Fearsome Visitors

For the most part, fishermen have only seen glimpses.

The legendary silver fin jutting above the surface. The glint of metallic gray slipping silently through the deep.

But this summer there have been more than just glimpses and unconfirmed suspicions. Starting in June with the spectacular sighting by fishermen out of Ventura Harbor of a great white feeding on a whale carcass off Anacapa Island, the drum beat over big sharks has only increased.

Stinson Beach just north of San Francisco was closed this week following a great white sighting. Now, a movie, “Deep Blue Sea,” is imagining a breed of cunning sharks running rampant.

So what is going on? It could all just be a matter of luck. Everyone who works the sea knows sharks are out there. It’s just not every day that they see big ones.

That, according to scientists, could be changing. A seal population explosion could bring more sets of jaws to Southern California waters, looking for fat, furry snacks.

“There used to be quite a few great whites, but there was no food source anymore so they moved out,” said Andrea Moe, coordinator of the marine education program at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. “But where mice are there will be cats. As orcas and great whites migrate through, and they realize the food is there, they’ll stop.”

The great white is virtually a creature of legend: a modern-day leviathan that can reach 21 feet, weigh 2,000 pounds and reputedly can swallow a person whole.

Great whites have been known to skulk in and around the Channel Islands, and have occasionally been rumored--though never actually documented--to come closer to shore.

Fisherman Kevin Reynolds was just about to take a dip in the water off his boat four years ago when he heard a fin cutting through the swells.

He knew almost without looking that it was a great white slicing through the water, the biggest trophy a fisherman could land. So, forget the swimming. He headed to the boat’s cabin to grab a gun, only to return to see the 10-foot prize slipping away into the waves as quickly as it came.

Not so for John Fuqua, a sport-fishing boat captain out of Channel Islands Harbor who made a name for himself when he caught a great white on videotape at the end of June. He fielded calls from CNN and Southland television stations, and got a handy sum of money for the video from a reality-based television show.

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Fuqua’s great white was seen gnawing on a dead gray whale that became trapped in a fishing net about a mile off Anacapa Island. The 20-foot shark hovered near the boat, and returned to chomp on the whale’s tail, all caught on a 90-second video punctuated by excited yells and shaking frames worthy of “The Blair Witch Project.”

“When people see something like that, they’ll have it in their heads until the day they die,” Fuqua said of the shark.

A few Ventura County seafarers have taken too close a look.

In 1994, James Robinson, a sea urchin diver, was killed while treading water near his boat 70 miles from Ventura, west of the Channel Islands.

A shark was also deemed responsible for killing kayaker Tamara McAllister, whose body washed up on the beach at Malibu in 1989 with a 13-inch bite on her thigh. Her boyfriend disappeared on the same trip, and his body was never found. The same year a scuba diver filming a documentary on sharks was attacked by a blue shark off Santa Barbara Island. He survived.

Still, despite all the hubbub, there have only been about 100 shark attacks on the West Coast since the 1920s, according to Jeff Seigel, an ichthyologist at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.

But ask the experts and they will say great white sightings around the Channel Islands shouldn’t surprise anyone. The large sharks hunger for the blubber of seals and sea lions that cluster on the rocky edges of the islands. As a result, great whites aren’t very likely to play Jaws and seek out human delicacies along the shore.

In recent years seals have increased exponentially throughout California, helped by laws against hunting, said Burney Le Boeuf, a professor of biology at UC Santa Cruz. There are so many seals in the Channel Islands now that they have begun breeding in less desirable places such as Anacapa Island, Moe said.

“If you’ve got the seals, you’ll have white sharks,” Le Boeuf said.

That’s not to say the shoreline is shark-less. The ones that prowl the shallow waters, however, are for the most part harmless. Gray smoothhounds--short and flat with two front fang-like teeth--commonly slip into the lagoons around Point Mugu Naval Air Station. Spotted leopard sharks are found in Ventura County waters, as are horn sharks, a bulbous-bodied shark with a small horn in front of its dorsal fin.

A thresher shark, which uses its tail to beat the water, patrolled the waves of Pierpont Bay for a couple days last month, according to Steve White, a lifeguard supervisor with the state parks department.

According to shark researchers such as Peter Klimley of Bodega Bay Marine Lab, female great whites migrate to Southern California to pup offshore. Their spawn, baby sharks with yolks still attached, swim for land, feeding on fish in the underwater canyons of La Jolla, Santa Monica and Ventura, such as the Hueneme Canyon next to Silver Strand Beach.

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Even a small shark has sharp, serrated teeth, and can do damage.

“Any shark is potentially dangerous,” Seigel said. “Even a French poodle will nip you if you harass it.”

Shark attacks in Southern California will never be as common as to the north above Point Conception, because great whites prefer colder waters. The only Southern Californians likely to come face to face with a great white in the water are sea urchin divers, who have had to move into areas closer to the great white’s food source at the Channel Islands as other beds are depleted.

Urchin diver Doug Walker has had his fair share of run-ins with blue sharks and makos, and regularly dives near the area of Fuqua’s sighting. Nevertheless, he feels little fear, he said.

“Of course, you take notice of it,” he said. “I’ve just seen fleeting glances in the water. If one came around a little curious. . . . Well, then, I’d get out.”

Why sharks attack when they occasionally do is a matter still debated in the scientific community. Some say the shark is only curious, or guarding his territory, spitting surfers out when the taste disagrees with it.

John McCosker, an ichthyologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, postulates a more straightforward theory: Sharks bite people because sharks want to eat.

McCosker and other scientists believe in order to save itself from harm a shark takes a bite out of its prey and waits for it to weaken from loss of blood. That way it can avoid a costly battle to the death with a 500-pound seal, desperately clawing, scratching and flailing for life.

This is the perfect example of why surfers, kayakers and divers in potentially dangerous areas should always stay near friends. After the first attack, a victim can be pulled to safety while the shark waits.

Nevertheless, shark attacks are very rare because great whites have a very narrow food source. They like their meals fat and furry, and as long as seals thrive, shark seal lunches won’t be too hard to come by.

David Wilson, a teacher at Buena High School, had an up-close and personal visit with a great white. He swears the shark looked right into his face, almost with a kind of recognition.

“I expected to look in its eyes, and see dull, empty black,” said Wilson, who said he was on a boat nudged by the great white shark Fuqua videotaped near the Channel Islands. “It looked more intelligent than I ever expected. It looked like it was thinking.”