E's Surf Report

hey rza: just saw your post from last night, thanks. sorry to hear what's happening in your building. one of my best friends is a tenant attorney. i don't know if he's represented anyone in your situation but he'll be a good resource. let me know if you want me to check with him on your behalf.

Thanks to whoever recommended the book "deep survival". It is very good.

loon
Did all the flats in your new building go already?

Working in L.A. this week.

DP at El Porto this morning saw some sparse, but occasionally nice south energy. Looks like there is much more punch in this south swell than was predicted. The set waves had some steep drops, plenty of juice, about head high on the biggest ones. Friendly crew in the water, as well.

Stoked.

Life is good.

Tomorrow will be better. Hope the niceness crew scores back in SF this weekend.

Ah, Olas....

Today, not as good as earlier in the week but it was nice to head out to a completely empty spot. I have surfed the same spot 4 times this week and have yet to be disappointed. Today was the biggest but also the most difficult waves to get into. A big of the onshore funk as the waves wouldn't really break at the same spot. A few sets were in the OH+ range but really soft still. Most were head high.

I waited 20 minutes before my 1st ride. Then another 15 before my 2nd. About the time I was considering heading in and calling a session, I got in a really good pocket and ripped off 6 waves in about 15 minutes. Stoked!!! Stayed out for another 45 minutes and got a good number of waves.

Anyway, it was pretty fun out there. Skies were strangely dark and funky. Sun couldn't bust out. Seals playing with each other. Surfer bailing his board instead of taking it with him on the duck dives. Tough to paddle around.

Donuts....

Also, there is a really sweet article in this weeks Sports Illustrated. I would post the link but you have to subscribe to view it. Basically, it is excerpted from this book about shark nesting/mating/migration/feeding at the Farallons:

Check some content:
- Even the seasonal shark population at the Farallones is a wild guess: anywhere from 30 to 100.

Not as many as I thought roaming the waters....

- One morning Peter was sitting on the front steps of the house, eyeing a perfect eight-foot barrel wave that rolled along an area known as Shark Alley. That surf, unsurprisingly, had never been ridden. Not for lack of surfboards, though. There was a bunch of them in the biologists' supply shed; Scot used the boards as decoys to lure sharks to the surface for photo I.D.'s. To a shark, apparently, a six-foot swallowtail does a near perfect imitation of a seal. When retrieved, the decoys were often missing hubcap-sized chunks from their sides, and surfers had taken to sending Scot their castoffs, hoping to repossess them after the sharks had taken a bite.

Don't ride 6'0'' swallowtails at the beach, PLEASE....

- According to Scot and Peter, the Queen Annihilator of Surfboards was a shark named Stumpy. Stumpy was 19 feet long and weighed 5,000 pounds, and when she was in residence, she ruled the Farallones. "She was the only shark that I think understood what we were trying to do," Peter recalled, "and she didn't care for it. When Scot was first putting out the decoys, Stumpy would just come up and destroy them, more because she didn't like them than because she was fooled by their silhouettes."

- "Shark approaching." The first thing I noticed about the shark was its immense girth. I had known that a shark might be as long as the Whaler, but I didn't expect it to be as wide too. A 20-foot shark is eight feet wide and six feet deep. That's wider than Yao Ming is tall. Another thing about white sharks: They're black. Not inky black like orcas but a mottled charcoal that takes on a luminous sheen below the water's surface. Only their undersides are white. This two-color scheme means that from below great white sharks look as flimsy as ghosts, while from above they possess the solidity of lead.

Let's review: 20 ft x 8 ft x 6 ft. Lay in your bed tonight and look at your bedroom walls. How far apart are they? How tall are you laying down? Now visualize how big these fuckers are......

Sorry for the long-ass post but I couldn't post the article.

glad u guys got some. out late last night and out late tonight to see fantomas at the filmore! had to sleep in.

surf tomorrow 4 sure.

e, we gotta meet up 4 a jam this weekend. i just bought a new acoustic.

i heard people were giving these scientists shit for using surf boards as shark decoys. the question is does it train them to attack surfboards or teach them that surfboards aren't food?

it would be tough to avoid that perfect 8 ft barrel, sharks or no sharks.

loon, that sounds good. it's hard to know exactly how much leverage we have to ask for a nice chunk of change. any advice would be very helpful. my email is rzadigi at yahoo
this morning there was a great show about real estate on KQED's Forum that may interest you. it should be available later today or tomorrow as a stream on their site. good luck with buying your place...that is a major, major undertaking.

Like yesterday, plenty of juice in the water, winds not too bad, but only eh rides for me. Outside too much waiting; inside too random. Nice warm water, though.

a shot in the dark but i'm looking for extra tix to the Fantomas show tonight. let me know if ya got one. Would love to see them, along with nor-cal math-rock band Hella.

couldn't find my groove today. a few decent ones, but lots of waiting and paddling back-and-forth chasing tasty looking peaks north and south that disappeared once i got to where they were breaking. wave-repellent(TM) in full effect for me today. still...decent way to start a Friday.

http://64.78.63.45/res05/trestles_qs05/livevideo.asp

good diversion from work today....2ft south pushin....blakestah...whats the breakdown of how long this little suth will last or will the west/nw kill what will arrive...I like combo swells myself...

Hella rock!!!

I used to drag for Halibut out in the shipping lane that runs east/west past the Farallones.There is a nice stretch of good bottom out there that does not destroy nets. We would fish until we were too tired, and then anchor or grab the mooring ball right at the south end of the big island. (South Farallone? Dont remember) Point is,after spending time out there, no wave would get me in the water. Period. I would also go out there with the "twins" from El Granada. Maybe some of you guys know them . They were ab diving commercially out there when it ws still legal. I would just sit on the boat in disbelief that they were getting in the water. I fully expected a disaster to occur, which thank god never did. Another time we were urchin diving off Bodega Head. My wife was out on the dive boat for the first time. We were burning a fatty getting our gear together on the anchor, when a 15 foot plus white just unloaded on a Stellar bull lion. The bull must have been 1000 lbs plus. It was just mind blowing. We watched in total awe for the five minutes or so it to whitey to finish the job. Needless to say, we just pulled the hook and went home. My wife was just completely bummed out. That was a first step that took me to this desk job.Saw a surfer get nailed five feet from me up north. It is all on film. They showed it on worlds most dangerous animals. But that is another story...

jeez!

well.. it's a good thing there aren't any sharks around here!

i hate you kaiser. i hate you all. i am never reading this blog again. there are no sharks!

