A great white shark leaped into the spotlight during a Southern California surfing contest Saturday, breaching free of the surface just beyond one of the surfers.
Jordan Anast, who captured the accompanying image, told the Orange County Register that he thought the splash in his viewfinder was caused by a dolphin.
While inspecting his images, however, Anast realized he had just photographed a white shark as it photobombed surfer Tyler Warren.
“It’s a shot I’ll never get again,” Anast said. “It just looks like ‘Sharknado,’ it doesn’t look real.”
The spectacle occurred during the San Onofre Surfing Club’s annual contest at San Onofre, south of San Clemente. Anast told FTW Outdoors that the contest was not postponed and Warren did not see the shark as he rode his wave in choppy conditions.
The San Onofre Surfing Club joked about the “uninvited guest” on Facebook, writing: “Surfers in the water said that it was going for the pelican in the upper righthand corner of the photo. Scored a 10 by all judges!”
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The imagery helps to illustrate that Southern California surfers share their playground with the world’s most notorious apex predator. And the casual attitude expressed by the surfing club shows how accepting surfers have become of this coexistence.
Juvenile white sharks, measuring to about 11 feet, feed in and near the surf zone on stingrays and other bottom fishes. They mass-congregate in areas that vary over time.
While San Onofre is not currently one of those areas, juvenile white sharks are spotted from the beach sporadically during the summer and fall.
Anast said the shark he photographed measured 12 to 14 feet.
However, Chris Lowe, who runs the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach, estimated the shark’s length at about nine feet, based on its girth in the image.
Lowe and his team have been tagging juvenile white sharks off Southern California as part of ongoing research.
