Friday, February 05, 2010

Shark attack in Florida

As a former kitesurfer, I was even more interested upon hearing about a fatal shark attack yesterday in Florida. I don't know the details, but it seems that a young man was bitten by a shark while he was out kitesurfing. Read here. I have actually windsurfed in the area that he was bitten, and know that every year there are huge migrations of sharks off the Florida coast as they follow huge schools of biat fish. In fact, I saw sharks many times while i windsurfed up and down the East coast of Florida. The waters along the coast are usually very rich with bait fish and other predators. In the very murky waters that you find along that coastline it is very common for sharks to come into very close contact with people. That being said it is exceptionally rare for anyone to be killed. We won't know what happened but my guess is that he fell in and just happened to be in an area where a large feeding shark was looking for prey. It's a terribly sad event especially with only a few fatal shark attacks in the USA every 10 years. As you know if you read my blog, my most visited page is the one I wrote a few years ago about sharks here in the Caribbean. The Caribbean gets very few shark attacks and we have never had one happen around Antigua. Of course there are sharks in most parts of the tropics, but with the very clear waters they can see their target prey very easily. Read here for more about Antigua's dangers.