"Wanna go for a ride?"
When a great white shark is hungry, there’s nothing off limits. Great whites leap into research boats and attack fishing boats when they want food. Great whites even attack other sharks when it’s feeding time, so a surfer is nothing more than a light snack to the average shark. Doug Niblack knows this first hand. Niblack was surfing in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Seaside, Oregon, when he encountered a great white shark. Niblack was knocked off his surfboard by the monster, but he’s unharmed because of his great instincts. Doug Niblack managed to surf on the back of the shark to get to safety.
“It was pretty terrifying just seeing the shape emerge out of nothing and just being under me, and the fin coming out of the water. It was just like the movies,” said a shaken Niblack. “I’m just screaming bloody murder. I’m just yelling, ‘Shark!’ I thought for sure I was gone.”
Niblack was not gone. The shark knocked him from his longboard and dragged him by his ankle tether, but in a miracle story of survival, the shark was under the board when it went and Niblack was able to stand on the back of the shark. The ride was only a few seconds long–four at the most–but that was long enough for Niblack to make a getaway once the shark sank back beneath the surface of the water in an attempt to come back around to finish its meal of surfer.
Such shark rides are rare, but not unprecedented. In 2008, a woman kayaking off the coast of Catalina Island, California, went for a shark ride after one of the great fish attacked her kayak. She was thrown from the boat, but landed on the shark’s back. She jumped to safety before the shark swam out to sea.
Tags: unusual events, surfing, man surfs on shark, surfer rides shark, great white shark, surfer rides great white shark, man survives shark attack by riding shark, Oregon man rides shark, Doug Niblack, Seaside, Oregon, stories of survival, shark riding
