Face the shark, don’t turn your back.
Avoid splashing frantically in fear.
And if it gets close to you and acts aggressively, punch it in the nose or grab it in the gills.
Yes, we know the ocean is the shark’s home. But with experts saying conditions are ripe for a “sharky summer” off Southern California’s coast, and with more of the sharp-toothed predators hanging out and co-mingling with ocean users, even closing a few local beaches in recent months, people may wonder what to do if they happen to come across a shark out in the ocean.
“The only way we’re going to completely stop people from getting bitten is to prevent people from going in the water,” said Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab Director Chris Lowe. “And nobody wants that.”
Maria Korcsmaros knows too well the risks of ocean swimming in the shark’s habitat, having survived a great white shark attack a decade ago that nearly took her life.
To mark the 10-year milestone, she was joined by supporters on Friday, May 29, to swim the waters off Corona del Mar where the 10-foot juvenile took a near-fatal bite into her body.
“It’s an honor that I can still swim out there,” Korcsmaros said. “You don’t want fear to take over something you love and something you want to do. For me, it’s therapy, as well as showing other people that even though it happened to me, I’m still willing to go out and enjoy the ocean and the environment.”
But knowledge is safety, and Lowe offers some shark safety tips so people are informed and prepared as they hit the beach.
“It is a wild place,” Lowe said. “It is not Disneyland.”
Tips on staying safe
Your chances of being bitten are statistically higher if you’re by yourself than if you’re in a group.
“Swim in a group, surf in a group,” Lowe said. “If you’re off by yourself, then you might increase the chances of a shark mistaking you for food.”
It’s unknown exactly why sharks bite people, but it’s safe to say there are two categories: either they mistake a person for food or they are defending their territory.
If you’re in a shark’s personal space and it feels threatened, and you are by yourself, it is more likely to come in and give you a little bite, saying “back off,” than if you are in a group, Lowe said.
New data also indicates that sharks are probably most actively feeding during dawn and dusk, so it may be best to not be in the water during those hours, especially by yourself, he said.
“Light levels are worse (then), sharks might have a higher probability of not seeing as well and therefore make a mistake,” he said.
It’s also best to stay out of murky or red tide water, Lowe said, noting that two swimmers bitten off Del Mar in recent years were out in those conditions.
“Murky water increases your chances of maybe startling a shark and getting bitten,” he said.
OK, so you’ve tried your best to avoid sharks, but still come across one in the ocean. What now?
You don’t have to be afraid, he said. But you should always keep your eye on the shark.
“Let the shark know you see it. So, if you’re in the water and you’re swimming and you see the shark, track the shark,” he said. “Let the shark know you’re following it, move your body, move your head. They know where your eyes are. If you’re on a surfboard, turn your surfboard towards the shark. All those things let the shark know it’s been seen.”
If you lose track of it, the first place you should always look is behind you, he said. “That’s just the standard predator behavior for safely investigating something.”
And if you don’t see it, keep doing what you’re doing and stay calm, he said.
“There’s no reason to freak out,” he said. “Based on all the behaviors we’ve seen, there’s people swimming who don’t even know the sharks are there.”
If the shark is acting aggressively — if it is coming in close, then veering off and coming back — and it gets close enough, that’s when you should punch it.
“The nose is the best,” Lowe said. “There are good places to just kind of let the shark know it’s getting too close to something that’s going to fight back.
“If the shark bites you, you definitely want to hit it,” he added. “You want to fight back. You want to hit in the eyes, you want to hit in the nose, you want to stick your hands in its gills. All those places are sensitive places, and they will get the shark to release.”
OK, so you’ve been bitten and punched the shark in the nose and it let go. Now what?
Always know your surroundings. Korcsmaros was saved by lifeguards in a boat nearby, calling out for help instead of trying to make it to shore and bleeding out.
Swimmer Leeanne Ericson, bitten a year later off San Onofre, was lucky to have people who knew first aid nearby, and strangers on the beach quickly called 911 for help. A helicopter came and swooped her up to a trauma center within 40 minutes.
The No. 1 job for people who come across a shark bite victim is to stop the bleeding by applying pressure.
“You want to apply pressure to try to stop bleeding as quickly as possible because once somebody goes into shock, the chances of them surviving go down,” Lowe said.
If the injury is on the arms or legs, you can apply a tourniquet using a T-shirt or belt, but surf leashes aren’t the best because you want something that is about an inch wide so it can be tight.
Get a person on a surfboard or towel, try not to drag them through the surf and sand.
“Sand in the wounds is really bad,” Lowe said. “It takes hours and hours on the operating table to remove sand. And a single grain of sand can have bacteria that can cause infection.”
So now that we’ve gone through all the what-ifs and safety tips, should people be scared to go to the beach?