My future father in law also used to dive off the faralons for abs using tanks. He once got chased by a a few juvie great whites. Apparetnly he hid in the rocks till they left him alone.

He has may other stories as well, including having to pull a buddy to shore who got his leg bit off at Pescadero while they were both Ab diving. His buddy lived.

He is a firm believer that its not the shark you see that gets you, its the other one lurking behind you.... (or under you - steamwand).. hahahahahaaaa (evil laugh :)

we had a little secret ab diving/eel hunting zone in the shallow reefs south of pigeon point years ago. one day after few hours in the water, game bags full, literally just stepping onto the shore. my buddy screams and points as we watch 2 fins from opposite directions enter the little cove we'd just got out of and circle around looking for......gulp....US! That was the last time I ever went ab diving. i told my parents if they wanted abalone again, they could buy it. the water was only about 6-8 deep too........

e - Sensorship stuff aside ...you need to regulate this shark thread. Please ...we're beggin you.

rza - i'll check with my friend & send you an email. thanks for the well-wishes. we are already hearing about formidable competition so we need + vibes from wherever we can get em.

mjs - we have heard from several peoiple but we are still definitely looking for partners. more info here:
http://www.craigslist.org/sfc/rfs/70833132.html

"We were burning a fatty getting our gear together on the anchor, when a 15 foot plus white just unloaded on a Stellar bull lion. The bull must have been 1000 lbs plus. It was just mind blowing."

- Maybe that would cure my munchies.....

- I have seen a fin in the water and I am not a big fan of it! But, I would love to be sitting on a boat watching them go about their biz.

Anyone ever hear of an attack at OB? I never have, although I know they are out there.

hey web, is there web access to the footage of which you speak?

Where are the jovial near weekend posts? Where do you consider the most shark infested but surfed areas? Australia? South Africa? OB?

No big sharks in Alameda. But they have facinated me my whole life. Now after an incident that happened list year I always have them in my head. Mostely the last two years friends and I have tried to only hit lesser surfed spots on week days( ...# mile, Montara, Gr,,, whalebeaach, and bakers, and every little good bar in half moon bay.) Last June, One day after declining to surf north Santa Cruze because of wind, we got in the water in glassy four foot surf at the fist beach north of Pigion Point. After about a half hour I yelled to my friend to go closer into the shore and near the peak. As I looked back at an incoming set, out of the corner of my eye I saw a Three and a half foot tall fin fifteen feet behind my bro who had his back turned on it. With no hesitationI yelled ," Jeremy Paddle There's A Shark!!!" He half turned to look and dropped and halled ass to the beach. I paddled in ten seconds later as the fin submerged. After standing in waste deep water and not seeing the lurky for 20 minutes I caught one wave and we left . That shit has now got me tweeking out with every seal or dolhpin I see. At least I can surf Alameda and not worry about lurkies.Yeaaay!

hey pez...I confess, I missed this south call. Went back to find it on QuikSCAT - sure enough, there, on the 22nd and 23rd....My bad. Anyway, it was not that big a storm, and not that long-lived. It got lucky on the winds en route, and saw much less atttenuation than normal. SoCal is already at 4 ft 17 sec...we're about 12 hours and 0.5 ft behind.

In any case, look for decent swell 2, maybe 3 days tops. The angle is also between 180 and 190 deg, so a lot of the Bay Area south spots will not pull it in. If you want to catch it I would go to an appropriate place this arvo or tomorrow.

However, there are two other small souths coming, so there's a good chance at most south swell spots over the next 4-5 days. These next ones are in the 190-205 range, which is better exposure for us. Keep an eye on the SoCal buoys, they are about 12 hours ahead of us.

Happy happy joy joy the weekend is coming.

What, has it been getting too crowded for y'all out there again?

bird, dont know, i've never looked. I never even watched the video, my friends did. If you typed in "shark attack" on the worlds most dangerous animals tv show web site, it may be there. It was in '85 or '86. Far NorCal.

I think South Oz is as sharky as it gets.

Whoa Web that is pretty intense.

I think us surfers are all mordidly obsessed w/ sharks. The landlord is just part of the game up here, can't really avoid it. Attacks at Stinson, Headlands, Baker, Lindy, Montara... etc.
- sightings almost everywhere else.

I talked to Eric Larson some years ago- Pretty crazy story- out in Davenport- Got nailed almost immediately. He said he didn't even know what hit him- until he was already 15 feet under being released. There was a doctor and a marathon runner (who went for help) out surfing so that was key. He needed like 600 stiches- but went out surfing a month later.

I think the GW centers are here/ Farallones Guadalupe island, Baja and Gansbaai, South Africa I think the Cactus area of Australia is pretty bad too.

I know some people who'e been cage diving in SA and Baja- looks pretty intense- would like to check it out one day!

B-Stah,
I would like to order a strong south for the first week of July. I'll be staying at Maalaea Bay in Maui and it only works on a good south. Please put that in your calendar. Thanks in advance.

We are in one of the world's hottest Great White shark territories.

However, there are far more attacks from Bull Sharks (Zambezis in South Afrika). These are the ones that hit people in Florida every year around Labor Day...smaller, meaner, but less powerful.

Hawaiian Attacks are another type of shark, can't remember now, either Mako or Tiger.

Tiger Sharks are the most feared in Hawaii.

That would be Tiger. Mako have very small mouths (relatively), but are agressive. Lots of Makos way offshore in swordfish grounds. They bite the same longline gear a swordfish does.

Kaiser- is it time to break this thread with one of your special posts that is has a much more welcome bite?

