Friday, April 25, 2008

Another Shark Attack - Swimmer Killed off Solana Beach

Seriously I am so sick of talking about sharks...but it is hard to ignore a story when someone is hurt or killed by one.




From the initial news reports a man, in his 60's, was swimming with a group of other swimmers in the ocean while they trained for a triathlon. They were a ways offshore when according to witnesses a large "grey" shark attacked the man, who eventually died from his wounds.

Here are some links to the News Stories that I found online...

Terry Rodgers' report from the San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE is probably one of the better ones...

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20080425-1113-bn25shark2.html


Here are a couple of others...

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20080425-0926-ca-sharkattack.html


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sharkattack,1,2305377.story


Here is some video...

http://video.nbcsandiego.com/player/?id=244777


Think that this is going to become a more of a trend or is it still just another case of bad luck? Drop me some comments on the blog and tell me what you think...

8 comments:

MrLook said...

just yesterday i sent the link of the HB story to my friends that I read on yr blog, then this morning this dude gets chomped. what the hell is going on? i think that due to global climate changes and the ice caps melting, gw sharks are hanging out in socal now and are pissed off.

Anonymous said...

hey adam, the news said that the swimmer was about 150 yards from shore. so my question is, how far from shore does the surf usually break? it's not as far as 150 yds right? i mean probably places like sunset cliffs probably go that far, but how about the typical beach break?

srfnff said...

Great Whites own the line-up, they go where they want, when they want. Most shark attacks occur in six feet or less of water. Fortunately, the frequency of attack is rare and the odds of running into one astronomical. And then, the chances of dieing from a shark attack are less than being injured. But, shizizit happens. Just ask the two guys who were paddling off Malibu last year when a GW stalked them before they were rescued by the lifeguard boat.

This current fatality incident also seems to confirm that the incident a couple weeks ago was in fact a shark attack. So heads-up SoCal, the landlord is in the house. Ya takes yer chances so know the risks.

Anonymous said...

>Most shark attacks occur in six feet >or less of water.

where are you getting this from?

srfnff said...

I did some shark attack research for my blog when Todd Endris was attacked while surfing a shallow water beach break in August, 2007. The location of the attack is several miles south of where I regularly surf.

I used several sources for info. You can read the story here: http://srfnff.blogspot.com/2007/09
/great-white-presence.html Many of the references I used are linked in the post.

Unless I can find it elsewhere, I believe the specific reference to "six feet or less" was drawn from the following website: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/
nature/whiteshark/shark_files
/index.html
which is quoted in the blog post.

There are several other web reference that quote shallow water depths for shark attack and I most likely extrapolated the data to read "six feet." That is a reasonable conclusion especially since the primary focus of the comments was shark attacks on surfers. Most surfers certainly surf in "shallow" water, which from my experience I concluded is around six feet or less.

It would certainly be a mistake to determine that one was safe from shark attack simply because one was surfing in shallow water. To do so would be an exercise in denial. There is much evidence of shark attacks on surfers (again, a very rare occurrence) in shallow water.

Anonymous said...

so, you came up with a quantitative value based on qualitative description?

srfnff said...

Yeah, I guess you could say that. I'm not a scientist, just a realist.

Anonymous said...

>I'm not a scientist, just a realist

it seems that you are more like and arm-chair scientist. a real scientist would have hard data to back up a claim. a scientist is a realist.