Nicaragua Black Board & Sharks

[canage1970]

Has any one surfed Nicaragua? I am going at the end of this May of this year and I have a Black Carbon Fiber board. Do I have any worries having a black board and potentially looking like a seal? I am open to renting a board but not sure of the selections... Would truly appreciate any advice... What are the dangers in Nicaragua??? Thanks Jason

[jaffa1949]

No seal, except a corrupt ex navy one. The main problem for a black carbon fibre board in Nicaragua will be solar damage if you leave it in the sun. It won't take long.

As for shark standard risk from tiger sharks and bull Sharks in tropical waters. Your silhouette will look like a deformed turtle and the Sharks might have heard about seals and will bite to see what is on the menu !

Take standard precautions and worry more about the Latino driving antics

Have fun!

[waikikikichan]

You can have a neon green board with hot pink polka dots that when it is back lit from the sun looks black. Everything viewed from way under looks black. Just surf next to a bodyboarder, they look more like seals or turtles.

[BaNZ]

You can have a neon green board with hot pink polka dots that when it is back lit from the sun looks black. Everything viewed from way under looks black. Just surf next to a bodyboarder, they look more like seals or turtles.

and what if you see a shark? Knock the bodyboarder unconscious and swim for your life?

[Jester]

Paint a glow in the dark all-seeing eye on the bottom, sharks are scared of the illuminati!!

[oldmansurfer]

If you see a shark don't swim like a wounded fish.

[peazz]

Simple fact is that if you are above a shark and he is below you, YOU ARE FOOD no matter what your shape is.

[oldmansurfer]

I have been above sharks and was not on their menu. I think sharks mostly don't consider people a food item but if they are hungry or chasing some other food item and come across a surfer they may think you are their food. Most humans bitten are not consumed by the sharks they just take a taste. Apparently sharks don't like our taste.....usually

[BaNZ]

My theory is that if I'm on a longboard, they probably think I'm a bigger shark and won't get close.

[Jester]

"We're gonna need a bigger board"

[Jester]

Wonder if anyone has any statistics on shark attack numbers vis a vis short boarders/long boarders?!

My thinking is that we're in their habitat. If you went to the Serengeti and got out of your land rover near a pack of lions you might just get bit once or twice! Chances are they'd leave you alone depending on how hungry they were, how threatening you appeared to be, if they had young in the area, if you smelled funny. Think the thing with sharks is, we'd just like to know if they were there or not to be able to act accordingly!

Jester's idea - boards with inbuilt sonar that alerts with an led light when there's anything bigger than a few feet moving around underneath ya! Of course..sharks are attracted to electrical pulses

[oldmansurfer]

Here is something I wrote about sharks a while back....

Growing up on Kauai provided me many encounters with sharks. Early on I recall helping with the hukilau on Wailua beach. We spent a lot of time on Wailua beach swimming, body surfing and sand sliding never seeing a shark. However there were sharks present every time there was a hukilau. Hukilaus are where people drag a net out around a school of fish and drag the surrounded school up on the shore. Every time they did this there were one or more sharks. There were always a couple guys whose job was to let the sharks out of the net before they tore it up. They would swim along the outside of the net sort of chasing the sharks waiting till they were close to the net. Then they would lift up the net to let the shark out and if it obliged they would jump over the net to the inside. Then they may jump back out because their was another shark in the net. I always thought they were crazy or brave but they never seemed to get hurt. Sometimes numerous akule ( the fish they usually surrounded) would escape and the shark would refuse to go out of the net. In those cases they would pull in the net part way then double it up and drag the shark(s) in then grab them and toss them over the net before dragging it all the way up on the beach. I was still scared of them but realized there was a way to live somewhat in harmony with them.



I ran into sharks diving a couple of times. Once I was skin diving at Salt pond and swam around a rock only to have a shark swim right in front of me. I did my imitation of Jesus and walked across the water back to the beach. Another time I was night diving with friends. We were just going out and I had a waterproof flashlight so I swam out shining ahead of me suddenly the body of a shark was right in front of me. I turned around and went back to the shore and that was my last attempt at night diving. Once when I was learning to surf I was at Kalapaki and swam to the bottom to see how deep it was where I was trying to figure out why the waves were breaking in that area. I never got to the bottom as a huge fish likely a shark swam directly in front of me. I shot back up to the surface flying out of the water and landing on my board.