A Tiger shark will cause WAY more damage than a great white. Believe it or not, white sharks have the same biting pressure as humans. They just have bigger mouths and MUCH sharper teeth. A Tiger on the other hand has close to 1000 lbs of pressure, and its teeth do a twirly zig-zag type patter, creating a sawing moition when biting down. Tiger sharks are also way more aggresive, and usually don't let go as white sharks do. The reason people do survive Tiger shark attacks is due to the fact that their limbs are ripped off, not the shark letting go. White sharks have also been tracked to Hawaii (deep waters). Surfers aren't safe anyway.. Even the land sharks will get you.

really Ian? the same as a human? That is pretty amazing. Sort of comforting. Now I will just say to myself "well, it cant bite any harder than I can".

Here's a land shark for ya
The World's tallest woman 7 foot 4 inches
From Holland!

Pool Shark! Jackie Gleason circa 1961 The Hustler

just one more thing to love about that country!!

I am a sicko cause I'd hit that!!!

Girl don't need no big shoes.

nothing sick about it. Big girls need lovin too.

She pretty hot for weighing 320!

Tiger sharks mainly feed on sea turtles, thus the extreme bite pressure to chomp through the shell...

From my (half-assed internet) research on it, no surfer has been attacked by a shark from the Golden Gate then the first attack is at Montara, with another attack right near it at Maverick's. However, there was a diver hit at Linda Mar in 1993 (survived), and a swimmer killed at Baker Beach in 1959. I know odds are I'm going to drown or take a fin to the skull before I get eaten by a shark, but I still like to be on the shoreward side of any sealions I see.

funniest thing Ive heard all day...

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=715583

dennis i hope you catch that train on maui.
it's unforgettable when it's firing.

I never saw a shark in the water until a few years ago while snorkling in north Queensland. I caught a glimpse of a smallish reef shark and I took off after it to get a better look, but it jetted off into the gloom.
I remember a dead 8-10 foot hammerhead washing up on the beach when I was a kid on Coronado (might have been an El Nino year) - but that didn't keep any of us out of the water.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of coming anywhere near a Great White, a Tiger, a Brownie, or any other aggressive shark scares the SHIT out of me - I just don't have any experience with 'em. But then again, maybe we have all come closer than we realize. I'm sure they're swimming under us more often than we'd like to think. More than once I've been surfing in some lonely, sketchy spot and have become completely overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of DREAD and RACED for the shore in an irrational near panic. Man, gives me the shivers to think of it. Just the same, I'll be out there again - probably within the next hour or so. Happy Friday!

I found a sign on the beach that says, " sharks can swim at 1 yrd/sec " which I store in the hall next to the surfboards. It's an oddly comforting thought. Aside from avoiding the more blatant chomping grounds, if a shark wants to nail me out of the blue there's really nothing I can do about it, so why worry? It's my fault for swimming in shark land. Of course if I actually saw a shark in the water I'd wet my pants.

my downstairs neighbor runs a successful shark diving business. Used to do Farallons, now mainly down south. If anyone has a hankering for cage diving, I would recommend his business over anyone else.

Thanks 3. Have you been there and done that? With break names like Impossibles and Freight trains, you gotta think it's something to behold on a good day. I'm pumped thinking about it.

That south is pumpin tresseles....anybody have space for dp trip to waddel in the morning...drop me an email.....wathcin frigging dudes rip treseles is driving me nuts!!!

good Billy Martin (drummer in MMW) interview

Got cruised by a juvie 7-footer (but girthy!) at 4Mile in 2001, was way outside at the edge of the reef / 1st peak. Me + 1 longboarder watch as the shark comes up into the humping set wave right at us, so it's actually slightly "above" us and you can see it's entire body in the wave. It kicked out about 15 feet away from us with an imperceptible flick of the tail, speeding off with ferocious velocity. I immediately paddled into Chicken Peak and told my friends. The sheer speed of it -- I understand now that you are dead if it wants you dead. You can never outswim a white shark.

Another time, 1999 at Davenport Landing, me + 1 buddy alone surfing fun peaks, then two seals come skipping like stones across the water, top speed toward the beach. They swam almost directly into us, then around us. They could not care less what was in their way, they were motoring really hard. We KNEW what must have been behind them and got the hint, immediately left the water. That place is MO spooky.

Pay attention to the other animals, they'll telegraph a shark's presence for you.

-4 Love Of Surfing (4LOS)

Kaiser, could you cut and paste that shark article here? loved the snippets. . .

No more shark talk. It's the unspoken taboo subject. I'm more concerned with the stink eyed aggros who try and ruin our stoke than jabberjaw. Still, though now that you guys got me thinking, there are some real sharky spots which spook me out. Thats why I try and not think about them. stop the thread now!

SWEET! just when i was crying in my bong about
being on the DL, a whole slough of tooth stories.

nice.
today is day 7 of 15. which feels like dec. 17th to a 5 year old.

have an awesome weekend.
yo TRAUT! call me re; tickets....

I can post it but it is really long......

post it Kaiser need to kill 1.5 hrs

wish i was going to the show tonight!!

Soccer anyone?

Ok, don't kill the copy and paster....

The killing took place at dawn, and as usual it was a decapitation, accomplished by a single vicious swipe. Blood geysered into the air and created a vivid slick that stood out on the water like the work of a violent abstract painter. Five hundred yards away, outside a lighthouse on the highest peak of Southeast Farallon Island, a man watched through a telescope. First he noticed the frenzy of gulls, and then he saw the blood. Grabbing his radio, he turned and began to run.

His transmission jolted awake the four other people on the island: "We've got an attack off Sugarloaf, big one, lotta blood." The house at the bottom of the hill echoed with the sounds of biologist Peter Pyle hurrying down the stairs, pulling on his knee-high rubber boots and slamming the old door behind him as he sprinted to the boat launch.

