Or a more apt title...Enter the water, enter the food chain.
Ruined a good board (And a wetsuit.
)
Fortuna woman letting brush with shark sink in
Chris Durant/The Times-Standard
Eureka Times Standard
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It's been five days since Sue Snyder was knocked off her surfboard by a shark, and every day that passes she feels luckier and luckier.
”I'm just counting my lucky stars right now,” Snyder said.
It was just after 8 a.m. Thursday and she was sitting upright on her board, about 100 feet off shore in an area estimated to have been about 10 feet deep.
”I was just sitting on the board, waiting for a wave and all of a sudden I found myself in the water,” Snyder said. “I saw nothing.”
In the next few seconds, which seemed a lot longer to Snyder, she kicked and swam, disoriented and trying to get to the surface.
”I felt the animal, the whole length as he slid past me,” Snyder said. “I kicked him, then I surfaced. That's when I heard 'Shark.'”
The leash to her board was severed, so she scrambled to track it down.
She hopped back on the board, backwards, and started to make her way toward shore.
”I was looking behind me,” Snyder said. “Knowing he was going to come back.”
She caught a wave and made it back to land, where witnesses were waiting.
”They all just swarmed me,” Snyder said.
She was checked for injuries, but the only souvenir of the attack is a 16-inch bite mark on her 9-foot 6-inch Rhyn Noll-made board.
”I loved that board,” Snyder said.
Snyder's husband, Dan Snyder, also surfs, but was not at Moonstone Beach Thursday. He said the board will not be repaired, but become an ornament at a new house he and his wife are building in Hawaii.
”I've been surfing since I was 9,” Dan Snyder said. “That's the biggest shark bite I've ever seen in a board.”
The Snyders believe the animal was a great white shark.
A shark researcher told them the shark was up to 15 feet long and probably weighed 3,000 pounds.
But Scott Quackenbush, director of the marine lab for Humboldt State University, said it might not have been the dreaded king of sharks.
”It could have been some other kind of shark,” Quackenbush said. “Like a blue shark or a salmon shark.”
The attack was more than likely instinctual.
”Realistically, this was probably an accidental feeding mistake,” Quackenbush said.
According to information Quackenbush provided from the International Shark Attack File, there has never been a fatality in the 12 recorded, unprovoked shark attacks in Humboldt County between 1926 and 2006.
Sue Snyder's attack made No. 12.
Marin County has 11 listed attacks and no fatalities and San Diego County has 10 attacks and one fatality in 1959. Mendocino County has one fatal attack and Del Norte County has two recorded attacks with no fatalities.
As the Snyders looked over the board with chunks of shark teeth still embedded in the fiberglass, Sue Snyder said she's not going to stop surfing, which she's done for 15 years, but she'll take a little break.
”I'm sure I'll go back out,” she said. “I'm just going to sit this shark season out.”
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