The Green Room

Surfer Magazine recently released an online report on springtime shark activity at Southern California beaches. Read the full article here:

According to the article, a ”6-foot long male Great White thrashing about in the shore break” was spotted at San Onofre State Beach in early March. The witness, Kelly Lewis, actually managed to get a picture of the thing (below).

But according to our own resident shark expert, Sean Van Sommeran of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, it turns out that the hyperactive shark flopping around on the beach wasn’t actually Whitey. When he heard about the strange encounter down south, Van Sommeran looked into it and once he saw the photographic evidence, determined that the above fish was in fact a Salmon Shark–not a known man eater.

Van Sommeran decided to set the record straight:

The shark pictured on the beach/tide-line (in the above Surfer Magazine online article) is not a juvenile white shark (Carcharodon carcharias). It is a juvenile or subadult Salmon Shark (Lamna ditropis), which is a close relative of White Shark and Makos and a fellow member of the Lamnid family of sharks. I’ve contacted the author of the article and associated shark attack specialists.

These sharks periodically strand elsewhere in California as well as Oregon, they are most common up in Alaskan and Canadian waters. Specimens collected had a carnobacterial infection of the head and nervous system causing these sharks to strand.

(For more information on specimen collection of stranded sharks check out this link to the PSRF website: http://www.pelagic.org/research/stranding.html)

These sharks are commonly mistaken by the untrained eye for white sharks but can be distinguished by subtle features of the head, pectoral fins and the tail section. The Atlantic and far southern Pacific have a very similar species (also Lamnid shark) called porbeagle shark (Lamna ditropis). The five species of sharks within the Lamnidae group of sharks are known for elevated blood pressures and temperatures and specializing in high performance fishes, other sharks and many species of marine mammals.

 Salmon Shark

Salmon sharks are not known to be a threat to humans although the larger adults (almost 10 total length and almost half a ton) are known to prey upon seals and porpoises; the larger specimens appear to be fewer and farther between, average adult size is perhaps 8′ total length.

(For more information on Salmon Sharks check out this link to the PSRF website: http://www.pelagic.org/montereybay/pelagic/salmonshark.html)

Please do make use of the information. Public education is very important to dull the hysteria as well as notify the public that these events and specimens are scientifically and environmentally important and that there is an animal rescue unit here locally (as far south as Santa Monica and as far north as Mendocino) that responds to fish and shark related stranding/rescue/collection events. We do assist with whale rescue and disentanglement events as well, on occasion.

Ciao,
Sean

Surfers often have ambivalent attitudes when it comes to sharks. We are terrified by the possibility of running into the landlords of our ocean playground and our own frailty in the face of all those rows of razor sharp teeth. At the same time, we can’t help but be intrigued by the power and beauty of these perfectly engineered ocean predators, and we tell stories about “sightings” and rumored “run-ins” to no end.

Sean Van Sommeran has been fascinated with the creatures ever since he first witnessed a great white shark feeding on an elephant seal off Año Nuevo Island at the age of 12. In 1990 the Santa Cruz native–and surfer–founded the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation. Over the years the PSRF has been at the center of research, public education, and advocacy surrounding the sharks of the Monterey Bay. Van Sommeran and the PSRF team have also worked as wildlife consultants for shark documentaries produced by such major networks as National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and the Nature Channel.

photo: Dave Casper/Pelagic Shark Research Foundation

With PSRF set to present its annual shark report this Tuesday at the Santa Cruz Surfrider Foundation’s monthly meeting, now seemed like an appropriate time to catch up with Van Sommeran on some the latest news regarding shark research and shark activity in our local waters…

So Sean, when we’re talking about sharks in the Monterey Bay region, are we primarily talking about great white sharks?

That’s where a lot of people’s interests gravitate toward, just because it’s the big, heavy one. But I spend as much time with other, less grandiose species: leopard sharks, guitar fish. They’re not going to overturn the boat or anything, but I spend a lot of time with those animals too.

