Three interesting accounts of the shark attack at Mavericks

The Santa Cruz Sentinel has the best account of the attack in the mainstream press, which adds the scary detail that Tim West was attached by the leash to the board during the incident.

He feels lucky, that he was still paddling at the time and not sitting: "Had my legs been dangling off the sides they would have gone in the jaws, I’m sure."

The attack threw him two feet in the air, he said, but it didn’t register what was going on until a few seconds later, when he saw the shark next to him—with his surfboard in its mouth.

"It was thrashing around like a fish out of water," he said, until the surfboard came loose and then everything went calm. He said his leash didn’t break so he was attached to his board the whole time, which was really scary.

The NY Times News Service tells us that the great white shark that attacked a surfer off the Sonoma County coast a couple of weeks ago was roughly the size of a Chevrolet Suburban.

Since 1952, when records started being kept, there have been 111 attacks on the West Coast in which a white shark has bitten a person, and 10 fatalities.

Sixty percent of the attacks were at sites of previous attacks. There were five attacks off Salmon Creek Beach, six near the Farallon Islands and nine off Tomales Point.

Surfing Magazine has some photos of Tim West and his damaged board and a very detailed account.

“At first I thought it was a seal or some seaweed or a boil,” West, 25, shaken but otherwise unscathed, said the next day in an interview at his home about a mile from Maverick’s. “Then I saw this gray thing just thrashing by my board. I swam away, to the end of my leash, and all of the sudden the thing disappeared and everything just stopped. It went dead calm. I reeled in my board and just paddled straight toward the reef. I didn’t even care about waves – just get me into the whitewater.”

Loeswick, sitting inside, saw the strike. “I glance up and his board gets shot out of the water, and there’s all this splashing,” Loeswick, 20, said. “It was surreal. I just freaked out and started calling his name: ‘Wwwweeeesssstttt!’ I was stoked to see that he was OK. We both paddled as hard as we could toward the rocks. He was maybe 100 feet farther out than I was, but he was so pumped on adrenalin that he just blew right by me.”

West: “Every stroke, I was thinking my life was over.”