Little Risk of ‘Jaws’ in Southland

They are out there, fins jutting above the surface, glints of gray in the deep Pacific Ocean off the California coast.

But, unlike Florida and the Atlantic coast, where the reputed “summer of the shark” continues into September, scientists say the big ones aren’t headed for shore here.

On Tuesday, a shark attacked a couple swimming in the surf off North Carolina, killing the man and leaving the woman in critical condition. On Saturday, a 10-year-old boy was killed in Virginia Beach.

But, it’s been nearly a decade since a shark death in California.

In Southern California, it’s the fishermen in the Channel Islands off the Ventura and Santa Barbara county coasts who most often spot the behemoths: the makos and the great whites who hunger for the blubber of seals and sea lions that cluster on the rocky shores of the islands.

Farther north, above Point Conception, the colder waters bring more great whites, particularly around the Farallon Islands.

Overall, the sharks that lurk near California beaches are considered more gentle than their eastern counterparts. There is the gray smoothhound--short and flat with two fang-like teeth--that commonly slips into the lagoons around Point Mugu. There are the spotted leopard shark and the horn shark, a bulbous-bodied shark with a small horn in front of its dorsal fin.

But even these can cause injuries.

“If you pull on its tail, a poodle will turn around and bite you,” said Jeff Seigel, a shark expert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

California’s waters are too cool for the kinds of sharks that travel Florida waters in packs. And California doesn’t have the shallow shelf that can extend 100 meters on the East Coast; the shores tend to have steep drop-offs, Seigel said.

In California--as in Florida--attacks are uncommon.

There have been only about 100 shark attacks on the West Coast since the 1920s and eight deaths. In 1994, James Robinson, a sea urchin diver, was killed while treading water near his boat 70 miles from Ventura near San Miguel Island. In 1989, kayaker Tamara McAllister’s body washed up on the beach in Malibu with a 13-inch bite on her thigh.

Still, sightings of giants like the great whites occur relatively regularly. Last month, people on a dozen pleasure craft watched as two great whites tore into the carcass of a whale off Newport Beach.

Sam Markel, a clerk at Captain Hook’s Sportfishing in Oxnard, said that as an urchin diver, he has seen great whites and blues and makos, sometimes up close.

“I’ve had to poke at them,” he said. “I compare them to rattlesnakes. You never want to turn your back on them.”