{"id":782902,"date":"2026-07-25T01:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T01:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/782902\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T01:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T01:45:09","slug":"it-felt-like-a-salmon-last-weekends-unscathed-shark-incident-survivor-says-it-was-actually-kinda-cool-lost-coast-outpost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/782902\/","title":{"rendered":"It Felt Like a Salmon: Last Weekend’s Unscathed Shark Incident Survivor Says It Was Actually Kinda Cool | Lost Coast Outpost"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Eric Gurney with his board. Photos by Dezmond Remington.<\/p>\n

PREVIOUSLY<\/p>\n

###<\/p>\n

A little less than three years after Eric Gurney was born, Jaws came out. It\u2019s still a special effects masterpiece, even if the prop shark looks a little cheesy now. It often malfunctioned, and Spielberg didn\u2019t end up giving it all that much screen time. He created the film\u2019s atmosphere by using cinematic tricks that forced viewers to assume the shark was nearby: a dorsal fin gliding uninhibited through glassy ocean water, buoyant yellow barrels dragged over the surface \u2014 a swimmer, one second there, the next, gone. The duh-duns. Less is more. The movie was better for it. Spielberg ended up being grateful for the shark\u2019s wonky idiosyncrasies.<\/p>\n

The film grossed $475 million and Universal greenlit another, Jaws 2, which wasn\u2019t nearly as good. Didn\u2019t matter. Eric can\u2019t remember how he wound up in the theater watching it, sometime around when he turned six years old, and it terrified him. He quit swimming, even in pools. Soon after, the nightmares started. Eric would see he and his brother sleeping in their beds, and the viewpoint would pan around the room. Water would start gushing out of a pool drain in between their beds and the room would fill up. Cue the duh-duns \u2014 and WHAM the shark crashes through the door, and Eric is forced to swim for safety, to the basement, to a closet, maybe to a cupboard.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The shark was always a metaphor for something scaring him, Eric had long ago decided. It often changed forms: sometimes the shark had two dorsal fins, or no head. Trauma became a shark. Loved ones dying became a shark. After escaping so many sharks in dreamland, Eric began to think he\u2019d someday have to deal with a real one. A surfer for decades, all the time he spent in the water didn\u2019t dissolve that impression.<\/p>\n

Probably millions of people watched Jaws and lost the ability to swim without thinking about killers underneath them, convinced that if they went into the ocean a shark would nab them, and pretty much all of them have been wrong. Eric wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

###<\/p>\n

Eric hadn\u2019t eaten breakfast yet when he and a friend paddled out last Sunday morning. They were out a little later than they\u2019d planned to be; finding a beach with the right surf had taken about an hour or so, and they wound up at Moonstone Beach at around 8:30. The waves weren\u2019t huge, but the lineup was full. Eric recognized several of the other surfers out there, some by name, some just by their face.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s been surfing for around four decades, but he\u2019s now in his 50s, and if he\u2019s out longer than an hour or so it starts to hurt. He wears a watch to keep track of time, and he saw it\u2019d been close to an hour and a half. All right, he thought, one more and I\u2019m going in. Eric waited for another set to roll in, sitting on his bodyboard, a surfboard about the length of his torso. It doesn\u2019t have any fins on the bottom; for extra propulsion, he wore a pair of flippers on his feet. He didn\u2019t have much on his mind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fifteen minutes before, he and his friend, Tony, had noticed a few seals hanging out further asea. They liked seeing seals when they surf, Eric told the Outpost during an interview earlier this week. The seals make them feel comfortable, \u201cbecause they\u2019re lovely,\u201d he said, \u201cand because that\u2019s what sharks like to eat. They\u2019re not gonna go for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The seals disappeared, and Tony said he saw a strange splash. It didn\u2019t look like a seal\u2019s; it was larger than the kind of splashes seals make, and besides, seals are so graceful they hardly splash at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Dude, it\u2019s July. Don\u2019t worry about sharks,\u2019\u201d Eric said. They\u2019re usually more of a threat during colder months, when they migrate back towards the coast from the open ocean. \u201c\u2018They never \u2014 that\u2019s not \u2018til the fall.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

They got back to it. Eric waited. The water was placid and dark, the sky grey and the sun hidden. The board started to vibrate, rock back and forth \u2014 Eric was confused. Am I sitting on a rock? he wondered. It stopped, abruptly, and Eric pushed himself up to see what was happening. His legs dangled in the ocean, his head careened over it. He saw a silhouette. All black. It came into view, and he could see the whole body, top-down, swimming six feet beneath him, tail fin, dorsal, snout, turning in a long arc back towards him \u2014 a shark, 10 feet long. The upper half of its tail fin was folded over, and Eric watched it snap to attention, like a sail unfurling in the wind, and begin to ascend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s coming up around my right, he thought, and he moved as far left as he could, the left half of his body hanging off of the board in the sea. Eric had only his right hand keeping hold of the board as the shark rose, cutting a sharp angle perpendicular to his board, just underneath it, and it breached the surface. He saw its back to the left of his board; he didn\u2019t look at the head on his right. Something told him not to. Eric shifted. The shark curled upwards and bit \u2014 Eric put his free hand on its back, balancing, the follow in a dance no human has ever led. It jerked the board, got a mouthful of foam with a dash of wetsuit polypropylene, released the board, thrashed away from him, and disappeared.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It felt like a salmon, Eric said. He knew that texture. It calmed him. He was calm for no time at all before he completely understood what had happened in the last 10 seconds, and he started swimming for shore, overwhelmed with panic, arms and legs churning the water, still still. If it comes back, he thought, I have no more leverage. I\u2019m totally in the water. If it comes back to bite, I\u2019m going to get bit. He made it to the beach, and the other freaked-out half-dozen surfers who had seen the incident came in too. They hit the beach almost simultaneously.<\/p>\n