Peter and his colleague Scot Anderson, the voice on the radio, jumped into their 17-foot Boston Whaler. The boat, which rested on a bed of rubber tires beside a cliff, was attached to a crane that now lifted it into the air, swung it over the lip and lowered it 30 feet into the massive autumn swells of the Pacific. The Whaler rose and fell into troughs big enough to swallow it. Peter started the engine and powered 200 yards toward the birds, where the object of their attention floated in a cloud of blood: a quarter-ton elephant seal missing its head. The odor was dense and oily -- rancid Crisco mixed with seawater. "Oh, yeah," Peter said. "That's the smell of a shark attack."

The two men knew that below them a great white was orbiting and would soon be returning for its breakfast. It might be Betty or Mama or the Cadillac, one of the huge females that patrolled the east side of the island. These girls, all of them more than 17 feet long, were known as the Sisterhood. Or it might be a "smaller" male (13 or 14 feet), such as Spotty or T-Nose or the sneaky Cal Ripfin. These sharks were called the Rat Pack. At this time of year there were scores of great whites swimming close to the shore of Southeast Farallon as hapless seals were swept off the island at high tide and into the danger zone.

In any given year more than a thousand people will be injured by toilet bowl cleaning products or killed by cattle. Fewer than a dozen will be attacked by a great white shark. In this neighborhood, however, those odds do not count. At the Farallon Islands during September, October and November, your chances of meeting a great white face-to-face are better than 50-50, should you be crazy enough or unlucky enough to end up in the water.

Peter and Scot stood at the stern holding poles with video cameras on the end. There were several beats of the absolute silence you rarely got in life, eerie moments when time seemed to stop and even the birds were quiet. Then, 50 yards away, the ocean swirled into a boil.

The dorsal fin of myth and nightmare rose from below and came tunneling toward them like a U-boat, creating a sizable wake. The shark made a tight pass around the Whaler, pulling up just short of the stern. "He's coming up!" Peter yelled. The Whaler rocked. A huge triangular head rose out of the water and, with surprising delicacy, bit the back corner of the boat. Scot leaned closer and filmed. The shark's black eyes rolled; the men could see the scars all over its head, and its two-inch-long teeth backed by rows of spare two-inch-long teeth. Then, as quickly as it had come, the shark slipped beneath the surface, dived under the boat and reemerged next to the seal. As it snatched the carcass and shook it, bright orange blood burst from the sides of the great white's mouth. "It's Bitehead!" Scot said. He broke into a broad smile.

"Ah, Bitehead," Peter said, as if fondly greeting an acquaintance on the street. "We've known this shark for 10 years."

Every fall, one of the world's largest and densest congregations of great white sharks assembles in the waters surrounding the Farallones, a 211-acre archipelago of 10 islets 27 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. No one fully understands what this gathering represents -- why great whites, the ocean's most solitary hunters, come together in such close quarters. What's known is that the sharks remain at this location for about three months. And this: The same sharks always return to exactly the same spot, as Scot and Peter know after studying them for more than 15 years in the Farallon White Shark Project.

This annual reunion is at least partly about hunting. Despite strange items found in great whites' stomachs -- a cuckoo clock, a fur cape, license plates and lobster traps, a buffalo head, an entire reindeer and even a man dressed in a full suit of armor -- what these sharks really love to eat are seals. And the Farallones are loaded with seals: northern elephant seals, harbor seals, fur seals, all barking and bellowing, draped on the rocks like a blubbery carpet.

It wasn't always this way. The islands' seals, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, were hunted almost to extinction 150 years ago. Only after Southeast Farallon Island, the largest in the group, became a wildlife refuge in 1969 did the populations begin to recover. And as the seals returned, no one was happier to see them than the sharks. By the year 2000 Peter and Scot were logging almost 80 attacks per season. Still, even considering the allure of a seal smorgasbord, why did these particular sharks keep returning? And why were they clustered so tightly? No one had observed such behavior among great whites before.

Not that there's been much opportunity. The Farallones are the best place on earth to study great whites behaving naturally in the wild. The sharks there might cross paths with the occasional boatload of day-trippers from San Francisco, but they're subjected to none of the behavior-altering coercion that other top predators endure so that people can look at them from Winnebagos or tundra buggies or safari trucks. This is important because even though sharks have been around so long that they predate trees, great whites have remained among the most mysterious of creatures.

How long do they live? Unknown (but probably at least 30 years). Where do they mate, and when, and how often, and, for the matter, how? There are clues but no hard facts. Scot and Peter have discovered that while the males return annually, the females return only every other year, often with fresh bites on their heads. Are these wounds related to mating? Do the females spend the off years giving birth in warmer waters? And just how many great whites are there in the oceans? All of this is a mystery. Even the seasonal shark population at the Farallones is a wild guess: anywhere from 30 to 100.

Then, of course, there's the question of size: Exactly how big can great white sharks get? Again there is no straight answer. Because their skeletons are made of cartilage rather than bone, sharks have left virtually no fossil record aside from teeth. The largest great white to have been caught and measured was 21 feet long, but there have been credible reports of much larger specimens.

That is not surprising. Sharks are the heavyweight champions of evolution; they've been fine-tuning their act for hundreds of millions of years. They're resistant to infection, circulatory disease and, to a large extent, cancer. They heal rapidly from severe injuries such as lacerated corneas and deep gouges. Everything about them is stacked toward survival. From the moment baby whites are born, four feet long and fully formed, they are in pursuit of their first meal. From hundreds of yards away they can detect .005 microvolt electrical impulses given off by their prey's heartbeats.

Like the great white itself, the Farallon Islands are nearly perfect freaks of nature. Their ecology is a house of cards: an intricate construction of ocean and seals and birds and sharks, all in sublime balance. But in nature, complexity also means fragility. The islands are hollow in places and made of 89-million-year-old granite, much of which has gone rotten and crumbles at the touch. The Spanish word farallón means "rocky islet in the ocean" (the pronunciation of the plural, farallones, has been Anglicized to FAIR-a-lons), and some of the islands, like Middle Farallon, known locally as the Pimple, are little more than rocks protruding from the water. All 10 islets are part of the ragged edge of the continental shelf as it rears out of the Pacific before plunging two miles -- twice the depth of the Grand Canyon -- into darkness. Technically the Farallones are just an exotic neighborhood of San Francisco, lying as they do within the city limits, but few of the Bay Area's seven million residents are aware of the islands' existence.

