Great White: Ghost of Coast

The horrifying image won’t go away. Bill McNair sees it at night in his sleep: a great white shark charging from the depths, its mouth agape, threatening to bite him in half.

“As soon as I go to sleep, I see that mouth,” the Huntington Beach podiatrist said. “And then I wake up. I slept maybe 10 hours total in the first week since it happened.”

The nightmares were spawned on the morning of June 10 when McNair, 52, was spear-fishing in 70 feet of water on the unpopulated windward side of Santa Catalina Island. He dived to about 15 feet and took aim downward at a small yellowtail when he saw the shark, an estimated 10-footer with a girth of nearly four feet, rising through the wavering haze.

McNair said he remembers vividly seeing first a patch of gray, then two large eyes, “their black pupils focusing right on me,” and then a mouth “with row after row of crooked teeth . . . and this face coming up at me with the speed of a freight train.”

His powerful gun already aimed in the direction of the shark, he pulled the trigger, dropped his weapon and kicked frantically to the surface, glancing over his shoulder once and seeing a silhouette of the predator, turning sideways, with half of a six-foot spear protruding from its snout.

“His heart was ready to jump out of his chest,” said his diving partner, Lyle Miller of Seal Beach, who plucked McNair to safety aboard McNair’s 38-foot boat. Miller did not did see the shark and neither reported the incident to island officials.

While authorities say they believe there is no reason for public alarm, McNair and Miller--veteran breath-hold, or “freedivers”--expressed concern about what they perceive to be an increasingly visible presence of white sharks around Catalina’s shores.

It was McNair’s second sighting of a great white in two years, he said, the other taking place on the lee side of the island near Ship Rock, just beyond Isthmus Cove.

Reports of other sightings have been swirling around the island and throughout the diving community for months.

One of them, during the spring, involved a large white shark swimming around a glass-bottom boat as it was moored near the beach in Avalon Harbor. In a separate incident at about the same time, the wife of a freediver allegedly saw a large white shark circling their vessel in the Parsons Landing area near the isthmus as her husband swam back to their boat. She waved her husband off, and he made it safely to shore.

“All I hear are the stories. I’ve never seen one in my life,” said Bob Kennedy, owner of Scuba Luv in Avalon. “I’ve heard of them and have actually gone seeking them, but haven’t had the privilege yet.”

Island officials, meanwhile, said last week that they were unaware of the sighting in Avalon Harbor.

“I can’t rule it out, but haven’t had it reported to me,” Avalon City Manager Rob Clark said.

He and other officials were quick to point out that while several species of sharks--including great whites--do visit the island, areas frequented by most tourists have never been closed because of shark sightings and there has never been a documented attack on a human anywhere near the island.

If there were large sharks entering tourist areas, “The first thing we’d want to do is put the word out because public welfare is involved,” said Brian Bray, harbor master at Avalon. “[Hushing such news] is not our game.”

Shark experts declined to speculate as to whether Catalina is being visited by more white sharks than in years past.

“White sharks have been residents there seasonally throughout history, long before Wrigley even arrived,” said John McCosker, a marine biologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “They visit all the offshore islands, particularly those that have large colonies of sea mammals.”

Catalina does not support a colony of elephant seals (the favorite prey of adult great whites), but it is home to much smaller harbor seals and a growing population of California sea lions, both of which also are on the menu of earth’s most notorious predator.

While it is unknown how well white sharks have responded to state protection from fishermen and the removal of coastal gill-nets (both in the early 1990s) that killed an undetermined amount of young sharks every year, it is known that the sea lion population in California has boomed from a low of about 10,000 to more than 200,000 since the enactment of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972.

If, in fact, more white sharks are being seen, another possible factor could be the simple call of nature. In late spring and summer, pregnant adult white sharks swim up submarine canyons to give birth in near-shore areas of all of the Channel Islands, and even along the Southland coast.

At Catalina, their timing coincides with the arrival of tourist season at an island playground only 21 miles from the bustling mainland. Catalina receives more than one million tourists each year, many of them engaging in various water sports activities.

Experts say there is little to fear, in most cases. Sharks in general are not cold-blooded killers with vengeful nature and taste for human flesh.

“I would be more fearful of my child going to school and being hit by a bullet during a drive-by shooting,” said Ralph Collier, who does research on shark attacks as president of the Shark Research Committee in Canoga Park.

In 100 years along the West Coast from Mexico to Alaska, there have been 108 confirmed unprovoked attacks by sharks on humans, mostly divers and surfers, he said.

“Humans just don’t do it for them,” said Peter Klimley, a scientist and at the Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega Bay. “They feed on seals, not humans, so when you get an attack on a human it starts like an attack on a seal, but very often the shark lets go.”

White sharks prey primarily on rays and bottom fishes until they reach a length of 10 to 12 feet. After that, they feed almost exclusively on pinnipeds. Since elephant seals give them more blubber for their bite, they are the preferred target.

Typically, white sharks rely on stealth and camouflage, sneaking along and blending into rocky bottoms, striking their unsuspecting prey at or near the surface.

The majority of attacks on humans have occurred on divers and surfers at or near the surface. Opinions vary as to whether all attacks are cases of mistaken identity, but it is widely believed that some are.

The safest areas for tourists are sandy bottoms, away from dense populations of pinnipeds. Catalina has plenty of these, including the popular marine park west of Avalon and numerous beaches along the bustling lee shore of the island.

It also has areas casual swimmers and snorkelers might want to avoid, such as the Salta Verde Point on the backside, where McNair said his encounter took place. Other areas where alleged sightings have taken place are near Ben Weston Beach and in Little and Shark Harbors on the backside.

One area many divers avoid altogether is the extreme west end of the island.

“They’ve been there for a couple years, big-time,” said Barry Andersen, a renowned shark fisherman and avid diver. “I know that during lobster season two guys were chased out of there [by sharks]. It’s a great place for bugs, but no lobster is worth that.”