Love sharks or hate 'em, it's hard not to root for the baby salmon shark shown during a rescue attempt in the accompanying video, after the junior apex predator had washed onto the beach in moderate surf next to Pacifica Pier near San Francisco.
Shark Divers on Wednesday posted an item, with the video, stating that salmon shark pups occasionally strand off Northern California and are often misidentified as white sharks.
Unfortunately, Shark Divers CEO Patric Douglas said Thursday that a salmon shark of similar size -- perhaps the same specimen -- washed up dead the next day farther down the beach.
Among the latest celebrities to have visited the Gulf of Mexico to witness what has grown like a cancer into the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history are renowned big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton and his volleyball player and model-actress wife, Gabrielle Reece.
Hamilton, a legendary waterman known for his strength and pioneering exploits on some of the world's largest waves, appears soft-spoken and understandably saddened when he opens: "Everything that I have in my life has come somehow through the ocean. It's my church. The place where I go for my peace, and it's my teacher.
Reece adds: "You take care of your house that you live in. We make our bed, we clean our cars and all that stuff and yet we neglect sort of the place that really supplies us with the greatest form of sustainability, which is the ocean."
Hamilton and Reece, who urge people to support efforts to help ensure that something like this will never happen again, were speaking on behalf of the National Resources Defense Council, which produced the video.
World freediving champion Guillaume Nery
had for some time wanted to establish a link between his sport -- which
requires diving to incredible depths on a single breath -- and BASE
jumping, which involves free-falling and parachuting from stationary
objects.
Thanks to exceptional camerawork by fellow French freediver Julie Gautier, Nery has succeeded in breathtaking fashion.
The pair took advantage of a recent competition at Dean's Blue Hole west of the Bahamas, in Gautier's words, "to make a short movie."
In the movie, Nery steals a breath, marches downward across a sandy moonscape to the edge of the world's deepest underwater sink hole (638 feet). He then falls forward, like a BASE-jumper from a cliff, and begins a head-first descent.
He seems to fall through space, arms at his sides, hair flowing behind his mask, body silhouetted by the fading light above, until reaching what appears to be the bottom of the blue hole. Nery then springs upward and scales the sinkhole's walls like a rock-climber in zero-gravity, ultimately reaching the surface -- and stealing another breath -- after almost four minutes underwater.
The problem is, Guillaume did not reach the bottom and did not mean to imply that he did. (At least one report stated he did just that. Others suggested he and Gautier filmed this in one dive during actual competition.)
"I never pretended to reach the bottom. It's impossible and no one will ever do it," Guillaume said via email, emphasizing that the movie was an artistic creation -- "a fiction movie" -- that took four afternoons of diving "to get all the shots."
"We just wanted to show another approach of freediving," he explained. "For me freediving means to be in harmony with the elements, it means freedom, it means exploring the unknown. We tried to express this feeling in one video."
Gautier, a French freediving champion and model, said on her blog: "Our goal was to emphasize on aesthetic images and innovative camera moves."
Did they accomplish their goals? You be the judge.
-- Pete Thomas
Editor's note: This post also appear on the GrindTv outdoors blog
Holly Beck, my former neighbor and fellow goofy-footer, might never have achieved the kind of success she hoped for as a pro surfer, but her positive energy is constant and the sport would not be the same without her.
I've always looked forward to reading about her adventures. And now that she has developed an affinity for producing videos, all the better. Beck on Tuesday posted "A Tuesday Morning in February" on YouTube, and it's very well done.
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