This obscurity is understandable. The boat ride from the mainland -- a riot of turbulence and nausea -- can last more than six hours. No one lives year-round at the Farallones. Peter, Scot and a revolving handful of colleagues bunk in the only habitable building, a 120-year-old house on 65-acre Southeast Farallon that has stood up to lashings of the meanest weather the Pacific can dish out. Thirty-knot winds, blanketing fog and 15-foot seas are standard.

The islands jut from the Pacific like the fangs of a sea monster badly in need of dental work. Sailors referred to them as "the devil's teeth" in testament to both their appearance and the nautical dangers they posed. Even if a visitor is hardy enough to make the trip to the Farallones, upon arrival he cannot set foot aground -- the islands are a tightly supervised National Wildlife Refuge within a National Marine Sanctuary, and the only people allowed there by federal law are the biologists who monitor the sharks and other wildlife. In any case, there's nowhere to land a boat. The islands' perimeters are composed of sheer cliffs and treacherous hidden rocks. A quarter-million seabirds spend the year painting these rocks with guano, and the stench of ammonia will knock you back on your heels. Planes may not fly directly overhead. Boats are required to remain at least 300 feet offshore. And you sure as hell don't want to go in for a dip.

Just stepping onto Southeast Farallon is a white-knuckle affair requiring physical agility and no fear of heights. You must either be hoisted from a skiff by crane and then winched up a cliff on a metal disk the size of a manhole cover, or leap ashore from a bucking Zodiac and scramble up a rock face while hauling gear, making sure to time the waves just right so they don't pluck you off like lint and sweep you out to sea. All this takes place in a constricted area that allows the person steering the boat no room for error. To the right, waves and eddies boil over a narrow gulch fringed by toothy rocks. At left, the ocean explodes against granite outcroppings, sending sheets of spray into the air. Above: thousands of dive-bombing seagulls. Below: a ring of great white sharks.

When all these impediments are taken into account, there is really only one reason to visit the Farallon Islands: They are the spookiest, wildest place on earth.

One morning Peter was sitting on the front steps of the house, eyeing a perfect eight-foot barrel wave that rolled along an area known as Shark Alley. That surf, unsurprisingly, had never been ridden. Not for lack of surfboards, though. There was a bunch of them in the biologists' supply shed; Scot used the boards as decoys to lure sharks to the surface for photo I.D.'s. To a shark, apparently, a six-foot swallowtail does a near perfect imitation of a seal. When retrieved, the decoys were often missing hubcap-sized chunks from their sides, and surfers had taken to sending Scot their castoffs, hoping to repossess them after the sharks had taken a bite.

According to Scot and Peter, the Queen Annihilator of Surfboards was a shark named Stumpy. Stumpy was 19 feet long and weighed 5,000 pounds, and when she was in residence, she ruled the Farallones. "She was the only shark that I think understood what we were trying to do," Peter recalled, "and she didn't care for it. When Scot was first putting out the decoys, Stumpy would just come up and destroy them, more because she didn't like them than because she was fooled by their silhouettes."

Stumpy patrolled a swath of sea near the main boat-launching spot at East Landing. For prey, this was not an advisable route onto shore. "No seal gets by her," Peter said. And while other sharks would take 20 minutes or more to consume their kills, Stumpy could polish off a 500-pound elephant seal in three minutes flat. Though the distinctively cropped tail fin that earned Stumpy her name hadn't been spotted for several years, Scot and Peter still talked about her with awe. "Stumpy was a goddess," Peter said. One time, Scot rigged a video camera under a surfboard to determine the angle from which the sharks attacked. He set the board adrift off East Landing. Right on cue Stumpy went at it with everything she had. The resulting footage was stunning, all teeth and whitewater and smashing noises that brought to mind a subaquatic train wreck. It was the first time anyone had successfully filmed a great white shark underwater in California.

Now Scot suddenly stood up. "There's something going on down there," he said, pointing toward the wave. Even without binoculars I could see the black dorsal fin. It carved a few tight circles, like a figure skater practicing, and disappeared into the surf. We decided to launch the Whaler and take a look.

Motoring into Mirounga Bay, we cut the engine about 300 yards from shore. Scot tied the surfboard to a fishing line and tossed it off the back. We drifted in silence. The only noises were the wind chuffing by and the water lightly slapping the side of the boat. I kept my eyes on the surfboard.

"Shark approaching." Peter said this softly. A shark's presence is always announced by a boil, the flat surface pattern made by its powerful tail fin right before it breaks the surface. In the next second the shark appeared, knifing toward the boat. Suddenly the Whaler felt ridiculously small.

The first thing I noticed about the shark was its immense girth. I had known that a shark might be as long as the Whaler, but I didn't expect it to be as wide too. A 20-foot shark is eight feet wide and six feet deep. That's wider than Yao Ming is tall. Another thing about white sharks: They're black. Not inky black like orcas but a mottled charcoal that takes on a luminous sheen below the water's surface. Only their undersides are white. This two-color scheme means that from below great white sharks look as flimsy as ghosts, while from above they possess the solidity of lead.

This particular shark, which looked to be about 15 feet long, glided under us, then came to the surface and bumped the back of the boat. Its head was scribbled with black scars that appeared to have come from deep punctures, as though someone had played tic-tac-toe there with an ice pick. Each shark has a signature set of divots, spots, scars and scratches, or chinks taken out of its fin, but this one looked as if it had lost a knife fight. I felt a very old part of my brain, the part that served us so well back on the veld, snap to attention. As the shark cruised around us, though, it seemed as unthreatening as a cocker spaniel looking for scraps under the dinner table. "They have split personalities," Scot said. "When they're in attack mode, their dispositions change." He explained that the shark was merely investigating us. Being a savvy hunter, it wasn't about to launch itself full tilt at something that might hurt it. This mode of behavior is the reason that many people who encounter great whites in the water will live.

