Well wasn't that impressive. Our water temps in less than two weeks dropped from 76 to 58. That's an 18 degree difference. And San Francisco? 60 degrees! We were colder than San Fran! Holy Moly. And the worst part? Historically the peak of our water temps is the first 2 weeks of August. We should have been mid-70's and above. Thankfully, the NW winds and the subsequent upwelling has subsided and we're back to WSW winds which are helping the water creep back up to the mid-60's. That's still 10 degrees colder than normal but at least it's a start. As far as the surf the past few days, the NW winds did bring an increase in NW windswell and along with the SSW swell, most spots had chest high sets with the OC bigger of course.
For the weekend, the NW holds tomorrow while the SSW slowly fades. Looks for chest high sets in the OC and SD tomorrow with just waist high+ swell over the weekend. And here's the tides, sun, and water temps for the next few days:
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
Sharks have been portrayed as the monster of the ocean (thanks Spielberg), but in all honesty, if they wanted to attack us, we'd be targets every time we surfed. And with any sport, there's always an element of danger you need to be aware of (hiking and bears, golf and alligators, skateboarding and moving cars). So if you plan to make surfing your life, you better be aware of your surroundings. Like if you surfed in Northern California, adult great whites were the primary concern- but they mainly stayed well offshore. And during the last decade here in Southern California, juvenile great whites have been hanging out along the coast. Now it looks like juveniles are hanging out along the coast from Central California and points north for some reason. Here's the Washington Post with more:
The glassy-gray sea ripples with the movement beneath. Then, a fin, about the height of a playing card, breaks the surface, slicing through the water from just beyond the surf line, a glimpse of a tail tip visible a few feet behind. The dark shape just feet beneath the murky water resolves itself quickly from the bow of a boat. On the iPhone screen where Patrick Rex, a California State University at Long Beach graduate student, has been tracking it by drone, the young great white appears like a cartoon cutout, a wide span of pectoral fins, a broad head and narrowing nose, a large, swishing tail. It is within feet of a teenage lifeguard on a paddle board, unaware of what’s below.
“You guys looking for sharks?” the surf-camp volunteer calls out, steering his stand-up board toward Rex’s Boston Whaler. He is looking for them too, an early-warning patrol meant to alert the dozens of kids on the beach about 20 yards away. “There was a six-footer just inside your board and the beach,” said Chris Lowe, the veteran scientist who runs the Shark Lab at California State University at Long Beach. “It’s about six yards off your port bow now.” A slow turn, and the lifeguard calmly heads toward shore: Another great white shark has come too close to the rollicking campers nearby. He delivers the warning more than a dozen times a day. “Thanks,” he calls coolly over his shoulder.
California, blessed and cursed by the extremes of its place at the continent’s edge and the shore of the world’s largest ocean, is learning with trepidation to live in harmony with “the man in the gray suit.” It is a nickname that surfers have applied to great white sharks over the years, animals in their element, going about their business day. If wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides and drought were not concerning enough, the geographic range of young great whites has expanded north along the California coast by hundreds of miles, bringing the quintessential summer-blockbuster predators within feet of surfers and swimmers from the Mexican border to beaches just south of San Francisco.
These are juvenile great whites, most just a couple of years old and seven to eight feet long. Unlike their large and often cannibalistic elders who more commonly live miles offshore, and often attack people by accident, the young ones have shown no interest in adding humans to their developing diets. But their numbers are growing. At a thriving nursery for great whites just a few miles east of this weekend refuge of a city on the border of Central and Southern California, two days with Lowe and his team revealed more than 15 great whites, some cruising no more than four feet from the beach. Many had been tagged previously by Lowe, who the year before tagged 35 great whites along the same mile-long stretch. There were, he said, undoubtedly more today.
But the great white phenomenon here is novel mostly because of the far larger geographic coastal range where juveniles are now learning to hunt before heading offshore to the cold-water island groups that have hosted the big ones for centuries. The wider distribution of great white nurseries is the result of successful decades-old conservation efforts and a warming coastal Pacific Ocean, which scientists say has opened a near-tropical water highway for the temperature-sensitive juveniles to comfortably ride much farther north than ever before.
The trend prompted the state legislature to act three years ago, approving a $3.75million great white monitoring program. The money is a response to the new questions being raised by the animals and to the additional public safety risks more sharks might pose.
Late last month, a swimmer was bitten just south of San Francisco by a juvenile great white, the farthest north Lowe said he had ever heard of such an attack happening. A few days later, off the island of Catalina in Southern California, a shark bumped a Boy Scout’s kayak and bit into his hand. Those bump-and-run encounters, scientists say, may be more of a “nothing to see here, move it along now” signal from sharks rather than an intentional attack. But the last shark-bite fatality in the state was last year. According to state Department of Fish and Wildlife statistics, there have been 197 shark attacks and other types of encounters off the coast since the 1950s, including 14 fatal ones. Those numbers have grown each decade since the 1960s, peaking in the 2010s with 55 attacks.
“White sharks right now are beneficiaries of climate change,” Lowe said. “But there are many questions about what is happening and why it is happening in these places. And as the teenage population of the white shark continues to grow, what and where are they going to eat?”
The mysteries surrounding California’s great white population have grown along with the geographic scope of its nurseries. But sharks are elusive, as a few days with Lowe’s team revealed, and hard to count. Shark scientists working in labs from San Diego to Monterey Bay debate if the shark population is growing or if the “distribution” of its juvenile habitats is just giving the impression of a booming shark renaissance. Put simply, scientists want to know: Are more white sharks in these waters? Or are these white sharks just in more places along the coast because of the warming waters associated with climate change?