Body surfing at Breneckes beach I saw sharks on a few occasions. My initial reaction was to swim like crazy to the shore. One day I did just that after seeing a large shark going sideways in a wave. When I got to the safety of the shore I turned around to look for it. There was a guy standing right next to me who appeared to be doing the same thing and he asked me "Did you see it?" I said "yeah I saw it, did you?" and we talked about what to do now since there were several people still out there with the shark. He convinced me that swimming frantically was the wrong action to take and that perhaps doing nothing was the more wise action since yelling "shark" as I usually did made everyone get excited and swim erratically to the shore which was more likely to draw the attention of a shark. We decided to not say anything to the others and no one was hurt by the shark. I changed my behavior around them and swam strongly but with minimal splashing to the shore. Once at Brenneckes I saw a shark tail up in the air obviously snacking on something on the bottom well to the side of everyone. I got out of the water and approached as close as I could from the safety of the shoreline but could not make out what it was feeding on. There was no blood in the water so I figured it wasn't a human. At Brenneckes I learned to tell the difference between a shark and a porpoise fin. Porpoise fins were somewhat curved along the back edge of the fin and sharks were more triangular.



I ran into sharks a lot surfing. Where I learned to surf at Kealia beach you could see sharks riding the waves when they were at around 4 to 6 feet (8 to 10 foot faces). On one occasion I was surfing alone at Kealia and a carload of mainlanders arrived and they came out to surf with me. Turns out they came directly from the airport and saw me having a good time and couldn't believe that waves that good could have only one guy out. Anyway the waves were in that range at about 4 to 5 feet where you could see the sharks riding in the waves. I took off on one wave and there was a shark in that wave which seemed to persist riding it longer than most do but I didn't think anything of it and took off anyway. I had a great ride, getting tubed a couple times and paddled back out. One of the mainlanders paddled over to me I thought to congratulate me on such a great ride which it was but instead he asked me a question. "Did that fish get you?" No clue what he was talking about I answered "What?" He said "Did that fish in that wave get you? When you took off it turned and went straight for your feet. I could have sworn it got you." I was astounded and responded "That was a shark." He asked "A baby shark?" I said "No just a small shark. Probably a gray reef shark and they don't grow real big." I decided I had enough surf and went in for the day. I think something about the new guys was attractive to the shark so it was behaving differently.



On another occasion I was out surfing alone and the only other person there was a guy was fishing on the beach. It was a beautiful day and the waves were small but really nice and while I had to wait for sets there was no competition so I caught all the waves I wanted. I was in between sets waiting for waves to come in and I noticed some movement in the water below me. A shark swam directly under my surfboard. The water was so clean I could see it was a white tip shark. I was amazed and thinking it was just as long as my surfboard (7 feet) when I realized my legs were below the board along with the shark. I pulled my legs out and put them over the board and looked around but never saw the shark again. I decided again it was time to go in. I asked the fisherman if he caught sharks there and he said he didn't and asked if I saw one. Yep sure did. I guess maybe that shark was attracted to the fisherman's bait.



I used to surf at Kalapaki and got to know the crew there. They had a routine for shark sightings which seemed odd to me. If someone saw a shark (fin) then they would scream "shark!" and everyone would go in. They would stay on the shoreline for at least 30 minutes after the last time someone saw the shark (fin). This system struck me as particularly odd since sharks rarely had their fins out of the water so not seeing a fin wasn't a good indicator of the absence of sharks. I finally decided to just stay out since it was the only way I would get the waves to myself. I did this same behavior at Wailua and Hanalei and Kalihiwai and anywhere I surfed. I figured if it stayed out of the break like they usually did I wasn't going to worry about them but if I saw sharks close up then I left the water for the day (not 30 minutes) since the shark is behaving abnormally since they usually stay out of the break. I saw sharks frequently at Pakalas and they always seemed to stay out of the break but the turtles would pop out of the water right next to me and scare the crap out of me.



The scariest shark encounter I had was when I was kneeboarding with surfer friends at Hideaways. I got to the water first and went out and swam about about 30 yards only to see the hugest shark fin I had ever seen in my life. It was headed directly toward me and suddenly I saw the head was a yard wide and quickly went through options. I could try to out swim it but was sure it would win that race, I could swim toward it but that was crazy, I could swim to the left over the shallow wana (spiny sea urchin) riddled reef but I would likely get injured and bleed maybe not a good thing with a shark nearby so the only reasonable option was to go to the right out into to open ocean and so I did. I swam strongly but not erratically. I never saw the shark again. My friends paddled out and I was yelling at them not to come out and that there was a shark and they yelled back that the break was the other way and paddled out regardless of my warning. So I joined them but made sure I kept most of them between me and the open sea. I kept counting them to be sure none got eaten and none did.