A few years ago there was a lot of controversy over shark diving tours chumming the waters and using surfboards as lures to attract white sharks. Surfers were concerned that these tour groups were actually teaching sharks to associate the silhouette of a surfboard with food? Were their concerns valid?

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Surfrider Santa Cruz will host the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation’s Sean Van Sommeran for Shark Smarts: A Surfers’ Guide to the Sharks of the Eastern Pacific Coast of California and the Monterey Bay Region.

DATE:  Tuesday, March 11, 2008 at 7:00 pm

LOCATION:  Simpkins Swim Center (off 17th and Brommer in Live Oak)

Join the Santa Cruz Chapter of Surfrider Foundation at their monthly general meeting on the evening of March 11 for the Annual Shark Report and Update provided by the Santa Cruz-based Pelagic Shark Research Foundation (PSRF). The presentation will be delivered by chapter member and PSRF founder Sean Van Sommeran. This lecture will cover shark safety tips and updates regarding latest in local research and behavioral studies of sharks within the Monterey Bay and along the California coast.  All new and original images/data gathered around the bay will also be presented in a Power-Point presentation.

The presentation is open to the public and free of charge.  So come learn how to separate fact from myth as regards these mysterious and often misunderstood creatures.  The meeting will also feature opportunities for locals to participate in Surfrider Foundation beach clean-ups, water quality testing, storm drain signage and watershed issues.

For more information, see http://surfridersantacruz.org or http://pelagic.org.

Tom Kendrick, author of Bluewater Gold Rush, will host a lecture, slideshow and booksigning this Thursday, January 17th at 6:30 p.m. at the Long Marine Lab in the Center for Ocean Health Building, 100 Shaffer Rd, Santa Cruz.

In his presentation, Swimming with Sea Monsters, 22 Years as a California Sea Urchin Diver, Kendrick will recount some of the more epic tales that he experienced during his time working as a diver in the California Sea Urchin Fishery from the late seventies to the late nineties. 

Kendrick’s saltwatery stories encompass everything from shark ecounters to surf exploration in California’s offshore islands to a chronology of the California Sea Urchin boom in which fortunes were both won and lost. During his urchin diving years Kendrick also came to know some unique characters. Many of his stories describe in captivating detail his numerous strange and hilarious interactions with some of the more eccentric personalities ever molded by the sea.

I was traveling in Costa Rica last summer when I happened to come upon Tom’s book. A young surfer named Darren from Ventura who I linked up with gave it to me when I mentioned I had nothing left to read on my trip. After a week of exploring the rivermouths together along the country’s central coast, Darren had to return to California and gifted me a number of useful items which both helped me out on the rest of my journey and lightened his load on the way back to the airport.

Among his gifts to me was Bluewater Gold Rush. With the exceptions of surfing, eating and sleeping, I remember having the book in my hands at all times for the next three days. During tropical rainstorms, sitting on the deck of the hotel waiting for the tide to come up, drinking Imperials. I couldn’t put it down. And even though I was on a surf trip in a warm-water tropical paradise, Kendrick’s book had me dreaming of taking a boat trip out to the Channel Islands and scoring a long period south swell at one of the many secret reefs, or fantasizing of having the reckless abandon to attempt to surf the right reefbreak out in the shark infested waters off of the Farallon Islands.

Darren had mentioned to me that his late father, Arnie, was a serious commercial abalone and urchin diver in the Channel Islands and that was why he had enjoyed the book so much. He told me that after his father passed the family decided to sell his highly sought after abalone fishing license, which was a huge financial help for the family, but also ended the family tradition of commercial diving. After I finished the book, I noticed that Darren’s father, Arnie Douglas, was among those memorialized in the back pages by Kendrick and for some reason this made Kendrick’s stories seem all the more personal to me. But really anyone who loves the ocean will identify with the book.

Kendrick’s first book is essentially a collection of stories–adventurous, humorous, tragic–woven together chronologically through a historical narrative of a lifetime dedicated to the sea.

