The Return of Miss July

No, sorry, we're not talking about Playboy bunnies here. Miss July is a different kind of man-eater—an itinerant/resident white shark that seems to appear every year on the third week of July. A Clockwork Carcharodon carcharias, if you will.

I have dubbed this shark "Miss July," but I don't know if it's a female or even if this theory is true. So this July will be a test.

A few years ago, I wrote a pitch for a "Shark Week" show called White Sharks of Malibu. The story started in April 2004, when Britney Spears went public with Kevin Federline, and they were photographed canoodling (and illegally smoking cigarettes!) at Will Rogers State Beach, well within the Santa Monica Bay.

There were photos of the couple surrounded by a ring of paparazzi—an easy shark metaphor. But when the news helicopters came to check the scene, they hovered just offshore. And when they looked down, they saw baby white sharks dangerously close to the pop star and her intended.

The British tabloid Daily Star hyperbolized the whole incident.

"She shouted, 'Oh my God! Shark! Shark! I see a shark out there, someone help me,'" the tabloid reported. "But then she soon recovered her cool … she was heard to say, 'That was really scary. I was almost fish food.'"

White sharks close to popular beaches caused a secondary explosion of news. I got my explanation from Ralph Collier of the Shark Research Committee, who confirmed that female white sharks come to the Santa Monica Bay in the spring to give birth, then they leave the area to minimize cannibalism of the young sharks. The babies have to fend for themselves, and the spring grunions are an easy food source.

Britney Spears was just a start of this show, which had other facets: some fascinating, some tragic.

In his book Shark Attacks of the 20^th Century, from the Pacific Coast of North America, Collier detailed the mystery of UCLA students Tamara McAllister and Jeffrey Stoddard, who disappeared while kayaking off Latigo Beach in January 1989. Their kayaks were found lashed together, upside down, six kilometers off . The next day, McAllister’s body was found 10 kilometers off the Channel Islands Harbor.

The Ventura County medical examiner reported, "Tamara McAllister died from exsanguination, the result of massive tissue loss to the upper-left thigh and a traumatic wound to the upper-right thigh that severed the femoral artery and vein.”

Were Stoddard and McAllister blown out to sea by the strong winds, and then drowned trying to swim in? Or were they attacked by a white shark? The mystery was part of that pitch for White Sharks of Malibu.

A couple Octobers ago, Randy Wright caught a bit of fame as his camera captured a sequence of a juvenile white shark, seven to eight feet in length, breeching just off the juncture of PCH and Sunset—close enough to Gladstone’s to make diners drops their drinks. When I went into Santa Monica to talk to Wright at Horizon’s West Surf Shop (RIP), it turned out he was fascinated by the Stoddard and McAllister mystery, and had an impressive collection of photos, facts and video about the two doomed UCLA students.

Also in my proposed TV show was a section called "Close Encounters With Miss July." This starts with Malibu resident Vic Calandra getting jumped by a 14- to 16-foot white shark—a long, lonely mile off Corral Beach—while competing in the standup paddleboard division of the Tommy Zahn Memorial Paddleboard Race. Calandra was stroking along, heard a noise, turned, saw a fin and then ended up fearing for his life as a white shark began bumping his board and thrashing around.

"The shark was either going to eat me, or I was going to have to swim a mile to shore with a paddle in my hand and a shark in the water," Calandra said.

That close encounter ended happily as Calandra was saved by Joey Everett, now a Los Angeles County fire captain, who came to Calandra's rescue by ramming the shark with his Joe Bark paddleboard, and essentially beating it up.

And that close encounter happened on the third week of July in 2007. 

Two years later, on July 25, a headless seal washed up on a Malibu beach, and there were reports the seal was the victim of a large shark that had been spotted about a quarter mile from the shore around the same time.

Also that week, Malibu resident Dave Ogle was flying along the coast in a helicopter, filming another helicopter piloted by Simon Davis, owner of Elite Helicopter Tours. They were filming Davis' helicopter against a backdrop of famous Malibu landmarks. Davis was hovering his green chopper off when Ogle swooped out to sea, did a turn and then flew back toward land to get the shot. Looking down, Ogle saw something abnormally large in the water, about a quarter mile from the shore.

"It was too big for a dolphin, not big enough for a whale," Ogle said. "I knew right away what it was."

For several minutes, Ogle filmed clear video of a large white shark swimming placidly, not far from swimmers and surfers.

The day before Ogle videoed that white shark from above, the California Wildlife Center and its Marine Mammal Rescue team rescued a 400-pound adult male sea lion that was believed to have been a victim of the large shark swimming in Malibu's waters. 

"He was a huge sea lion, so the shark had to be very large," said Jonsie Ross from the Marine Mammal Rescue team. "It appears he [the shark] had him in his mouth down to his shoulders ... the sea lion somehow escaped."

The pitch for White Sharks of Malibu ends with local fashionista Blueberry paddling out to the shark tank the Monterey Aquarium used to place here in the fall. They no longer do that, but for a couple years, Blueberry paddled her standup paddleboard off the beach out to the tank and went for a swim inside with a baby white shark.

Gnarly!

I wrote this pitch about a year and a half ago, and nothing happened with it. But when I heard stories last summer that a white shark had been spotted jumping off The Point That Shall Not Be Named on the third week of July, I thought, “Hmm, maybe there is something to this Miss July deal. Can they really be that regular?”

I know enough about white sharks to know that some follow a regular migratory pattern that takes them from the California coast and into the Central Pacific and even all the way to Hawaii in the winter. They return to California in the spring, and make their way up the coast, ending up off the Farallon Islands in the fall.

I asked Collier if it's possible the same shark could be showing up off Malibu, not just in July, but specifically on the third week of July. He said it was possible:  

Some years ago, Scott Anderson and Peter Pyle recorded a large adult white shark that returned to the Farallon Islands during the same week over a five-year period. In the early 1970s, a group of fishermen ventured to Año Nuevo Island to fish every weekend over the course of the summer. They were met by the same white shark every week over a three-month period. This occurred over a span of four to five years. Photographs were taken of the animal and scarring on the head was the method used by the fishermen to identify the shark. The annual migration of many shark species brings them back to the same locations year after year. It is believed that these routes are learned behaviors, rather than genetically implanted in the shark.

So can you have a Miss July? Yes.

So, this July will be the test. Keep your eyes peeled toward the horizon, and also for what lies beneath.