Pete Thomas Outdoors

Paddleboarder has close call with shark at Catalina

A 15-year-old girl was fortunate to have escaped injury Sunday at Santa Catalina Island, when a shark decided to see if her paddleboard was food.

The city of Avalon must also be feeling fortunate because had the girl been injured -- or worse -- it would have put a major damper on the beginning of the busy tourism season, which gets underway later this month.

The shark reportedly bit the paddleboard more than once about 200 yards offshore, beyond a remote stretch of coast a mile from Avalon.

The size or type of shark is not known, but great whites have been known to mistake surfboards as prey, and are ambush hunters that strike marine mammals from below.

Shark attacks at Catalina are extremely rare but a Los Angeles County Fire Department statement assured prospective visitors that lifeguards aboard rescue boats will be on the lookout for sharks.

It could be said that this incident marks the beginning of the shark-sighting season off Southern California.

Juvenile white sharks, which prey mostly on small fish until they become large enough to feed on marine mammals, utilize coastal and island waters. And more are bound to be seen or encountered as more people visit beaches and recreate in the ocean.

Fortunately for thousands of surfers and swimmers who play in the ocean each spring and summer, most sharks are able to discern between people and prey.

Alleged shark sighting at Swami's surf spot stirs debate

Was that really a large great white shark cruising through a wave, mere feet from unsuspecting surfers, at a popular Southern California beach last Wednesday?

Or was it another species of shark, or something else entirely, depicted in a widely circulated photo that has generated such a buzz among surfers, particularly those who ride waves at Swami's Beach in the San Diego community of Encinitas?

Although shark sightings had been reported previously off another area beach, this one sparked controversy because of the photograph, which revealed what appeared to be the tail end of a large shark as it swam freely among surfers.

Gary Elliott, who snapped the photo, told CBS News 8 he did not see the apparent shark until he got home and looked at his images. In the same report lifeguards suggested the image was merely that of a surfer "duck diving" beneath the wave. But Ralph Collier, who runs the Shark Research Committee, identified the shark as a probable great white measuring 10-12 feet, "or a little more."

This news might have been especially unsettling to those who recalled the fatal attack by a large white shark on a swimmer off Solana Beach, a mile south of Swami's, in 2008.

Surfers and other scientists, however, remain skeptical. Nick Batcheller, a spokesman for Mitch's Surf Shop just south of Encinitas in Solana Beach, said surfers who come into the shop and who frequent the Swami's lineup are convinced that something about the image is fishy.

"It just doesn't add up," Batcheller said. "If the shark was that big it would be protruding out of the back of the wave."

Christopher Lowe, who runs the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, said the tail does not look like that of a great white. Lowe, who has studied white sharks extensively off Southern California, suggested the tail might have been the fluke of a bottlenose dolphin as it swam sideways through the wave.

Salvador Jorgensen, a white shark expert at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, had basically the same response. "It doesn't really look like a shark tail more than, say, a dolphin sideways in the wave," he said. "But it's impossible to say for sure from the picture alone."

Luke Tipple, an Australia-based marine biologist who has served as a host for numerous nature programs, wrote a blog post about the image under the title, "That's not a great white shark."

Tipple also suggested that if it were a 10- or 12-foot white shark, more of its body would have been evident in the photo. He added that large white sharks simply do not swim along the surface, and implied that the only way the duck-diving surfer theory made sense was if someone used a photo-editing program to remove the surfer's feet.

In the News 8 story, Elliott denied that the image had been altered and made no claim that the subject was, in fact, a large great white. In fact, like other surfers, Elliott was looking forward to paddling out at Swami's, shark or no shark.

"I don't feel threatened in the water at all," he said.

Distance swimmer gets swarmed by Man 'o Wars in Hawaii

Penny Palfrey believed she possessed the strength and stamina required to swim 72 miles across the shark-patrolled Kaieiewaho Channel between the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kauai.

But when dusk settled Tuesday and the Portuguese Man 'o Wars  began to swarm over her body, their tentacles clinging like invisible string and issuing painful stings to her face, back and arms, she could stroke no further.

Palfrey was pulled from the water at 6:31 p.m., nearly seven hours and about 20 miles into the swim. Red welts streaked her skin. Facial expressions of disappointment and pain co-mingled.

But hers remains an inspirational story.

Palfrey, an Australian whose accomplishments include a two-way swim across the Strait of Gibraltar and a marathon crossing of California's Santa Barbara Channel, is the embodiment of perseverance.

She tried the same Hawaii swim last April and the same thing happened, 12 hours into the attempt. And she'll try again someday, perhaps with better timing, for the simple reason that the Kaieiewaho Channel is the last of  Hawaii's major channels to be uncrossed by a swimmer. Only one other person, Jonathan Ezer in 1976, has even attempted the crossing.

Surfer fatally attacked by shark off Central California

A fatal shark attack on a bodyboarder early Friday north of Santa Barbara has resulted in the temporary closure of three area beaches.

Lucas Ransom, 19, was riding waves with a friend at about 9 a.m. when the shark bit him on the leg 100 yards offshore at Surf Beach, which is on Vandenberg Air Force Base west of Lompoc.

Ransom, who is from the Riverside County town of Romoland, was a student at UC Santa Barbara. He bled to death as a result of his injuries, which are presumed to have been caused by a great white.

Surf, Wall and Minuteman beaches were ordered closed for at least 72 hours. The latter two beaches are off-limits to the general public.

This is the time of year that many adult white sharks return from long open-ocean forays and begin to feed on seals and other pinnipeds at coastal and island rookeries off Central and Northern California.

But adult white sharks can lurk off the coast at any time. The last fatal attack by a great white off California was in late April of 2008, involving a swimmer off Solana Beach in San Diego County.

