Return of the Longboard

Simon Anderson and his Mighty Thruster

Surf and Destroy

Terror from Below

The Unsinkable Tom Carroll

An Explosion of Talent

Tom Curren's Mile of Style

How to Turn a Circus into a Riot

I Predict Waves in Your Future

Cult of the Surf Photographer

Video Killed the Surf Movie

Waves for Sale

Surf Boom Redux

Terminally Hip

Super-Sizing the World Tour

Somebody Should Do Something

Surfers vs Apartheid

Make Room at the Top, Obrigado!

The Last Big Wave

Eddie Aikau's State of Grace

A Beloved Rival

Long Division

On Christmas Eve 1981, a 25-year-old wetsuit-clad Monterey County kneeboarder named Lew Boren was pulled from the shallows of Spanish Bay, near Pebble Beach. His corpse was bloodless, with a perfectly symmetrical armpit-to-hip bite taken out of his torso—the work of a 20-foot-long, 4,000-pound white shark. Surfing, again, was in the news. But this time around, the attention didn’t seem particularly sensationalized. Most surfers understood that the odds of getting hit by a shark were statistically null, even in high-risk zones, which included Northern California’s Monterey-to-Sonoma “Red Triangle,” the entire coast of South Australia, Byron Bay in New South Wales, Queensland’s Stradbroke Island, parts of Hawaii, both sides of Florida, and any non-netted beach in South Africa. In fact, just a few months before Boren’s death, 

 magazine had reported that sharks accounted for no more than 500 known deaths in all of human history.

Boren, however, was California’s first surfer shark fatality, and that was news. Scary news. For a month or so after Boren's death, West Coast surfers—even those living hundreds of miles from the attack site—paddled into the lineup like jittery late-night New Yorkers walking home while Son of Sam was still at large.

How to deal with the thought of being ripped open and devoured by an apex predator with killing skills honed by 400 million years’ worth of evolutionary repetition? Ancient Hawaiians made fervent prayers to their shark god. Aussies just tried to out-brute the animal—in a lurid sequence from 

, Paul Witzig’s 1968 surf movie, a nonaggressive nurse shark laying on a dock is wrenched, gaffed, and stun-gunned to death with help from Queensland state surfing champ Russell Hughes. After 

 hit theaters in 1975, dozens of American surfers offered a homage of sorts by riding boards with an attacking great white airbrushed onto the bottom. There was also some red, white, and blue bluster: asked by a California surf magazine how long it would take before they’d paddle out at a break where a fatal attack had taken place, 62-percent of respondents said either “the same day” or “one day after.” (The surf media was understandably interested in sharks, and for the most part level-headed. "Sharks: Myth or Menace?", published in 1980, was SURFER's first feature-length article on the subject. Surf with caution, the magazine advised, but know that "sharks, like ancient dragons from the deep, [are mostly] a symbol of fear in the ocean, and many ideas about sharks are myths." 

 magazine followed one month later with a featured titled: "Sharks: Why Not to Worry About Jaws.")

The number of worldwide surfer-related shark attacks increased in the decades to come, with two events in particular raising the terror level among surfers to new heights. On Halloween morning, 2003, a 13-year-old surfer named Bethany Hamilton lost her left arm to a tiger shark while surfing near her home on Kauai. Hamilton not only survived, she was back out surfing again just seven months after the attack, and later competed on the world tour. The second event took place during the finals of the 2017 J-Bay Open, when a 10-foot great white swatted world champion Mick Fanning of Australia off his board. The terrifying moment was caught on film—Fanning was unhurt—and took surfing to a new level of internet virality. Sharks, from then on, perversly, became one of the most compelling aspects of the sport to non-surfers. Smartphones meanwhile meant that almost every new attack, surfer or non-surfer, was recorded and uploaded straight into the media bloodstream.

But were sharks actually increasing in number, or becoming more aggressive? Yes to the first question, thanks to new marine animal protection laws, but only slightly. No to the second question. Furthermore, according to the International Shark Attack File, the number of attacks is and always has been pegged directly to the number of people in the water. The more swimmers, surfers, kayakers, divers, SUP riders, and so on, the more attacks.

The odds of being hit or killed by a shark remain conspicuously tiny. Of the millions upon millions of people who either worked or played in the ocean in 2017, for example, just 53 were the victims of an unprovoked shark attack. None of those attacks were fatal. Marine biologists have long theorized that attacks on humans are essentially a case of mistaken identify—after making a “test-bite” and discovering the target isn’t a well-fatted piece of marine life, the shark will usually swim away. Meanwhile, conservationists point out that the fishing industry kills tens of millions of sharks annually, and that many species have at one point or another been in danger of extinction. Man is by far the more aggressive predator here, not sharks.

Yet that kind of analytic reasoning only goes so far when it’s 

 floating in the lineup at dusk (the shark’s most active feeding period), during a lull, at a surf break teeming with marine life, while your buddies are already up on the beach toweling off. San Francisco writer and surfer Dan Duane—whose own fear of sharks began after a high school friend described in graphic detail a photograph he’d seen of Lew Boren on the coroner’s slab—recalled such a moment in his 1996 memoir 

. During a late afternoon surf at a break just north of Santa Cruz, Duane watched as a seal emerged two or three feet behind an easygoing local surfer named Willie. Everything was calm and quiet; no approaching waves, a slate-gray sky, just a breath of wind. The seal, Duane wrote, “watched Willie’s back for a minute, then leaped out of the water and came down with a terrific slap: thrashing and kicking, Willie spun around on his board, utterly hysterical, face white, screaming, ‘What was that!? What the 

The phantom menace taking another noisy bite, that’s all.

For a month or so after Lew Boren's shark attack death, West Coast surfers paddled into the lineup like jittery late-night New Yorkers walking home while Son of Sam was still at large.

Chapter: 7

Long Division

Terror from Below

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