ in an area of about 10-20 miles of beach, then disappear and come back months later like they never left to the same places returning yearly.
Well St. Augustine then was blessed with a Huge Hammerhead, who the fishermen had named “Ol' Grampa” or something like that, which I will use. They would sometimes claim that when it swam under the 20 foot wide pier, two miles south of where we were surfing, that it stuck out on both sides, but those were just fish tales. He* was probably 15 - 17 feet long, and the distance between his dorsal fin and tail was over ten feet! plus he had another six feet of head neck gills and mouth all ahead of the dorsal fin. I know because he came up right in front of me - about 20 feet away and was checking me out, no doubt. His dorsal fin was about three feet high and I looked UP at it. All the other surfers were surfing about only 100 yards out, and couldn’t see what I was dealing with as I was about 200 yards out, alone, with my new sandy tan colored shark acquaintance. (I had paddled way out there in hopes of catching some outside set waves on a coquina shelf that was just trying to begin breaking there as the tide was lowering.)
When you have a shark checking you out, the first thing you do is you get your legs out of the water and lie flat (lay? Flat? Whatever) on your board and hope that the shark concludes that you’re merely a piece of driftwood. Then, you calmly start paddling away from the shark and back towards the beach.
As I was smoothly paddling back in to the crowded lineup of surfers on the inside sandbar, two guys were paddling out towards me, and I didn't want to yell, but I just kept shaking my head trying to quietly convey the danger. Then, the guy on the right's eyes popped out of his head as he stared behind me, and he instantly spun around and started paddling back in also. His friend said what's going on? The reply? “The biggest f*cking hammerhead in the world is swimming behind and directly towards HIM! (i.e., Me.)
I looked behind my feet and saw the ‘grooves’ where his dorsal and tail fins (which were over 10 feet apart) had slipped back into the water, and saw his hazy shadow slowly pass below me as he went on to check out the two other guys who were, of course, likewise paddling back in. (That outside sand bar/coquina shelf did not ‘connect’ back to the inside. You couldn’t catch a wave for that 100 yard calm, calm paddle.)
But, as this was Florida, when I got back to the inside’s take off zone, everyone else was dangling their legs and I was still belly on board; so I felt relatively safe and STILL DID NOT GO TO THE BEACH...YET. After all, there were 50 surfers near me that Grampa could easily grab a leg from, while I stayed belly down on my board.
Now the bottom on the inside takeoff zone had been pulverized and churned up by the waves hitting the inside sandbar and was all sandy/muddy and you couldn’t see your feet in the water.
When my heart had finally calmed back to something reasonable - about 7 minutes after the above first encounter with Grampa - (I’d guessed that he’d gone back outside to where I met him - but I was wrong.) So I decided to finally sit up on my board and dangle my legs as that’s the comfy way to sit while waiting for waves- better viewpoint, et al. - and I was taking a last deep calming breath when the sandy water everywhere around me erupted with white water and something big hit me just to the left of my nose, HARD.
I SCREAMED and figured this was it - the early and tragic end of R.C. but I then saw Ol’ Grandpa come up from below me with his giant hammerhead and fins surfacing about eight feet just to the south of me, and what had happened was I couldn’t see that I was sitting in a big school of big 24" to 48" sea mullet. Grampa did the classic upward attack into the school which all jumped out of the water at the same time and that was what caused the whitewater explosion around me. The hit to my face was a jumping 3 foot mullet.
Grampa’s hammerhead then dorsal and tail fins surfaced in sequence about eight feet south of me. And he began threshing through the school of sea mullet Southbound (away from me) like a lawn mower, and his attack path was running South, (parallel to the beach) and it was right through the center of the lineup of surfers in the takeoff zone.
There was blood and stinky fish guts and half mullets everywhere and you could hear the water, fish, guts and blood sloshing in and out of his mouth which was a horrific sounding waterworld nightmare.
The surfers to the South of me saw him coming down at them and all they, or anyone, could do was get their bellies onto their boards as he slalomed through the surfers using them as turning points in his sloshing slashing juggernaut of terror all the way down the beach for a total of a 60 yards or so. Blood, fishy guts and half mullets were everywhere and EVERYONE got out of the water.
Now seriously think of the avantage's a steel mesh shark suit would be in surfing.Holy sardine!!! Anyone would think we were living an age without shark repellent bat-spray...[Link]
SOTTites: If you enjoyed the above tale, yah GOTTA WATCH HFL's link!*R.C.
Comment: A week earlier: Florida beach reports surfer bitten by shark in 2nd attack in 2 days