Posted on 07/05/2014 8:41:21 PM PDT by wonkowasright
A 7-foot-long shark attacked a swimmer Saturday at Manhattan Beach, causing serious injury and prompting authorities to use helicopters and boats to evacuate throngs of people taking to the water on a busy 4th of July holiday weekend.
The incident happened about 9:30 Saturday morning, said photographer Eric Hartman, who saw the victim carried from a lifeguard vehicle on a backboard into an ambulance near the first lifeguard station south of the Manhattan Pier.
(Excerpt) Read more at culvercity.patch.com ...
Juvenile if it was.
I’m pretty sure this is in California, not NY.
Oh, so they don’t speak English, then. Nevermind.
Sharks should be killed on sight. Think of how much more seafood would be available. While we’re at it, shoot the seals that swim up the Columbian River to the Bonneville dam to eat endangered salmon.
Way back when I used to fly helicopters, occasionally along the beach, I was amazed at the number of sharks you could see in fairly close to the beach.
At least in Florida.
Brought in by tornadoes.
There are sharks in the ocean, it’s not some sort of freak occurrence. Here in NC it’s not at all unusual to see hammerheads and other, smaller sharks fifty yards away from surfers when looking down from a pier. The sharks are just beyond the breakers.
A strong suggestion would be to stay well away from fishing piers when swimming or surfing. Stay well away from people surf fishing, too, and not just because of the lines and the hooks. Ocean swimming in low light and at night is more dangerous as well.
My wife and I took a aerial tour of Cape Cod last fall, and I took this picture. That is a lot of meat for a carnivore.
Large prey draws large carnivores. Great Whites tend to inhabit colder water. They’re seen occasionally in the Atlantic in states below where the Gulf Stream veers off, but it’s somewhat unusual. We have plenty enough other varieties of shark, though. None quite as fearsome to contemplate. I’d hate to come face to face with any of them in their habitat. A hammerhead would be especially alarming.
When I lived in Subic Bay as a kid, we used to go down to the beach at night, and they had a water ski raft about 50 yards off the beach.
I remember the water it was anchored in being about 15-20 feet deep.
We used to swim out to that thing and swim all around it, horse playing, throwing each other off, racing to see who could swim to the bottom and back the fastest.
Never even gave a thought to sharks. Not once.
Before anyone misinterprets that...it wasn’t bravado or anything like that. We were just too stupid to even think of it, so caught up were we in the fun of it.
Me and a select few friends spent all of our time in the water. We would bring our snorkeling gear to school, and when done, bolt on the busses down to the beach. On weekends, our families often went, and when they didn’t, we did.
We spent so much time in the ocean that we felt completely comfortable in it.
I shouldn’t admit it, but it is true: when I saw “Jaws”, it changed a lot for me. I thought back to all those hours I spent at night with friends swimming in those tropical waters, and it made me shudder.
I didn’t shudder because of the danger, because I can’t really gauge just how dangerous that is or was, but...I shudder more at the mere obliviousness of my twelve year-old self in retrospect.
Hammerheads are just damned creepy looking. Freaks of nature.
And those hammerheads can get damn big. What is the record for one of those, 18 feet or something?
Ugh.
Bummer. I love going to Manhattan Beach. Planning to be there in August. Gotta get rid of those sharks by then.
He came like everyone else to NY State... For a free meal.
There are old family friends who live not far from Beaufort, NC, they’ve been in and around the ocean for generation after generation, have a Grady-White fishing boat that they take out to the Gulf Stream. They always told us we wouldn’t be in there if we knew what was swimming around our feet.
I still went. Only had two scares in going on almost five decades. Once as a child on Oak Island, NC. We arrived a week after a hurricane had blown through, new sandbars off the beach. People were finding tremendous conch shells out on those sandbars, about a hundred yards out. My dad and I started out there, paddling along on one of those renting inflatable rafts. About halfway, we heard people yelling and lifeguard’s whistles. At almost the same time, three large dark forms swam just below us. Scary feeling. Didn’t know whether to freeze or swim like mad. If I could have jumped up and walked on water I would have, lol. Turned out to be stingrays, trapped between the beach and the sandbars.
Other time, a dolphin leapt out of the water and smacked down not ten feet away from me, this was more recent. I was on Hatteras Island, NC. If you see smaller fish start jumping out of the water all around you, be very careful. Might not be a shark, could be blues or a barracuda, but they can still hurt you.
I don’t know about length but to my knowledge the biggest one ever caught was at Cape Lookout, NC in 1987. Over 3,100 lbs.
I grew up in Hermosa Beach in the 70's and have swam and surfed in Hermosa and Manhattan Beach waters countless times. No one ever saw or cared about sharks back then. Now they are sighted all the time, and as of today, attack people. It's well past time to cull their numbers, but instead, as you point out, the Leftists running CA pass laws protecting the objects of their eco-fetish insanity.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.