Posted on 03/28/2026 9:56:37 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The surfer who had a frightening run-in with a great white shark at Newport Beach said she didn’t realize it was the feared predator circling her surfboard until it was too late.
“Went to this beach my whole life with my friends,” Vivian Phongngo told KTLA. “I’ve never seen anything bigger than a stingray.”
She at first thought the beast was “a really nice fish” before believing it was actually a dolphin.“And then like after three seconds, I was like no, that’s a shark,” she told the outlet.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
I miss Gilda.
I don’t like the ocean. That may be why I live thousands of miles from any of them.
Yep. My trips salt water fishing have taught me that nearly everything that has survived the evolution in salt water can either bite, sting, or has poison tipped fins... One friend has a pair of Red Wing work boots with a permanent “bite mark” on the toe from a crab he reeled in here on the Texas coast. He is thankful it was a little cool that day and he didn’t wear his flip-flops...
Yuppers...
Good Points!
“ More people die by cows then by sharks every year.”
I’ll take my chances with bovines.
Death to the sharks !
Maybe sharks attack people because they want more cocaine. I surmise their addition stems from all of the cocaine laced human sewage waist water that gets emptied into the ocean off the coast of Kalifornia. Well, it could be.
Nobody but her saw a thing? Hmmmmmm
True, I’ll even reference Gary Larson on that fact.
Land shark? Reminds me of an old Outer Limits episode “THE INVISIBLE ENEMY”(1964) in which astronauts trapped on a planet keep disappearing when crossing a sandy area.
What a memory I still have at my age!!
.
Didn't Frank Herbert steal liberally from the episode for Dune?
I’d guess there’s more cocaine residue on any dollar bill in circulation than in a mouthful of sea water.
It’s a shared environment.
Surfers can be so freaking naive about the risks they run pursuing their sport. But at least this young lady got a nice photo spread in a major newspaper. She’s a minor celebrity now.
We can make the aquatic environment of the Great White Shark our environment, but most people such as swimmers, surfers and divers enter the environment of the Great White Shark without preparing it and making it "our environment".
We can make it our environment by supplying ourselves with "bang sticks" or other defensive weapons, or we could hunt and kill sharks if we had the will to do so.
But in the absence of those things, it IS their environment.
There is an illustrative exercise that is often practiced by teachers and lecturers who pose the following questions to their audience:
TEACHER: What is the fastest land animal on Earth?
STUDENT: The Cheetah!
TEACHER: Good answer. What is the highest flying creature on Earth?
STUDENT: The Vulture!!
TEACHER: Yes...they fly very high. What is the deepest diving mammal on Earth?
STUDENT: The Sperm Whale!
TEACHER: What is the fastest flying creature on Earth?
STUDENT: The Peregrine Falcon!
TEACHER: Uh huh. Very fast. What land animal can lift the greatest weight?
STUDENT: The Elephant!
TEACHER: Those are ALL excellent animals. But they are all wrong. The fastest land animal is man. The highest flying creature is man. The deepest diving mammal is man. The fastest flying creature is man. The land animal that can lift the most weight is man.
I have seen several cases where this kind of Socratic method was used on both kids and adults, and I always enjoy the reaction when they audience is told that man is all of those things.
There is ALWAYS a universal reaction of "Ohhh...that's RIGHT. I didn't think of it that way..."
So, I disagree with you in that respect in the context that it is "our environment, but I agree with the context of the teacher, that ANY environment is OUR environment...should we choose to make it so.
However, venturing into THEIR environment without preparing that, er..."battlefield" to make that environment OURS, we are simply soft, crunchy, and even tasty sojourners to THEIR environment!
😆
🦈
I saw that episode right before we went had a heavy nighttime snowfall.
As a little kid looking out the window at that porch light illuminated endless expanse of sparkling snow, I said Nope!
( thanks for resurrecting that particular childhood trauma)
😳
I can tell you’ve never been shark fishing.
They hit hard and they pull long.
You should try it.
Sharks don’t have the ability to leave their environment and catch me.
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