When surfer meets shark
Elinor Dempsey first thought a sea lion or dolphin was below her; then came the unpleasant surprise.
Elinor Dempsey was sitting on her red longboard, waiting for a wave. She wasn’t expecting a great white, writes Robin Abcarian.
LOS OSOS — Elinor Dempsey was sitting on her red longboard off Morro Strand State Beach last Saturday, waiting for a wave. The sun was out, the ocean was glassy, and she was doing what surfers do — spacing out a little bit, enjoying the water.
As she looked down, she noticed something swimming under her. A seal, perhaps? No, she decided, too big for a seal. Must be a dolphin. A really big dolphin.
“I thought, ‘Wow, it’s so close, I could pat it.’ My second thought was, ‘Oh my God, he’s getting aggressive.’ All I saw was fish skin in front of my face. I thought it was some dolphin going crazy.”
She heard a loud, chomping noise.
And then she started swimming for her life. Other surfers, far more freaked out than she, urged her to swim faster. They knew it was no dolphin.
Dempsey’s ankle leash was still attached to her board, so she grabbed her surfboard, hopped on and began to paddle. “One of the guys next to me says ‘Paddle faster,’ and I said, ‘I’m paddling as fast as I can.’ ”
A moment later, a wave shot her to the beach. She climbed out of the water and sat down, exhausted and in shock. A perfect half moon shape, jagged around the edges, was missing from the front of her board. A crowd gathered.
Patrick Pemberton, a surfer who also happens to be a reporter for the San Luis Obispo Tribune, had just gotten out of the water when he noticed the commotion down the beach. He grabbed his iPhone and Go-Pro and started working. He shot video of Dempsey, still wet, totally composed, even chuckling about how she hadn’t even been in the water long enough to catch a wave.
The story made headlines around the world. Within two hours of the attack, Pemberton said, his mother texted from Indiana: “Stop tempting fate.”
Will he? Let’s put it this way: Four days after the shark attack, he picked up a new surfboard.
Sorry, mom.
On Wednesday, shark expert Ralph Collier, who runs the Canoga Parkbased Shark Research Committee, showed up at Dempsey’s house to examine her board. He keeps track of all human/shark encounters on the West Coast. Since 2000, he said, he has chronicled more than 80 unprovoked shark attacks. Five were fatal.
Collier determined that Dempsey’s shark — a great white — was most likely 11 or 12 feet long, and that it probably bit the board to warn her away. He took a sample of what appeared to be its blood from her board. DNA analysis may help identify its gender and its family group.
“I think it was swimming around you, checking things out,” he told Dempsey. “The shark didn’t know what she was. He probably said, ‘Dammit, it’s not leaving, it’s not getting the message.’ So now he comes back and hits you. I don’t believe this was a predatory attack.”
About half an hour before the shark attacked Dempsey, a shark of a similar size, perhaps the same one, had bumped a surfer on a red board near Morro Rock, about two miles south of Dempsey’s encounter. In December, a Morro Bay man was bitten by a shark off Montana de Oro State Park beach.
While the sheer number of Pacific Coast shark attacks has risen in past years, a human being is less likely than ever to be attacked.
The population of sharks has grown slightly. But the populations of beachgoers and pinnipeds (the sea lions and seals that are the preferred shark diet) have exploded.
“I’m surprised we don’t have more of these things happening,” said Collier, who is also hoping to visit 22-year-old Connor Lyon of Santa Barbara, who was fishing between Point Conception and Gaviota State Beach on Aug. 18 when a shark chomped on his kayak. (Lyon, uninjured, was picked up by a passing boat.)
“I’d go to Surfrider Beach in Malibu in the ’60s to catch and tag sharks,” Collier said, “and there’d be five guys surfing. That was it. Today you go down there, there’s 200. Many years ago in Morro Bay, you didn’t have hardly any reports. Doesn’t mean the sharks weren’t there. You had fewer people.”
Collier is adamant on one point: Fear of sharks should not keep anyone out of the water.
“You are less likely to be killed by a shark than you are by a rhino,” he said. “Or by a bee sting. Thirty dog owners are killed by their pet every year!”
I’m pretty sure Collier meant to invoke hippos, not rhinos. But I take his point.
Dempsey, a senior product director for Trans-Union, a credit reporting company, is still processing her experience, as they say. She plans to get back in the water in the next week or two, with eight friends at her side.
She doesn’t know why she didn’t kick free of her board, she doesn’t know why she thought she was being stalked by a dolphin, and she doesn’t remember what happened at the moment of impact.
“I think I blacked out a little,” she told me Tuesday evening, as we sat at the beach near the site of her shark encounter. On Monday, her blood pressure was up. She and her 19-year-old son had to reassure her 14-year-old daughter, who is in France on an exchange program.
Dempsey’s been the subject of many news stories. The “Today Show” did a segment. She turned down a request to appear on “Fox and Friends” after reading nasty comments under a story about her on the Fox News website. “It was stuff like, ‘Too bad that Democrat didn’t get killed.’ And ‘Let’s get Hillary Clinton a board and a Beach Boys CD.’ ”
Fame, of course, has its drawbacks. She has also been forced to reveal a closely-kept secret.
“I was sitting on the beach and the state park ranger was doing a report,” said Dempsey, who doesn’t talk about her age. “Next day, I see the article, ‘Elinor Dempsey, 54.’ So now the whole world knows how old I am.”
‘The shark didn’t know what she was. He probably said, “Dammit, it’s not leaving, it’s not getting the message.” So now he comes back and hits you.’
— Ralph Collier, head of the Shark Research Committee