Another close encounter I had was at Mahelona Bay. My friend Mark invited me to go with him. This was my second time to that break. You had to walk over seaweed covered boulders and jump off them to get into the water. I was doing that and slipped rolling down the side of a huge seaweed covered boulder into the water. I figured what they heck no worse for wear and paddled out like normal hoping no one would notice my fall. The waves were small and the water was clean and I could see sharks swimming very rapidly past me. This was very unusual behavior. Sharks are usually cruising when I see them in the surf but these guys were speeded up and acting aggressive. Initially I wasn't sure if they were sharks since they were so fast but after a few encounters I was sure and asked Mark if he was seeing the sharks swimming real fast and he said he was and that we should go in so we did. We walked back to the car and his girlfriend who was waiting at the car started screaming something at us. I thought it sounded like she was saying "Should I call the ambulance?" Which didn't make sense. I asked Mark what she was saying and he said "Dave!!! Look at yourself!!" I looked down at my chest and I was bleeding all over the place. Apparently when I fell in the water I got scratched but didn't notice and was bleeding. The ocean washed it away so I never noticed in the water but outside it accumulated so I looked like a war victim. This undoubtedly stimulated the sharks to act differently.



One other "shark encounter" I had was at Kalihiwai. I was surfing and the guys I was sharing the break with all went in. Someone mentioned a shark so I stayed out and surfed alone and looked around. Nothing for a while and I enjoyed the waves alone then way outside I saw a huge fin. This was really enormous sticking out of the water 3 to 4 feet approximately. I figured must be some weird shark and the fin was long and narrow and black so I thought I would have an easy time going through books to figure out what kind of shark it was. When I got home I tried to look up what kind of shark it was but it didn't match any of the sharks that I had pictures or descriptions of in books. A couple days later I was reading about whales in Hawaii and saw male killer whales had a fin just exactly like that one that I saw.

[Jester]

I'm glad I live in Ireland

[benjl]

I was surfing at a beach by myself on new years eve in the coromandel of NZ (most coasts in the upper north island are breeding grounds for sharks over the summer months).
I looked down the beach at some point and thought I saw a fin and possibly the back end of a shark about 30-40m away- it looked brownish though and it disappeared quickly though so I totally forgot about it and kept surfing for about another hour.

It wasn't until me and a few mates were out in the water the next day when all of a sudden the whole beach got told to evacuate due a shark sighting! I was chatting to the life gaurd and mentioned my experience the day before and he said that bronze whaler sharks have a brownish back and that it was probably what i saw around me the day prior!

Around this time a year or two ago a swimmer got eaten alive at the beach where I normally surf out at west. I often freak out a bit when the currents push me near the point where lots of fisherman are throwing bait off.

[BaNZ]

Sounds like there is too many sharks in Hawaii.

Unfortunately in Taiwan, all the sharks are now made into fish fin soups. So if there is any shark sightings, you will see a fleet of fishing boats after it.

[billie_morini]

Ol' Man,
love all your shark stories! This sentence is one of several that made me laugh out loud:

"I did my imitation of Jesus and walked across the water back to the beach."

Also enjoyed you named all the breaks. I got a map out to see where they are.

Thank you,
billie

[dtc]

Nice stories ol man

A guy was bitten just around the corner from where I often surf, but it turned out he had been spear fishing and got scared when the shark came too close and tried to hit it away. The shark got a bit defensive. It was a baby one anyway.

When I was learning to scuba dive we were all sitting on the bottom about maybe 10m down when a large shark swam straight above us. Just the thing when you are learning to dive ...

Obviously, as a lawyer I'm fairly immune because of the professional courtesy sharks have to show me

[jaffa1949]

The shark was a wobbegong The kid was a a smartass and poked it a number of times.
Pure self defence on the Sharks part

[oldmansurfer]

I forgot to mention one other false shark siting that may be encountered in Nicaragua that is a manta ray with it's wing tips up. It will appear to be two shark fins but they never change their side by side orientation. Here is a link to a picture of one
http://azoreswhales.blogspot.com/2013/10/manta-day.html I used to see them at Kalapaki long ago when I surfed there