With a Recent Series of Shark Attacks, Surfers and Bodyboarders in Hawaii Are Headed Into . . . : The Eye of the Tiger

Rick Gruzinsky began his day as many other residents of the Hawaiian island of Oahu do--by paddling a surfboard into the waves that form perfectly over the reefs of the North Shore.

But what would happen to Gruzinsky on the morning of Oct. 22, 1992, would not only stay with him the rest of his life, it would mark the beginning of a series of events that have left many wondering about what appears to be a very dangerous trend.

Gruzinsky, 26, a construction worker from east Honolulu, had paddled out at Laniakea, a surf spot between Haliewa and Waimea bays. The surf was small, about two feet, and two others had gotten out moments before.

Gruzinsky was alone.

It was about 7:30 a.m., the sun shining and light trade winds blowing. Gruzinsky had ridden two waves before paddling out a third time. As he lay on his board about 150 yards from the beach, there was a long period between swells. A large green sea turtle swam past, but he thought nothing of it.

Then the water beneath Gruzinsky started to move. He thought he had drifted over a reef, a shallow coral head.

“Then I saw some colors and swirls under me and I thought ‘Oh my God, that turtle’s under me, what’s that thing doing?’ ” Gruzinsky recalled recently from his home.

It was no turtle, but a 14-foot tiger shark, one of the most dangerous fish in the sea.

In one motion the shark used its head to lift Gruzinsky’s board, with Gruzinsky on it, up and out of the water, flipping it and grabbing the front rail in its mouth.

Gruzinsky held onto the back of the board and cradled it with his arms and legs.

“And then it latched on,” Gruzinsky said. “I remember it trying to get a good bite . . . it was trying to adjust its bite.”

Gruzinsky held on while the shark shook its head. “The board was kind of like a lever between us,” Gruzinsky said. “All I could think about was getting pulled under, because I didn’t know where the body of the shark was. My main concern was to stay above water.”

The shark shook again. There was a loud snap and Gruzinsky held onto what remained of the board. The shark had bitten off a chunk of fiberglass and foam the size of half a manhole cover.

“I remember distinctly seeing the eye just below the water level and the big round snout,” Gruzinsky said. “The shark was trying to swallow the piece and I remember looking into its mouth. It looked like it was trying to spit the piece out, but the piece got stuck in its mouth because I remember seeing the edges getting caught in the soft white part of the mouth and it had already passed its jaw.”

Then the shark sank slowly out of sight.

Gruzinsky climbed onto the board, but it was upside down, a chunk missing from its rail. Gruzinsky tried to paddle toward shore, but there was a brief tug, perhaps from the body or tail of the shark catching the board as it swam beneath him.

Gruzinsky tried not to slide from the unwaxed bottom of the board, paddling precariously for what seemed an eternity. No waves rolled in to help him along.

“It just took forever to get in,” he said.

But he made it, with only a few scrapes from either the fins of the board or the exposed fiberglass where the shark had taken its bite. Gruzinsky couldn’t remember. A crowd gathered to greet him on the beach. A tour bus stopped and soon everyone knew the story of Rick Gruzinsky.

And it appears to be a story that won’t go away, happening time and again not only in Gruzinsky’s mind, but to other surfers.

Two weeks to the day after his attack, Gruzinsky was ready to give surfing another try. But on the morning of Nov. 5, off Keaau Beach on Oahu’s west shore, bodyboarder Aaron Romento, an 18-year-old, was bitten on the leg and bled to death within minutes.

Gruzinsky eventually made it back into the water, having surfed one or two days before paddling out again at Joko’s on the afternoon of Dec. 23. It was on this day, while in the water, that Gruzinsky said he experienced a “weird” feeling inside.

“And sure enough,” he said, “I got home later that evening and somebody called me and said, ‘Did you hear?’ And it was the same board-bite and everything.”

Gruzinsky was referring to surfer Gary Chun, who while out with about 20 other surfers at Chun’s Reef (not named after the surfer) had a chunk bitten taken from his board by a 12-foot tiger shark while he was sitting up after paddling out.

Chun’s Reef is located across the channel from Joko’s.

“It just put me back to zero again,” Gruzinsky said. “I was already over it almost, and then it’s like ‘Oh, man.’ ”

Oh, man indeed.

A third confirmed attack in so short a period of time was too many.

Surfers and swimmers demanded that something be done to eliminate this threat to life and limb. The North Shore had become notorious for more than large surf. Off the coast was a demon sea.

“It’s a pretty fearful situation,” said Craig Sugihara, 46, owner of Town & Country Surf Shop in Pearl City, near Honolulu. “Parents don’t want their children to enter the ocean.”

They haven’t had a shark scare like this in Oahu since the Billy Weaver incident in 1958.

After Weaver, a 15-year-old, was killed during a tiger shark attack witnessed by several people, shark hunters went on a rampage, killing 697 sharks (only 87 of which were the dangerous tiger sharks) around Oahu.

After the recent incidents, the state of Hawaii enacted a law to have the state Department of Land and Natural Resources conduct “a shark population control program with input from the Hawaiian community.”

A shark task force had already been organized after bodyboarder Bryan Adona disappeared in February of 1992 at Leftovers, a surf spot near Waimea Bay. His board was found the next day with teeth marks made by what was believed to be a large tiger shark. A few months before that, Martha Morrell was attacked and killed by a 12-foot tiger shark while swimming about 100 yards from shore in front of her house on the island of Maui.

