So today my family and I are down at the beach. I and my wife are sitting in our chairs, or back and forth in the surf with the kids. At one point, a life guard comes riding down the beach on an atv, whistle blowing, waving everyone out of the water. ‘What is it?’ I wonder. I see a handful of park rangers coming down to the beach, so I walked up to one of them and asked what was going on, thinking she would say something like jellyfish or rip current. Nope. It wasn’t either one of those. She told me someone spotted what may have been a fin up north of us.
Now I’m thinking ‘Come ON!’. I figured someone probably has been watching shark week on Discovery Channel, got a little over excited at an oddly shaped wave, and let their imagination run wild. So I sit back down in my chair. Now, my chair is about four feet away from the edge of the water. And right in front of us, in ankle deep water, appeared a six foot black tip shark! I’m talking ankle deep water. It just thrashed its way right up onto the sand, chilled for about three seconds, then thrashed its way back into the hellish depths from whence it came.
To say we were startled is a tad bit of an understatement. Needless to say, we were done playing in the water for the day. Possibly for the rest of our lives.