This is a very weird
story, on several levels.
First, a 4-foot shark spent several hours “body surfing”
just off
Second, after beachgoers and lifeguards watched the shark
surfing for “hours,” the shark suddenly – and inexplicably – decided to bite the
foot of a surfer from
Third, there were nine surfers still in the water less than a half hour after the bite. The only surfer who left did so because another surfer had cut his back and “there was blood everywhere.” The fact that a shark was in the water biting his peers made no difference to him. Or the other surfers, obviously.
This is your brain on drugs.
1. Ha! I've surfed before when there's a shark out. Quite a few time. I originally hail from Durban, South Africa. Our local break had a resident shark for about 2 months during the school holidays one year. No idea what it was, but it was about 7 foot long. It used to freak the non-locals out, but we digged it 'cause it kept the surf uncrowded.
My personal experience with it (when it first arrived a bunch of us were sitting on the beach and thought it was a log floating in the midbreak, so we swam out to it with the intent of pulling it back to the beach and out of the way of the surfers. Turns out it wasn't and a couple of the guys showed how fast they could swim if they put their minds to it :-) was that it was more scared of us than we were of it - whenever we got too close to it it would dart off.
Mind you, if somebody was cut or something they would go back into shore - and if somebody had actually been bitten while we were out there and we'd stayed out, i think that would be a bit unresponsible.
Posted at 11:01AM on Nov 23rd 2005 by mccdyl001