I would recommend Bluewater Gold Rush to surfers, divers and anyone who has ever been captivated by the wonders of the ocean environment and the beauty of the California coast. In fact anyone who appreciates a good adventure would likely enjoy this book.

If you can’t make it to the booksigning and slideshow presentation this Thursday night at Long Marine Lab and would like more information on Bluewater Gold Rush, check out www.bluewatergoldrush.com.

I received a lot of positive feedback from readers after the most recent column about the surfing experience along the Northern California coast beyond the Golden Gate. It sounds like many Santa Cruz surfers still yearn for those days when you could be alone with your thoughts while riding a few empty waves. Everyone who wrote me seemed to appreciate the slower pace of a place like the North Coast, despite the challenging conditions. Unfortunately, because of space restrictions, the article was trimmed back quite a bit. For anyone who enjoyed getting lost in the slow vibe of the North Coast, here’s the uncut version for you:

Veteran surf scribe Dave Parmenter once described Santa Cruz as Huntington Beach with pine trees.

I suspect Parmenter was surfing somewhere in the far northern reaches of California when he came up with that statement. While it’s obviously an exaggeration, his words struck a chord as I skirted my way down a steep goat trail with my board in tow, trying to get down to a boulder and driftwood strewn beach somewhere along the Sonoma County coast.

The scene down on the beach was a far cry from the mild weather, crowded lineups and bustling surf and tourism industries of Santa Cruz. Like most beaches north of the Golden Gate there were no signs of civilization. I also couldn’t find a grain of sand on the entire beach, just an assortment of rocks and stones of various sizes. Thick patches of bull kelp bobbed in the ice cold water and a group of elephant seals wriggled about on a sea stack far offshore.

I was up on the North Coast—the ambiguity of place is intended, no surf spots will be harmed in the making of this article—visiting my friend Jamie. He had invited me up to his house for a couple of days to go abalone diving and, if we were lucky, maybe even score some waves.

The vibe along the North Coast is how I imagine Santa Cruz must have been like some fifty years ago. Except for a few small towns like Jenner and Point Arena, the coastline remains relatively undeveloped and wild. It’s a mellow, pastoral scene—old barns with sagging roofs, endless green hills peppered with grazing cows, and a dramatic rocky coastline covered in groves of cypress and pine, often shrouded in mist.

It’s easy to find opportunities to surf alone up here if you so choose, and when a crowd does gather it’s often a small group of locals who all know each other.

“You know everybody,” Jamie told me of growing up along the Sonoma coast. “There’s really just a handful of local surfers, you could count them on both hands. Everyone else comes up from the Bodega Bay area or from the valley like Santa Rosa, and Sebastopol. It can still get crowded at certain spots when all the conditions are obvious, but overall it’s more of a community vibe.”

There are two main reasons why the surfing experience along the North Coast has failed to mushroom into the crazy scene so prevalent in Southern California and Santa Cruz. First off, the surfing conditions are harsh. A 5/4/3 mil wetsuit with a hood and thick booties is really the minimum gear necessary to surf year round. I found this out the hard way when I began shivering in my 4/3 and booties after being out for just an hour under gray, overcast skies.

Then there are the waves, which do their very best to frustrate surfers and only reveal their true potential to the most meticulous wave hunters who constantly study what the conditions are doing.

Nate Buck, 27, is a lifeguard for the California State Parks who’s been patrolling the Sonoma Coast State Beaches since 2000. He grew up in Encinitas surfing spots like Swami’s and Cardiff Reef and says that what really sets the North Coast apart is the region’s lack of consistent surf.

“In Santa Cruz and Southern California you can pretty much go surfing almost every day,” Buck said. “Up here it’s just really fickle. Someone who comes from down south needs to understand they won’t have as many days to surf.”

“It’s a little bit slower paced and there’s not the immediate reward. You have to be able to tolerate less than perfect surf and handle paddling for 45 minutes to get out and maybe catching just one wave. There are no cameras up here, no one’s watching you. You just have to be in it for the experience.”