“Something unusual has been going on lately,” Bill Paty, chairman of the task force, said in a newsletter distributed among its members. “But we have no idea whether these incidents are a statistical fluke or evidence of a disturbing trend.”

The state doesn’t want to take any chances. Though the task force is operating on what it calls a three-pronged approach to the problem--hunting, education and research--it is the first “prong” that is getting all the publicity.

After the Gruzinsky incident, the task force set a cable with 12 hooks and floaters on the hooks, and caught five or six large tiger sharks and saw several more. After Romento was killed, the group made another set and caught three more large tiger sharks.

As of last Thursday, the task force, since the attack on Gruzinsky, had killed 10 tiger sharks, most of which were more than 10 feet long, and free-lance hunters had killed at least another 22. Heavy surf in recent days has hampered the hunting effort.

Warren Bolster, 45, a well-known surfing photographer, said the task force isn’t even scratching the surface of the problem. Bolster said that during a recent helicopter ride over the area from Honolulu to the North Shore he saw several large tiger sharks, including one group of sharks feeding in a pack on a school of fish.

“We’re not talking Jaws I, II or III here,” Bolster said. “We’ve got a real live drama unfolding.”

Linda McCrerey, a spokeswoman for the task force, said that hunting of large tiger sharks continues to be a primary goal. “But we don’t want to hunt too many because some Hawaiians, some animal rights activists and even a couple of scientists are not in favor of hunting large tiger sharks,” she said.

A few native Hawaiians insist that shark hunters are violating a sacred right. For some Hawaiians, the tiger shark patrolling their village represents Aumakua , which means “family or personal God.”

One free-lance hunter reportedly received threats on his telephone answering machine, which he considered genuine enough to reel in his lines and call it quits.

But the majority of Hawaiians, many of them surfers, are in favor of limited hunting to help solve the problem, according to McCrerey.

But almost everyone wants to know why so many tiger sharks have come to the North Shore to begin with.

Local fishermen believe that long-line and gill-net fishermen over the years have decimated the offshore fishery to the point where sharks aren’t able to find enough to eat and therefore come into the shallow water to prey upon whatever they might find there.

John Naughton, a marine biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service who is based in Honolulu, argued that tiger sharks are a near-shore species to begin with and don’t even feed on the tuna and billfish targeted by the long-liners and gill-netters.

“It’s an inshore shark that during the day stays down off the deeper slopes,” Naughton said. “And it comes up into the shallows at night to feed, where they are much more successful capturing slow-moving reef fish.”

Surfers claim that the sea turtle population has exploded since the animals were protected about 10 years ago. Since the sea turtle is a favorite food of the tiger shark, and because it prefers the near-shore reef waters, it would follow that tiger sharks would be attracted to such areas.

“I mean, I love sea turtles,” Gruzinsky said. “But I tell you, if they’re going to bring sharks in . . . I don’t love them that much.”

Dr. George Balazs, a NMFS biologist and expert on sea turtles, acknowledged that the animals have rebounded, but said that removing them from the protected list would lead to their eventual extinction.

Still, Balazs told a reporter: “This issue is not going to go away in the near future. If you’re covering this type of thing, then you are going to be writing more stories somewhere down the line.”

Meanwhile, the state is trying to keep the situation under control.

The Oahu Mayor’s office is steering inquiries to the DNLR, which says that none of the attacks have been on tourists and that sharks tend to stay away from the more crowded beaches. The Hawaii Visitor’s Bureau says there have been no inquiries from mainland travel agents or cancellations because of the recent attacks.

Chris Lowe, of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, said that sharks probably do not consider humans a food source. “If tigers considered people a food source,” he said, “they’d be attracted to areas of human use, like Waikiki. But evidence suggests tigers mostly avoid groups of people.

“Besides, attacks are very rare . . . when they do occur, the shark usually takes a single bite. It almost seems as though the shark realizes it has made a mistake.”

The last three incidents were single-bite attacks.

A theory that most observers tend to agree on is that numbers of tiger sharks has increased steadily in the last 20 years.

“Unfortunately in Hawaii we haven’t developed a market for sharks so there’s no commercial fishery,” said Naughton, 50, a lifelong Oahu resident. “And they’re considered really a poor man’s sports fish. Nobody wants to catch them when we’ve got huge marlin and yellowfin (tuna).

“Between 1953 and 1975 we had a series of shark-control programs and the last one ended in 1976 and that was a very small one, so we know that tiger sharks have had a chance to build up to maximum levels.”

Nobody seems to know why the sharks seemed to have congregated along the North Shore, but McCrerey said that part of the task force’s operation includes the tagging and releasing of the smaller tiger sharks caught to learn more about their habits.

Meanwhile, the shark watch continues.

“Everybody’s watching out for sharks,” said Waianae Water Safety Lt. Brian Keaulana. “The ocean is (the sharks’) environment, and we can’t treat it like a swimming pool. You take a chance when you go out. It’s not a big chance, but at least people are more aware of it now. They’re not taking the ocean for granted anymore.”

The task force is advising surfers to avoid going in the water alone, or at dusk, dark or dawn; to avoid murky water, or surfing near streams, river mouths and drain outlets because they carry dead animals and other possible food products on which the sharks might feed.

Meanwhile, the task force hot line, for those who want to report tiger shark sightings, is down to one call every three days or so. Young surfers are still being prevented from entering the water by their parents and the older ones seem to be using more caution.

As for Gruzinsky, he has been surfing six or seven times since the morning last October, but said he hasn’t gotten over what happened.

“Surfing’s definitely not what it used to be for me,” he said.