Now there were three sharks circling us. They seemed -- as unlikely as it sounds -- almost gentle. They kept their distance from one another but were all working from the same playbook, looping from every possible angle, swimming about six feet below the surface so their fins stayed submerged, trying to figure out whether the Whaler represented food. They were in no hurry. They dived beneath the Whaler, bumped it, slapped it with their tails.

Looking over the side, I came face-to-face with a shark arrowing straight up from below; this was how they rushed their prey. I could see its eyes and its crooked, fiendish smile. "Oh, my God!" I said, lunging back. "White sharks have this great grin on their faces when they're coming right at you," Peter said. "It's cute."

Then, off the bow, I saw a tail that dwarfed the others'. The shark was so enormous that even with its back end next to the boat, I couldn't make out its front half. This great white had a different aura. It could only be a Sister. Her tail gleamed, and it bore absolutely no scars. She swam with power and unlikely grace, a Sherman tank making dressage moves. As she vanished into the depths, another shark emerged from the darkness, making several quick runs under the Whaler. Scot leaned over the edge to get a better look. "Hey, that's Cuttail!" he shouted. Cuttail was a Rat Packer, back at the Farallones for the 13th consecutive year.

The sharks kept coming and coming. At least five visited the boat. Even when great whites are in quiet reconnaissance mode, you can feel their approach -- a phenomenon acknowledged by researchers, surfers and divers. Surfers refer to this sixth sense as "that sharky feeling" and "the creeps." Peter referred to it as "being in the groove."

Why did i care so much about these fish? Why did we all? They were always in my thoughts, even when I was sleeping. Great whites are simply different from other animals. As the Australian diver and underwater cinematographer Ron Taylor once put it, "My own feeling was that there was a strong intelligent personality behind the black orb. Not evil, but more alien and sinister than that."

Even the word shark is sleek and cutting, like a stick whittled to a sharp point. One theory traces the word to the Mayan Xoc, the name of a demon god that resembled a fish. Shark might also be related to the German schurke, which means shifty criminal; regardless, the word didn't come into usage until 1570, long after the ancient Greeks and Romans became aware of a fish that could tear people apart. There were classical references to oceangoing men chewed to the bone, but the Greeks and Romans didn't know much more than that. So they made stuff up.

In Pliny the Elder's 37-volume natural history, which appeared in A.D. 78, the Roman scholar speculated that fossilized sharks' teeth, which were then (and are still) found in significant quantities on land, rained from the sky during lunar eclipses. Later, a more sophisticated theory came along: The teeth were the tongues of serpents that had been turned to stone by Saint Paul on the island of Malta. They were thought to have magical properties, notably the ability to counteract poisons. It wasn't until the mid-17th century that the Danish scientist Steno discovered their true origin: He'd had the opportunity to dissect the head of a great white that had been captured off the coast of Italy.

A century later the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus created the scientific nomenclature system, and finally the great white had an official title: Squalus carcharias. Later, when more shark species had been identified, the great white became Carcharodon carcharias, which means "ragged tooth."

Certainly no one could have guessed that the ancestors of these raggedy-toothed fish had been patrolling the seas since the Devonian period, 400 million years ago. That era, 200 million years before the first dinosaurs arrived and 395 million years before our own ancestors appeared in Africa, is now referred to as the Age of Fishes. Among the sharks that made their debut in the Devonian was Dunkleosteus (loosely translated: "terrible fish"), more than 17 feet long and sporting protective armor and self-sharpening hatchet jaws. The Carboniferous period that followed, known as the Golden Age of Sharks, featured such unique creatures as Helicoprion, a shark with a wheel of teeth that resembled a buzz saw, and Edestus giganteus, a 20-foot-long hyperpredator with teeth that protruded beyond its jaw like a pair of Ginsu pinking shears. But the most impressive set of teeth ever to have graced the earth belonged to a shark called Carcharodon megalodon, which lived between 20 million and 1.5 million years ago. Megalodon is best imagined as a great white blown up to parade-float size. Its teeth, which could exceed seven inches in length, are plentiful enough to have become a fixture on eBay -- though the best-preserved specimens sell for lavish amounts of cash among fossil collectors.

Megalodon is candy to cryptozoologists, who love to imagine that somewhere in the Marianas Trench or some other unfathomable abyss it still lives. After all, other long-lost and unknown creatures have been retrieved from the depths. A new shark called the megamouth, a 14-footer with Jaggeresque lips the size of Chevrolet bumpers, was hauled up in 1976. But, sadly for monster lovers, the general consensus is that megalodon has flatlined. Hiding, even in the pit of the sea, would be tough for a 50-foot fish, but more important, megalodon never adapted to the deep ocean. And so it has fallen to great white sharks, which appeared in their current form about 11 million years ago, to occupy the bean-shaped niblet of our cerebral cortex reserved for fear of being eaten by something -- particularly something that hides in another element, waiting to burst into ours.

There are 368 known species of shark swimming around today, and they're almost preposterously diverse. We've got angel sharks that are flat, like shark bath mats; green lantern sharks the size of goldfish; reclusive Greenland sharks, with mottled skin and poisonous flesh, living under ice; goblin sharks, with what looks like a pink letter opener affixed to their heads. We're scared of most of them, though most of the cultural angst centers on the four species that have repeatedly ingested humans: the tiger, the bull, the oceanic whitetip and the great white.

It's becoming clear that white sharks are not malevolent, indiscriminate robohunters -- in fact, they exhibit certain behaviors more appropriate to mammals than fish. A great white's vision is obviously more developed than was previously realized; no other shark lifts its head out of the water to size up its surroundings. The ability to see well, on top of a sense of the subtlest electrical impulses, enables whites to tweak their hunting strategies on the fly. And then there's the aura of gentleness they project when they're not hunting.

More intriguing still are the relationships the Farallon sharks seem to have among themselves. They aren't organized pack hunters, like orcas, but they keep an eye on one another and stay in what scientists refer to as loose aggregations. So when an attack takes place, all the sharks in the area know about it and go straight to the scene. And even if there's a traffic jam at the carcass, they don't get worked up into a feeding frenzy. They establish a buffet line according to hierarchy: the larger the shark, the sooner it eats. Oh, there might be attempts to cut the line, but this is a risky strategy, and some of the Rat Packers are missing pieces of their fins to prove it. Sisters have the right-of-way at a kill, with Rat Packers orbiting at a respectful distance, cadging leftovers.