“I don’t think so,” Lowe said. “I think they should definitely do their homework, that there could be more sharks out there … your safety is not guaranteed. You’re the one who has to make the decision on whether you feel comfortable.”
Lessons learned
This year is not the first time lukewarm waters have lured the apex predators to the region. A decade ago, a marine heatwave dubbed the “Blob” and an El Niño weather pattern had created warmer waters so pleasant that great white sharks hung out much longer than usual — conditions experts are forecasting will repeat this summer.
Groups of juvenile sharks were spotted off South Bay, Long Beach, Huntington Beach and San Clemente during that initial shark surge, hanging out for months at a time.
The juveniles like warm water and lots of food, and Orange County is ripe with stingray snacks. Also, Baja-born sharks don’t like waters too warm, so they head north when temperatures there heat up to more than 82 degrees, Lowe said.
Then, a handful of people suffered shark bites, fueling fear.
“Bites are rare,” Lowe said, “and I think we just didn’t know anything about white sharks, what they did, or their behavior. We had very little information about them.”
The shark bites dominated news headlines as researchers tried to figure out what was happening and how best to arm the public with information.
In 2018, the state gave a $3.75 million grant so Shark Lab researchers could learn more and equip lifeguards with tools to report and respond to shark attacks.
In the past decade, the Shark Lab has set out buoys that ping when a tagged shark gets within 300 feet, helping them better learn about their movements. Lifeguards get texts when a tagged shark is nearby, so they can make informed decisions on whether or not it’s a threat to the public.
The Shark Lab also worked with lifeguards to come up with an algorithm on when they should close a beach following a sighting, based on the size of the shark and its behavior — is it acting aggressively or just cruising by?
Each summer, the lab also deploys “Shark Shacks” along the coast to educate the public on sharks.
But with the funds from the original state bill depleted, the Shark Lab will have to start laying people off in August, Lowe said.
A bill making its way through the state legislature asks for $1.7 million in funding; authored by Sen. Tony Strickland, it would allow the Shark Lab to continue research and public outreach and expand efforts to Monterey, where a swimmer was just killed by a shark in December.
“We’re asking people to write letters of support, because that would keep us going at least for another two years,” Lowe said.
One of the most valuable tools that changed the way we look at sharks: the drone.
A decade ago, there weren’t many drones flying around, with very few people understanding how to use them. Shark Lab researchers and lifeguards would have to take expensive helicopter flights to spot sharks off the coast.
But drones make it easier to document sharks, both to show where they are hanging out and their behaviors, and have given an insider’s look into how they act around humans.
And it turns out, they aren’t really all that interested in us.
“Hundreds of encounters were happening without incident,” Lowe said of what the drones were documenting. “How do we explain the fact that people aren’t being bitten every day?”
The information was revolutionary, he said, the first time anyone had quantified how often sharks were around people.
“The perception was, if they are nearby, they are going to bite,” he said. “For the first time, we had documentation that wasn’t true.”
So far this year, shark aggregations have been popping up in Los Angeles County near Will Rogers State Beach and Santa Barbara, Lowe said.
There’s been little activity off Orange County, and San Diego has been quiet, he said.
There may be different types of sharks showing up, such as tiger, bull sharks and smooth hammerheads, Lowe said.
“These are species that we are not used to, they follow the warm water up,” he said. “So these are things that people in Southern California just aren’t used to, but we want to prepare them for what’s potentially coming.”
Celebrating survival
Korcsmaros was joined on her 10th anniversary swim by Steve Robles, a Belmont Shores swimmer who was bitten by a shark 12 years ago off Manhattan Beach Pier, as well as friends and lifeguards who came out to support.
“Just go forward and face your fears, head on. Just overcome it,” said Robles.
A few years ago did his own 15-mile swim off the Channel Islands, he said. “That was, for me, kind of to prove to myself: I can still do this.”
He, too, has learned much about sharks following his attack.
“There’s sharks everywhere,” he said. “You have to understand shark behavior. They aren’t after us. We’re not part of their menu.”
Instead of fearing sharks, Korcsmaros joined forces with Shark Stewards, a nonprofit that protects and educates the public about shark species, often joining public speaking engagements, with a large one planned on Sept. 10 at the Sports Basement in Long Beach.
She often tells people: Just because it happened to me, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you.
And if it does, stay calm.
“If I had panicked and swam to shore or did something different, if I hadn’t raised my arm and called for help, screamed out loud, they may not have noticed me, come over and checked on me,” she said.
Korcsmaros believes the shark misidentified her as prey.
“They don’t have a knife and fork; they have teeth,” she said. “They have to investigate, bite and figure it out.”
The biggest advice: Always be aware of where you are swimming and what’s around you.
“If you see a shark, back away and get out of the water and tell a lifeguard,” Korcsmaros said. “And don’t swim alone.”