As a result, the level of surfing talent in the water tends to be less high performance than in a surfing mecca like Santa Cruz. The average age in the lineup tends to be a lot older as well. Many of the local surfers up north are people who moved up there in the 60s and 70s to get away from the crowds and pioneer new spots.

“Up here it’s pretty rare to see anyone in their early twenties surfing really well,” said Luke Walton, 25, who grew up surfing the North Coast and currently lives in Humboldt. “It’s partly because it’s not really consistent up here, so it takes a lot longer to progress. You can’t surf 300 days a year here. You can try, but most of the time it’s not going to be very good.”

But what your average North Coast surfer lacks in hot dogging ability, they make up for in ocean knowledge, competence in raw conditions and heavy water and—most importantly—commitment and patience, essential character traits for surfing success up north.

The North Coast surfing experience is as much about the hunt itself and solving the puzzle of where there will be decent waves as it is about the actual act of riding a wave. You can drive around for hours on twisting roads searching for waves and still end up getting skunked, which is exactly what Jamie and I did one day during my stay. We had driven around all morning and checked a half dozen spots, but nothing was really working. Either the swell direction was wrong, or the tide wasn’t right, or there wasn’t enough swell, or a combination of all of the above.

“The wind is huge,” Jamie explained to me while in the car. “Some years it will blow hard for literally like three months straight. It just junks up the waves so bad you can’t even surf.”

Many North Coast breaks don’t even look like surf spots. They are often strewn with a minefield of jagged, black rocks and thick heads of bull kelp. Every time we passed by a rocky cove or hiked to the end of a bluff I found myself thinking, “If I only had a few sticks of dynamite I could turn this setup into a perfect wave.” Aside from the handful of beachbreaks, most of the surf spots are reefbreaks that work best on higher tides so that potential landmines are covered with a bit of water.

“There’s a lot of almost perfect setups,” Buck said. “There are so many places where there’s just a big rock in the wrong place, or the point is oriented not quite right, or the wave is too sketchy and if you blow the drop you’ll be right on the rocks. You spend a lot of time mindsurfing places. I’ll bet there will be a lot of good setups here in like a 1,000 years when the coast has had more time to get worn away.”

Not to say that there aren’t a few rare gems. Like anywhere, the spots up north can all have their day. On the rare occasions when they do go off, the waves can provide as thrilling a surfing experience as just about anywhere in California, and usually with half the crowd. Furthermore, because the coast is so inhospitable to surfing, when you do finally score the North

But the real locals you have to watch out for hang out beneath the water. The northern tip of the Red Triangle extends up to Bodega Bay and shark sightings are common along the entire North

Buck was one of two lifeguards who first responded to the scene at Salmon when a 20-year-old female surfer was attacked by a great white estimated at 16 to 18 feet in October of 2005. On the way to the scene, they had received a report over their radio that the victim had a severed artery and was still in the water. Fortunately the information was incorrect and other surfers had helped the woman get to the beach, but at the time Buck and his partner were prepared for the worst.

“You’re going to that call basically thinking you’re going to have to swim out and retrieve a dead body,” he recalled.

Buck said he has two surfing friends who have had encounters with sharks along the North Coast, and one of them has been attacked on three separate occasions. None were fatal, although they easily could have been.

“Shark attacks are a reality here,” Buck said. “I live at Salmon Creek beach where someone gets bumped or circled at least once a year. When you consider the relatively low number of surfers around here, you realize that’s a pretty high chance of having an interaction.”

While they will be the first to admit their coast is no world class surfing destination and can at times seem cruel, it’s rare to hear North Coast surfers complain. They are used to the tough conditions and whining just isn’t their style. In the end, most North Coast surfers will always stay true to their home turf.

“I think this area is where I’m most comfortable,” Luke Walton told me. “I would much rather surf a slightly less quality wave with just a few friends than a high quality wave that’s super crowded. For me, the wild experience of surfing up here is a lot more satisfying.”

Got a surf story? Contact Leo Maxam at leomaxam@yahoo.com