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Triangular bite marks in the board.<\/p>\n

He was fine. The board had a perfect negative of a shark\u2019s mouth in it, about 10 inches in diameter; his wetsuit, a small tear. None of its teeth broke his skin. Eric and Tony hung out for another half-hour or so on the beach. People wanted to tell him they were glad he was OK. And they wanted photos of the board. He met a guy who claimed he was with the Coast Guard, who took a few and said he\u2019d report the incident. (Eric later contacted the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who sent him a lengthy incident report to fill out.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

They left and went to eat breakfast in McKinleyville, but before that they stood in the parking lot for a minute.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d Tony said. \u201cJuly, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n

###<\/p>\n

Eric made his peace with the incident quickly. He and Tony talked it out over breakfast, and then he saw his girlfriend and hashed it out some more. He went back home, to Eureka, later.<\/p>\n

So far as almost getting mauled goes, it was a pretty great experience, he said. He\u2019s glad he didn\u2019t look at its face when it made its move on his board. He has several friends who have had similar experiences; one of them described what he saw as a trash barrel full of teeth with water pouring into it right next to him. \u201cI mean, if I saw that next to me,\u201d he said, \u201chow would you \u2014 how would you go to sleep then?!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eric is proud of how he reacted, staying calm, moving to the right place out of harm\u2019s way without hesitation. Decades of surfing made moving around the board a simple instinct. A newbie maybe would have frozen, he said, put their weight in the wrong place and fallen off. He said he\u2019s heard some people have survived their shark encounters by fighting, jabbing their fingers in its eyeballs, punching its sensitive snout. He\u2019s just glad he avoided being injured. His friend who saw the toothy trash can didn\u2019t get bit, but another acquaintance of his, Scott Stephens, survived a serious one <\/a>in 2012. The shark raked its teeth along his torso, but it avoided his arteries. He still surfs. If Eric had had an experience more like Scott\u2019s, he said, he would be in the hospital rueing his response. Only a tiny handful of people to ever live have gone through what Eric did, and he\u2019s grateful to experience the privilege, but only because he was uninjured. He doesn\u2019t want to experience that again.<\/p>\n

He harbors no ill will towards that shark nor its cousins at-large. It was just doing what it was designed to do, he said, exploring for a potential meal with its mouth. It didn\u2019t make him feel like a prey animal, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a situation where you are reminded of what we don\u2019t want to be reminded of,\u201d Eric said. \u201cIn that moment, you don\u2019t have an ego, you don\u2019t have a name, you don\u2019t have a number. You\u2019re not really a member of civilization. You\u2019re just a biological organism. You\u2019re just a creature in the wild, with other creatures who are a lot bigger and stronger than you are, and that\u2019s our situation on Earth. It\u2019s just that we cover it up with civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s always wanted to touch a shark \u2014 preferably from a boat while it feeds on a whale carcass or something, but this will do. It was \u201cspiritual,\u201d he said, and he was surprised by its similarity to a fish. A friend told him if he\u2019d stroked it the other way, it would have felt rough. But he got the smooth side and it kept him calm. He doesn\u2019t fish much anymore, but he used to frequently. \u201cI have nothing but positive associations with fish,\u201d Eric said. \u201c\u2026And that touch, what was being communicated through that touch, was really powerful too. At the time, I wouldn\u2019t \u2014 I didn\u2019t have any words, right? But just the thought, of fish, and all of the positive associations with that, and it just gave this current, of \u2018Ah, it\u2019s okay to be calm.\u2019 Like, \u2018This is a fish. It\u2019s a really, really big fish, but it\u2019s not going to hurt you. You\u2019re going to be okay.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of that, of course, he came up with later. The feeling was there; the words were not. Eric is a writer, and clarifying an experience by assigning words to it is a process he\u2019s carried out many times. \u201cWhen I\u2019m telling, like, describing it all, it\u2019s a little bit, um, it\u2019s a little bit false,\u201d Eric said, \u201cbecause I\u2019m putting all these words to this after the fact, and in the moment, it was just, like \u2014 it was just something that happened so immediately. And there\u2019s no words.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut that\u2019s what we do,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe\u2019re human beings. We tell stories to ourselves and to each other. That\u2019s who we are. So that\u2019s my story right now. It could change, but it feels right.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shark had done him a favor. Eric had been certain for so long that he\u2019d one day have to deal with a real shark, in a real ocean, not a psychological monster lurking as a metaphor. Now, he said, the loop had been closed. He didn\u2019t have a shark dream all week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Gurney with his board. Photos by Dezmond Remington. PREVIOUSLY ### A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":782903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[79],"class_list":["post-782902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}