Scuba Diver Hospitalized After Shark Attack Off Santa Barbara Island

A blue shark attacked an underwater cameraman while he was filming a documentary on sharks off Santa Barbara Island on Sunday, biting the man’s left forearm and right hand, authorities said.

Larry Stroup, 46, was working in scuba gear and had left a protective cage when he was attacked, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman said. He was diving 10 miles northwest of the island, located about 25 miles west of Santa Catalina Island.

Stroup was airlifted to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, where he was listed in serious but stable condition after undergoing surgery Sunday evening, a hospital spokeswoman said.

A Coast Guard official said Stroup was diving from the 60-foot vessel Scuba Lover when the ship sent an emergency call to the Coast Guard station in Ventura at 11 a.m.

‘Snuck Up on Him’

“We heard on the radio the guy was . . . filming the sharks and one snuck up on him and bit him,” the official said.

Dave Delano, manager of the Ventura Marina where the Scuba Lover is based, said Coast Guard officials radioed first-aid instructions to the boat’s crew.

“They couldn’t stop the bleeding with direct pressure so they were told to use a tourniquet,” Delano said.

Radio traffic between the boat and the Ventura Coast Guard station at first indicated that Stroup was attacked by a great white shark, Delano said, but later the crew said that a blue shark had attacked the diver.

“They had baited up for blue sharks, and there were blue sharks all around the boat,” he said.

A relatively small but voracious species, the blue shark is known to swarm around fishing boats and sometimes frequents shallow water near beaches, but attacks on humans are not common.

“But when they are being fed,” Delano said, “they bite anything that looks edible.”

Paul Korber, the marina’s deputy harbor master, said Stroup was filming sharks “eating and doing other activities” when one of them attacked.

Crew members said they were putting together a documentary on sharks in their natural habitat when the incident occurred.

The Scuba Lover’s crew was still visibly upset when they docked about six hours later. They said the shark that attacked Stroup was about five feet long.

The boat is owned by a Steve Madaras, who also runs the Scuba Luv dive shop in Thousand Oaks, Delano said.

Frequent Expeditions

An avid scuba diver, he frequently conducts shark observing expeditions aboard the boat, Delano said. Madaras and his crew had left the harbor Saturday for a two-day expedition.

Mike Slick, assistant dockmaster at the harbor, said radio traffic indicated that the attack occurred at a spot known as Lost Reef on the western side of Santa Barbara Island, a popular spot for experienced scuba divers because it is out of the way and fish are abundant.

Delano’s wife, Sandy, an administrative assistant at the marina, said local fisherman have reported seeing an increase in the number of great white sharks in recent years as seal populations have boomed.

“Since the seals are protected they provide an abundance of food for the sharks that normally would not have been in the area,” she said.

“You’ve got more and more kayakers, windsurfers and surfers competing with more and more sharks in Southern California,” Ralph Collier, president of the Shark Research Committee, a Los Angeles scientific organization, told The Times earlier this year. “It’s just a matter of time before the sharks and the people meet.”

“Normally, the Scuba Lover runs what they call ‘blue shark expeditions.’ It’s a beautiful shark but not usually dangerous,” Delano said.

Veteran lifeguards said Sunday that shark attacks “just don’t happen” to swimmers along beaches between Los Angeles and San Diego, but there have been some attacks when people venture farther out to sea.

“In 22 years of working on this beach, there has never been a shark attack in the waters that we patrol,” said Long Beach Lifeguard Lt. Bill Forrester.

Capt. Don Rohrer, a Los Angeles County lifeguard for more than 30 years, said he had never “heard of a swimmer bitten by a shark. We see sharks out in the water, but I don’t know of any shark bites. It’s just a thing that doesn’t happen down here.”

In January, however, a couple kayaking off Malibu was apparently killed by a shark, possibly a great white.

Sailors found the body of 24-year-old Tamara McCallister floating six miles off Channel Islands Harbor, about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. A 13-inch chunk of flesh was missing from her thigh. The body of her companion, Roy Jeffrey Stoddard, 24, was never found.

The last previous fatal attack in the state was in September, 1984, when an abalone diver was killed 40 miles south of San Francisco.

Since the 1920s, there have been 62 recorded shark attacks in California--10% in Southern California, according to state Department of Fish and Game statistics. Only six fatal shark attacks were reported between 1926 and 1984, and in five of those deaths the attack was blamed on a great white.

Times staff writer Carol Watson in Ventura contributed to this story.