Previously, a scuba diver was killed by a white shark off Fort Bragg in Northern California in August of 2004. A year earlier, also in August, a woman was killed as she swam near seals off Avila Beach in Central California.

According to the Florida-based International Shark Attack File, before Friday's attack there had been only eight fatal attacks by white sharks on humans off California since 1916.

However, there is a consensus among some scientists that white shark population off California is increasing.

Christopher Lowe, who runs the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab, attributes this to a longstanding ban on fishing for white sharks, a longstanding ban imposed on gill-net fishing in white shark nursery areas close to the coast, and the phenomenal rise in the number of California sea lions, which constitute a readily available food source for large white sharks.

Lowe, however, has not implied that this will translate into more attacks on humans, because white sharks have evolved over millions of years into such specialized predators.

Patric Douglas, CEO of Shark Diver, which is a California-based commercial shark-diving company that has extensive experience with white sharks, has witnessed the predators' behavior up-close dozens of times and can attest to their cautious, investigatory approach to possible prey.

Douglas agrees with scientists that most, if not all white shark attacks on humans involve mistaken identity, and advises people to stay out of the water very early in the morning when the sun might be at such an angle as to make it difficult for sharks to discern people from prey -- notably pinnipeds.

"Because that's when most of the attacks happen," Douglas said. "Just stay out of the water and give the sharks their due, because that's their time."

-- Pete Thomas

-- Generic white shark image courtesy of Christy Fisher / Sharkdiver.com. Photo of bodyboard with shark bite courtesy of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Dept.

Ventura swimmers shatter distance mark with 202-mile relay

For six swimmers who on Monday completed a record-breaking 4 1/2-day, 202-mile relay off Southern California, among the biggest challenges were brutally cold water temperatures, jellyfish stings and mysterious little fish that nibbled on their skin as they stroked across the black ocean during the night.

"They would nibble on my feet at night, and they got us all eventually," team member Jim McConica said of the pesky denizens. "I don't know why they would only feed at night but they would come up and they would nibble on you, causing you to lurch out of the water, trying to get away."

The ambitious project, called the Ventura Deep Six Ocean Challenge, was planned to shatter the 78.2-mile record for a continuous open-water relay swim. The six members were McConica, 59; Jim Neitz, 42; John Chung, 40; Kurt Baron, 46; Tom Ball, 50, and Mike Shaffer, 45.

McConica, a renowned distance swimmer and an L.A. County lifeguard, said the team agreed on 202 miles hoping to not only break the record -- which was set last year on a lake in New Zealand -- but to put their new record out of reach.

They embarked on their quest last Thursday at dawn in Ventura. Their route led northward, to Santa Barbara's Stearns Wharf, then southward to La Jolla in San Diego County.

Wetsuits are banned in these types of record pursuits and the ocean was so cold -- from the mid-50s into the mid-60s -- that the swimmers would turn "a cadaver white," said McConica, who was still in bed at mid-morning Tuesday, trying to catch up on sleep, when reached by phone for this interview.

Each swimmer had set times in the rotation -- McConica's times were 6 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and midnight -- and by excursion's end each would complete 17 hour-long stints in the water. A team of observers made sure all rules were followed and the record is expected to be validated by the World Open-Water Swimming Assn.

But it was not the smoothest of operations. The escort boat did not always present the straightest path and after each swim, weary and chilled almost to the point of immobility, the swimmers had to try to climb back onto a small inflatable boat via a precarious swim ladder. They then had to climb from the inflatable onto the mother ship, a task made difficult because of large swells.

Lisa Gizara, a photographer who accompanied the expedition, said the swimmers shivered uncontrollably and their lips and faces were blue as they tried climbing aboard the inflatable.

It was overcast throughout the journey and by the time a swimmer was able to lose his chill and feel somewhat comfortable, it was time to go back into the water.

But there were what McConica called "beautiful moments," such as the time he was accompanied by about 100 dolphins that scooted beneath and around him as he swam. "They were chirping and talking, the whole thing," he recalled. "Even with ear plugs in you could hear all the noise they'd make."

The most beautiful moment, of course, was the finish. The swimmers got stronger as the finish line drew closer and McConica said they were like horses wanting to get back to the barn.

"We were all ready to be done," he said. "We were all just physically and mentally exhausted. But it was tremendous. We were all elated and extremely pleased with each other because we had accomplished something that nobody else had done."

-- Photos: Swimmers exchange places as part of the Ventura Deep Six relay (top); Jim McConica climbs aboard inflatable boat after a stint in the water (middle), and Jim Neitz being accompanied by an escort boat in the waning sunlight (bottom). Images are courtesy of Lisa Gizara and subject to copyright protection.

-- Editor's note: This post also appears on the GrindTv.com outdoors blog

Man endures jellyfish swarm in swim across Monterey Bay

Bruckner Chase swam for 14 hours across Monterey Bay in Central California on Tuesday to raise awareness about the fragile nature of the local marine environment.

Ironically, some of that environment's more bizarre-looking denizens made the swimmer pay dearly for his 25-mile traverse of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

"I'm, like, 'Come on guys, I'm trying to help here,' " he said of an enormous jellyfish swarm that rose to the surface and threatened to end his epic odyssey.

Chase persevered despite relentless stinging that began an hour into his swim from Santa Cruz to Monterey. As the jellies became more dense, Chase donned a wetsuit handed to him by those aboard an escort boat.

But that only protected his torso, arms and legs. "I got stung on my tongue, inside my mouth, on my neck and my feet and hands," he said during an interview Wednesday morning, while parts of his body still itched and contained welts. "After the sun came up I did not take a single stroke in which I did not at least see a jellyfish."

Chase, 44, who scheduled the event earlier than he would have liked to help kick off this week's Blue Ocean Film Festival, became only the second person to have swum across Monterey Bay.