Another thing sharks aren't supposed to have is a personality. Yet one of the most intriguing discoveries of the Shark Project is that they do. There are aggressors and there are clowns; there are mellow sharks and peevish sharks and sharks that mean absolute bloody business. In a segment of the television show Animal Planet filmed in 1999, Scot admitted that he and Peter were emotionally involved in their study. "It's unexpected to get on a personal level with the sharks," he said, looking a little sheepish. "It's turned into more than just research. We've actually got a relationship with them."

In the same program a South African shark researcher described one of his study animals, a big female named Rasta, as "the sort of shark you want to just jump up and hug. Whenever it comes to the boat, you're just so happy, like a little kid."

It struck me as surreal to be floating among great whites only a 30-mile hop from Union Square, but there was something even stranger going on only 200 yards away. Smack in the middle of Stumpy's lair, just about the last place you'd consider dipping your toe, a boat was anchored, and a man was climbing out of the water. His name was Ron Elliott. Ron was the last commercial diver at the Farallones. He picked urchins, working solo from his boat, an immaculate aluminum crabber with a sky-blue shark stenciled on the gunwale. The boat was named GW. I could see Ron standing alone on deck in a hooded wet suit. "He keeps a real low profile," Scot said. "Doesn't even have a deckhand." Clearly, they were in awe of this guy. And after seeing firsthand what lives in these waters, so was I.

Ron didn't always have the Farallones to himself. Though the cold, dark waters here are forbidding even without the sharks, numerous divers once worked them -- for abalone, for urchins, even for sport. On Sunday, Jan. 14, 1962, to cite just one incident, more than 100 divers arrived at Southeast Farallon for a spearfishing competition. At about 10:30 in the morning a spearfisherman named Floyd Pair had just surfaced about 100 yards from shore when something hit him from below. Confused, he looked down and saw a 14-foot shark with his right leg in its mouth. Pair whacked the shark repeatedly with his spear gun as he yelled for help, and the great white swam off -- toward the other divers. Even after all the spearfishermen were safely back on board and the emergency helicopter had been called, the shark remained at the surface, circling. Pair lived, but he had "serious fanglike lacerations" that missed his femoral artery by less than a centimeter.

Later that same year the Mighty Skin Divers Club of San Francisco anchored at Middle Farallon, a nubbin of rock about three miles north of Southeast Farallon. It was Nov. 11, the height of shark season, although no one knew that at the time. The sport of scuba was new, and divers were excited to photograph the psychedelically colored fish that lived on the marine shelf next to the islet. The 30 club members were guided by Leroy French and Al Giddings, two experienced divers.

At the end of the first dive Giddings stood on deck, counting heads. One diver was missing. Giddings turned and saw a shark at least 16 feet long thrashing on the surface. Leroy French was in its mouth. The shark lifted its enormous tail, slammed it down and, as the scuba club watched in horror, dragged French underwater. Giddings heroically jumped in and swam to the spot where his colleague had gone under. Seconds later French's life jacket inflated, and he popped to the surface clawing at the water and screaming. With the help of another diver named Donald Joslin, Giddings got French back to the boat. French was then airlifted to the Harbor Emergency Hospital in San Francisco, where 480 stitches were required to close his wounds.

And so it went through the '60s, '70s and '80s, as more and more people discovered the hard way that the Farallones were not an ideal diving locale. Scuba clubs went elsewhere. Spearfishermen followed. The abalone and urchin divers, however, remained for a time. Yet the sharks made increasingly frequent appearances as the seals returned, and there were several near fatal attacks on divers and other close calls. One by one the divers lost their nerve.

Soon it was only Ron. At first Peter and Scot thought he was suicidal. He had a knack for anchoring at the scene of the latest shark attack, and the biologists worried that any day they would be picking up Ron's body. But the years went by, and he kept diving, often calling on the radio at day's end with valuable observations about shark behavior. The three men became friends.

Today the GW was anchored in front of the dramatic, cathedral-like Great Murre Cave, whose opening is a 200-foot vertical slash in the rock. This was Sisterhood Country. We tied alongside; Ron stood on deck. He was a trim guy in his early 50s with a brush cut and eyes that, while kind, didn't miss much. The talk turned immediately to great whites. I asked Ron how many times he'd seen sharks while diving at the Farallones. He thought for a minute, scratched the side of his neck. "Well, I don't really count, but, ahhhh, at least ... three, four hundred."

Over time I would come to understand Ron's attitude toward the sharks. Emotion didn't enter into it. In his mind they were doing their job, same as he was. And if Ron occasionally had to hide from them under rocks or fend them off with his urchin basket -- well, that was just another day at the office.

Only the week before, in fact, he had jumped into the water at Shubrick Point and practically landed on one of the Sisters. She swam away and then turned, mouth wide open, and barreled toward him. "She tried to give me a little love bite," Ron said. "I shoved my urchin basket in her nose, and she flipped around and attacked the basket, shook it over my head, bent my arm, sent me sailing." Ron's wet suit hood was ripped from his head, his mask jammed down around his neck, his nose bloodied. Then the shark turned and whacked him with its tail. "I thought she broke my face," he said. "She kept circling me, following me. She wasn't one of those ones you could bluff out."

But Ron didn't mind the danger involved in diving at the Farallones. In fact, he liked it -- the diceyness meant that everyone else stayed away. He'd started out diving for urchins in Southern California in the '70s, and when he and his wife, Carol, moved north to Point Reyes, he looked out at the Farallones and realized that for urchins, it was the place to go. The first time he dived there, in 1989, he encountered a 17-foot shark.

I asked him how Carol felt about his job site. "She's O.K. with it," he said, then paused. "Well, maybe she's getting a little tired of it. But she knows that if something happens, I'd rather have it happen out here than, you know, in a car."

