Close encounters of the shark kind..

I just paddled out to catch some overhead waves when I heard a man behind me whistle. I turned and shrugged, thinking what da heck is that guys problem. He continued to whistle. To get an idea of who's attention he might be after I looked at the chick surfer next to me, she replied by simply putting her hand on the top of her head, fingers pointing skyward. I was confused. I looked back at her and she repeated the hand motion, and uttered the word "shark" calmly. Me and the group of other surfers paddled in. I got safely to shore and a fellow surfer said the shark was within a few feet of me. WHOaH. He claimed a 12 inch dorsal fin.

This article was published the next day in the Maui News claiming the shark to be 12-14 feet Tiger Shark...


LAHAINA — A baby humpback whale under attack by sharks struggled to the beach at Puamana on Monday morning before it died while surfers and other beachgoers braving the threat of sharks tried to keep it in the water.

A German visitor who was surfing off Puamana said she saw the whale approaching the lineup of surfers when another surfer called for them to get out of the water.

“The whale was coming toward us,” Aylin Meier recalled. “I thought something was wrong. It was not so far away from the beach.

“We saw this whale which was too close, coming in the wrong direction toward us. Then a woman said, ‘Get out of there, get out of there,’ ” Meier said.

On the beach at Puamana, Diana Rodgers said she first noticed the whale because it was close to shore, just outside the surf break about 50 yards offshore.

“We first noticed the whale because it seemed way too close to shore. Obviously it was a baby, and we looked for its mother and didn’t see any evidence of a mother whale anywhere,” she said.

“We watched it going up and down just beyond the break. It kept going back and forth. It seemed like the sharks were biting it, and it seemed to be just slowly losing energy.

“Then it began resting a little more, and we could see when the waves came, it couldn’t fight them anymore. It seemed like it gave up and just floated in.”

Rodgers, of Santa Monica, Calif., said the baby humpback floated to shore, where a number of people on the beach attempted to push it back into the water while throwing rocks to scare away the sharks.

When police arrived, they ordered the people off the beach because of the shark hazard while the young whale died. The creature’s body rolled in the shore break until a team of state and federal marine specialists arrived to recover the body.

Chris Yates, head of the Protected Resources Division for Hawaii of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service, said a necropsy will be performed to determine what caused the calf to die.

He said there was no way of knowing immediately if the sharks attacking the calf caused its death or if it already had been ill or injured before the sharks began their attacks.

There were multiple wounds along its tail and on the bottom of its body, although Rodgers said it was difficult to tell if the wounds were from shark bites or from being washed across the shallow reef.

“The marine mammal veterinarian will be assessing all of the injuries, but it’s awfully hard to tell if the shark bites occurred before or after the animal was in trouble,” Yates said.

It’s normal for sharks to attack an animal whose health and vitality are compromised already, Yates said. It is unusual for a calf to be separated from its mother. He said he was not aware of anyone sighting in the vicinity any adult whales that might have been the calf’s mother.

Maui County lifeguards warned other beachgoers in the area of the shark attack on the whale, although one group of surfers at Launiupoko Beach Park didn’t take the warning seriously until a tiger shark swam past.

Maui District conservation enforcement chief Randy Awo said the coastline for a mile on both sides of the whale death was closed until sunset Monday, and the situation will be assessed this morning to determine if the shark threat is over.

A Launiupoko surfer, Richard Darner, said a lifeguard on a personal watercraft swung by about noon to inform them of the whale.

“The lifeguard told everybody, but everybody out there figured the sharks would feed on the whale and stayed out. A lot of guys didn’t believe it, until all of a sudden we saw this big old fin come right between us,” he said.

He said there were solid 3- to 4-foot sets that were hard to pass up, but then he was in back of the lineup when he saw what appeared to be a 12- to 14-foot tiger shark swim between him and the other surfers.

“I was shocked. He was just there where the waves break,” he said.

At Puamana, Meier and Rodgers mourned the death of the young whale.

Meier said when she first saw the whale outside the surf break, she did not think it was hurt or sick. “He was alive. He was not injured,” she said.

But once he was attacked and then slid over the reef to the beach, she said, there was no help other than from the surfers who tried to keep it in the water.

“We called for someone to come, but over one hour and nobody came,” she said.

Rodgers said she took a number of whale-watch cruises before her scheduled return to Santa Monica on Monday night.

“We’d been out watching the whales, and they are so magnificent. Then to see this whale wash in and die — I wanted to say something when all these people came by and they were just taking pictures of this dead whale.”