The tentative answer, according to Lowe and several recent papers on the California white shark population, is yes and yes. Both phenomena are probably true. The seminal event that prompted these new questions began in 2014. The Pacific Ocean off the U.S. West Coast has not been the same since, including the behavior of its rich variety of large mammals, diverse shark populations, and an array of other sea life.
An eastern Pacific heat wave, nicknamed the blob, shuffled the warm and cold currents that run along the California coast. The following year a periodic, if rare, weather event known as “El Niño,” when warm currents surge north from the southern Pacific, reached California and exacerbated the effects of the lingering warm-water blob. The primary consequence was that for the first time subtropical water from northerly currents from Mexico made its way around Point Conception along this county’s northern coast. The outcropping — effectively the geographic gateway to Central California — had historically served as the barrier between warm southern currents and far chillier northern waters.
Species of shellfish, anemone, commercial fish and sharks commonly native to deep Southern California and Baja were showing up in Monterey Bay — and even areas north of San Francisco. Food supplies — for migrating whales, elephant seals and sea lions, for young great whites — shifted routes and drew the large animals with them, sometimes toward shore and sometimes farther out to sea. Salvador Jorgensen, a marine ecologist and researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said juvenile great whites were hardly seen off the Central and Northern California coasts before 2014. Now they are nearly as common as the group that hangs out in the warm waters here east of Santa Barbara off a sandy beach where, on most days, you can see the Point Conception headlands in the western distance. “If you just look there in Monterey Bay, you would say, wow, this population is just massively increasing,” Jorgensen said. “But when we took a step back and looked at what the drivers are, why these sharks are up here, we realize that there’s just been this massive shift in the northern boundary of warm water along California.” Jorgensen, who often works closely with Barbara A. Block, the eminent Stanford University shark scientist, said that “it seems like sharks that were previously south of Point Conception are now making it up around that corner, which has always been a big barrier thermally, and up into this region.”
The warmer water, though, is only one part of what is pulling great whites into places they have never been seen before. The turbidity, or clarity, of the ocean; the salinity; and the amount of chlorophyll in the water, which can indicate how rich in food a region is, are other factors that dictate a great white’s broader movements. The research is time-consuming and remote, and the data sometimes conflicting, often bringing more questions than answers.
In one measure of how quickly habitats are emerging and changing, the experts have sought help from the amateurs to understand the new great white behavior off California. In the paper published this year in Scientific Reports, Jorgensen wrote that “the emergence of juvenile white sharks in Monterey Bay was unexpected, sudden and outpaced established scientific monitoring programs.” What Jorgensen acknowledged was that because “shark scientists go where they know the sharks are,” it was eyewitness reports from longtime surfers, divers and fishermen that first tipped him and others off that new juvenile white shark nurseries were emerging around the northern edges of the bay.
Other clues, such as an increase in bites on otters — which are not traditional great white food, being light on fat and long on thick fur — added to the evidence that the bay was full of novice juveniles testing what is edible and what is to be avoided. (Lowe jokes that otters are like “vegan brownies” for sharks — they resemble, in murky water, fatty seals, but one bite and sharks are grossed out.) “We used a lot of citizen science data to capture this transition,” Jorgensen said. “But I think the bigger danger we’re talking about here is climate change. We’re having a complete shift in the patterns of where these animals go, and they’re showing up in new places that people aren’t used to. These things are all shifting, and it makes prediction much harder.”
The great great-white revival is a conservation triumph, albeit one with an occasionally frightening edge to it. Although there were few solid population numbers at the time, the great white population off California was severely challenged before voters passed a 1990 ballot measure outlawing the use of gill and other indiscriminating nets set adrift in the coastal waters off Central and Southern California. The ban took effect in 1994, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson (R) also signed into law a prohibition on hunting, catching and killing great whites off the California coast. Lowe and other shark scientists trace the white shark resurgence to those measures.
The data were scarce because traditionally commercial fishermen, working the highly productive waters of the Santa Barbara Channel and other productive fisheries, would simply list in their catch logs “shark” if they hauled one in as “by-catch” in their nets. Not until 1975 did fishermen begin specifying if the caught shark was a great white, a bit of bureaucratic detail Lowe attributes entirely to the publication the previous year of Peter Benchley’s smash novel, “Jaws.”
The California conservation measures also protected elephant seals, sea lions and other favorites of the great white’s diet. It was, suddenly, a good time to be a great white. “There is a lot of food,” said Echelle Burns, a sustainable fisheries researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who studied under Lowe in Long Beach. “But we still don’t really know why these juveniles are picking the spots they do or why they change them sometimes year to year.”
Great whites, for better or worse, were suddenly pop stars. The population grew over decades, and under some pressure from the public, given the ubiquitous YouTube drone footage and GoPro highlight reels of sharks coming within feet of swimmers, the state decided it had a stake in protecting the public from its conservation successes. The $3.75 million that the state approved three years ago to establish a great white monitoring system is managed by Lowe’s lab. The program is not an early-warning system. But Lowe shares the tracking data with lifeguards along the coast and helps design protocols for when a beach should be shut down. It is tricky, subjective work with a sometimes profound economic impact on communities when beaches are closed in regions seen as havens for great whites.
PIC OF THE WEEK:
Another dreamy set up based on surfing ability. Looking for a challenge? Then those rifling rights way outside are right up your alley. Maybe you're surfed out? The inside reef has got some easy right handers to cruise on. Maybe the grom is just learning to surf? Heck- grab the Wavestorm and try out the waist high left on the inside reef instead. Or if you just want to work on your tan- grab a Bintang and sit by the pool at my palatial estate.
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Got This
Just Signed With Barcelona
Me & My Board Have Matching Nose Guards
AND THE SURF REPORT WILL BE DARK NEXT WEEK. You may just want to hold off on surfing until I get back.