It was dusk; it was time to leave. The ocean looked as black as tar. As we pushed off from the GW, I turned to Scot and Peter, the question clear on my face. How could anyone do this for a living? "Ron's all about competence," Peter said. It was hard to believe that all the competence in the world could keep a diver safe in a place where a floating surfboard might draw a shark within seconds. How long could Ron's mix of skill, sangfroid and luck hold out?

As we drove back to East Landing, I pointed at everything -- gulls, shadows on the water, nothing in particular -- thinking it was a shark. "You've got sharks on the brain," Scot said. "That happens. You just can't be close to a creature like this and not be affected. You see their eyes, and you know they're looking at you."

That night I dreamed of sharks again. I recognized them gliding by: Stumpy, Cuttail and the unknown Sister with her monstrous tail. At the Farallones shark dreams are so common and vivid that there is a section in the biologists' logbook devoted to recounting them; Scot said he still had them every night. In my dream it was dark, and I was alone, drifting in a small boat. Once again I looked down as shadowy creatures swam beneath me, just barely visible by moonlight. And all night, majestic and terrible fish cruised through the bedroom in otherworldy silence.

dennis, YES! I've surfed it a handful of times FIRING and several times really fun. gunnier, longer, works best in her steamingly endless folds......

Has anyone checked out zabasearch.com? This thing is a little concerning. Not only can you find any address you've ever had including phone number, you can also get map a satelite image of those locations. Check it out.

4LOS, your Davenport session sounds familiar. Were you surfing with T Moe?

If not, a friend of mine (T Moe) tells the exact same story about seals skipping for their lives at the exact same spot.

After hearing that, I decided no mushy left at Davenport or weird righthander is worth dying for...

Thanks Kaiser. That shark article is going to carry me right into the weekend nicely.

less shark stories.. more soccer mommas!

A man with a full suit of armor was found in a sharks stomach. WTF?!?

I Was surfing West side Oahu this past December. Between sessions I noticed something odd on the hood of this Hawaiians truck. Turns out to be an 8 foot Tiger. He was spearfishing and the thing "got too close", he capped it and swam it 1/2 mile down the coast to where he could bring it on to land. We asked him where he got it and he pointed to our break and said "right out there where you surf". I saw him the day I left and he said he saved the Jaw and some skin for a drum - I'll spare ya the pics.

no post the pics!!!

In Hawaii, the shark is considered by some families to be an amakua, a spiritual guardian. Thus, most Hawaiians -- not haole-Hawaiians or Japanese-Hawaiians or BVB-faux-waiians but HAWAIIANS -- do not fear their amakua, their guardian and protector.

So please post the photos!! Sharks aren't bad.

just googled it -- read here:

http://www.moolelo.com/sharks.html

Davvy looks pretty sharky. I still love the place though. As for Hawaii, I was surfing out at the Lighthouse off Diamond Head and after the sesh my friend from Hawaii asks me, "Did you see that Mako out there when we were paddling out?"

HELL NO I DIDN'T! I would have been at waikiki if I had. Hawaii has sharks, no question!

So, someone wants to play soccer eh?

I WANT SOCCER, I WANT SOCCER BAAAAAAD

gave up on surfing for today and took out the street longboard and had a blast. Close to surfing but still have the desire to get in the water. a few nice spring a.m.s have spoiled me, I want the winds to stop but I fear no surf for today, and with all this shark talk maybe a good thing

Oh my gawd... that soccer mom would make me want to settle down. That huge ass chick up there, I would mount: it would be like a Chiahuaha trying to hump a German Sheppard, but whatever.

Shark shit:

http://www.stileproject.com/sharkattack.html

fair warning though, it's very graphic; and i'm not just talking about the porn ads in the webpage.

There was a news story in Oahu a few years ago about a great white shark cruising the west side of the island. A spear fisher took his one man row boat out of Yokohamas and paddled it a mile offshore. He took his gear and dived for fish and bait. He said that after awhile, he noticed a shark far away swimming side to side approaching him slowly. It got closer, and closer, and got bigger, and BIGGER. He started getting scared, and noticed that the shark was a Great White. It got to about 20 yards away, when he realized it was probably smelling his bait tied to his waist. He cut the bait loose from his belt, and it started to sink. The shark got really close, and dived below him and grab the satchel of bait and swam off. The diver swam back to his boat and hauled ass back to shore. He said that when it got close, the girth of the shark seemed as large as a VW beetle. It was an 18 footer. Looks like Californians aren't the only animals from California that like to come to Hawaii.

On a brighter note, the North Shore is going OFF today. Pipeline was DOH+ this morning, and is now around 5 feet Hawaiian. It was gnarly, big, and unreal this morning. I was dodging these bombs everywhere. Without a doubt, Pipe is a super heavy break. I'll try to post pics later.

3to5setsof7 - I'd like to pick yor brains a bit before I go to get the lowdown on the place. I take it you've spent a fair bit of time on Maui. I so stoked to be going there.

God damn it. Drove over an hour to nice, glassy, peeling surf near an elephant seal hangout; climbed down some rocks and into the water, and twenty minutes later, it was blown out and whitecappy. Plus I kooked both my drops before it got sucky.

sprains, as result or who patients experiencing pain muscle approved for 10 mg Flexeril is by muscle pulls, are each a relaxants. strains. of FDA. http://www.info-on-drug-flexeril.com

bro dont drop in on sean or shane definately dont fuck with alex i saw him totally punch mike simmons in the face totally split his lip brah. wet and reckless! kklb4l sucka (translation: kellies cove local boyz 4 life) word.

In my 2.5 years of surfing San Francisco, I've been at been at the beach staring out at the horizon something like 300 times. Saturday was the first time it was ever clear enough for me to see the Farallones. The coincidence was pretty creepy.

Found some fun waves for a little while yesterday at OB, Friday I found a big headless sea lion with a 16- 18" bite out of its chest. It had washed to the top of the high tide line way south of Sloat. Sundy it was gone- washed back in with the 4.6' high tide no doubt. Thought you guys might be interested...