A Bay Area kayak fisherman became the one that got away on Saturday after being knocked off his sit-on-top boat by a great white shark.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that 45-year-old Adam Coca was angling from his yellow Ocean Kayak Prowler in about 30-feet of water in an area on the San Mateo coast known as the “Red Triangle” when the shark emerged to bring some irony into the fisherman’s life.
“I felt it hit the nose of my boat from below, like ‘boom! Kaboom!’ then it flipped the boat over. I was halfway in the water, basically an anchor point as the shark chewed my boat and pushed. We must have done three or four full circles like that.” said Coca, who managed to scramble onto the stern of the overturned 13-foot boat while the shark gnawed on the nose.
“I held onto my boat and looked right into its eye,” Coca said. “The shark was at least as long as my boat.”
At the moment Coca was locking eyes with the beast, things got frantic. The great white had become tangled in Coca’s paddle leash. Distracted by the flailing paddle, it lashed out with teeth and presumably rage until it severed the leash and disappeared into the depths.
Despite several bite-induced holes on the bottom of the boat, which were later measured by authorities to be 18 inches at the widest portion of the arc, Coca was able to paddle to shore.
For their story about the incident, the San Jose Mercury News interviewed Santa Cruz shark expert Sean Van Sommeran from the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation.
“It’s a matter of acclimation,” Van Sommeran said. “Just like the fly fishermen have gotten used to fishing rivers 10 feet from the bears, we have to get used to being in their (shark) territory.”
According to Van Sommeran, “safety while in the ocean is a matter of familiarity and possessing some situational awareness.”
[Via: San Jose Mercury News], [Photo Via: Hermanus Backpackers]
so freakishly crazy.
THAT is why i’m good on land. (: