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Photographer Jordan Anast pretty much captured the shot of a lifetime this weekend at San Onofre. During a San Onofre Surfing Club contest, Anast clicked this instantly iconic image of a sizeable (let’s call it big) great white shark as it leapt out of the water behind one Mr. Tyler Warren, the venerable Southern California surfer, shaper, and e-bike hater.
“What an exciting 24 hours it has been since the great white shark breach pictures were released,” Anast wrote, “non-stop media coverage and my phone, email, texts, website are still blowing up.”
No doubt, sharks equal web traffic, and every media outlet with a url picked up the story (The Inertia not withstanding). But this time, it was more the image composition: Tyler, riding with his usual grace and a great white framed perfectly in the background, coming completely out of the water. “It’s a shot I’ll never get again,” he told the OC Register. Indeed. But given San O’s history, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Breaches have been caught on surf cams, seen during contests at Lowers, and a women was attacked near Church (a wave in the Trestles zone) in 2017. Sightings are also common near the nuclear power plant. That’s where I had my first contact with “Fluffy,” the locals’ pet name for the juveniles that hang near the plant.
It was one of those hot September days, the wind blowing gently offshore and the water clear as gin. The kelp swayed slowly with the incoming swell, like branches in the wind. That’s when I noticed the cute, cuddly little great white shark cruising between the kelp beds – all seven feet of it, nearly as big as the longboard I was paddling. It circled curiously, but thought better of a test bite given its relatively small size. It could have torn me apart. But it didn’t.
That’s that attitude most surfers in the San Onofre-Trestles area take with these apex predators: They’re there. We all love (see need) to surf. What are we gonna do about it? If you’re Jordan Anast, who’s been shooting photos at San O for years, you click one you’ll never forget. “It just looks like ‘Sharknado,’” he said, “it doesn’t look real.”
Find more of Jordan’s fine work here or at JordanAnast.com
