A Great White
kayak story
By Roger Duddridge email
I was just looking through some of the other pages on the site, and so
much of it is great and interesting. I looked at some of the shark
stories from the Long Beach area, and actually have one to report myself,
though I was surfing in a 17 foot sea kayak at the time.
I remain to this day convinced that the shark in this story was a great
white, though I have no other witnesses, only the Pacific Rim National Park
warden who related to me that one had been sighted in the area. I was
practising surf landings at combers beach just south of long beach, on a
day that was bringing in many frequent sets of eight foot average waves,
and getting dumped a lot as it was my first time in these conditions. My
kayak has no front bulkhead, only a rear one just behind the seat, and an
airfilled nosebag to keep the boat buoyant from bow to stern in the event
of capsize. I was making good use of these features not knowing that I was
making a crucial mistake in the fact that the nose bag was not secured to
the boat except by friction.
On a particularly large wave I capsized as it picked
me up to an almost vertical position even before the curl reached over and
began to impact. I was out of the boat so quickly that the curl actually
rammed water into the bow of the boat, forcing the airbag out with almost
explosive speed. The kayak had not yet seen the worst of this wave but I
had definitely seen something just prior to the capsize that had caught my
attention like a train coming right at me.
In the surf zone and in a very buoyant unloaded 17 foot kayak, the view
directly ahead changes either up and down every few seconds. Half the time
I could see the back of a wave, and the other half I could see above them,
and the first thing that caught my attention was a sealion who seemed to be
in an unusual position with respect to the water. His body position as I
remember sparked something in my mind that I seemed to recognise was not
physically right. He immediately disappeared as I did behind the next
wave, but again on the next wave he seemed unreal somehow, and then on the
next I saw why. A very large fin in the same water location was visible
to me, and it gave off a feeling of strength that I have never encountered
before. It was like solid steel, with the power of a train as I said
before, heading in my direction. Again on the next wave I saw the fin and
then my boat began its capsize. The boat was pointing from the vertical
toward the bottom when the water forced the airbag out and filled the nose
with water, so when the now sinking bow hit the bottom with the wave
pushing hard on the stern pointing up, the boat broke in two. I was in the
water and I knew somehow that the bottom was just inches below my feet.
There was a huge drag against my efforts to move toward shore, as I had
grabbed the bow handle and was trying to save the remains of my kayak. I
kicked and kicked until the first big toe met sand, then kicked some more
until my whole foot had made contact.
The whole event
happened so coincidentally with the shark, the capsize, and the breaking
hull, that my mind had been totally focused on salvaging myself and hull to
the shore because it was so close. This somehow saved me from connecting
with the reality that I was in the water with a huge shark, and he in fact
had been closer to shore than I before I capsized.
If I had known any fear
I am sure I would have been like a magnet to the steel of that shark,
because as I have heard sharks can detect an electric signal so tiny that
if you put an AA battery in the water with the positive end in New York and
the negative in Miami, some sharks can read the voltage. I would have been
giving off a lot of volts if I had been scared. Fortunately for me a
sealion may have been the meal of the moment, and I did not have a second
of fear, because I was so busy. Later, when all of those fleeting images
came into their correct order in my mind, I was very very glad to be back
on shore!
Every second of that story is true, believe me. There are gw sharks
occasionally in the area of long beach, and they DO go near shore!
