Anyone put this on their boards. Looks like it is based on science, but seems like you are guarding against a million to 1 event. Pretty cooling though. Might be worth the $30 just for the graphics aspect.
Latelifer - haven’t tried it but there was a thread on it a few months ago as I recall. Have a look in the archives.
Jeff
Found the post, thanks. Pretty intense post.
I guess my next question is: Will it look cool on a board in NJ, or look lame?
We are warned to avoid murky water, early morning and late afternoon sessions as these seem to be when sharks feed. Given too that their eyesight is not good (I don’t think anything in the ocean is much of a visual predator, mammals aside) the effect of visual deterrence can’t be that great.
Generally speaking the probabilities of a shark attack on a particular person, other things being equal, are very small. It is literally and obviously more likely that you’ll die in a car accident (40,000 Americans per year) than a shark situation.
If you wanna paint your stick, go ahead, but don’t be telling people it’s a shark repellent pattern. Who’s gonna test it? You? I can see it now: the next time whitey is cruising your local spot, all your buds will nominate you to get those empty waves. Gonna do it? Not me, I’ll watch you.
I’m no shark expert by any means, and I certainly don’t intend to be a killjoy.
This thought came to mind reading the advertising blurb , though …
DOES having a picture on the bottom of your board , when you see a fifteen or tweny foot white pointer’s dorsal slicing through the water twenty feet away from you , somehow prevent you from being afraid / emitting ‘fear vibes’ [for want of a better term] into the water ?
Because , if thirty bucks can stop you being afraid, I’m sure we’d all be signing on the line already…
just my .02, is all
ben
ps- I also had a bit of a chuckle at the photo taken from under the water [‘what a shark sees’ ??], showing the board all lit up ,so you can see the pattern painted on the bottom of the board. hahahaha ! [Last time I checked, shark’s weren’t strapping cameras with electronic flashes around their …er… ‘necks’ , and going, “… oh, LOOK dear, you can see in the light…THAT one’s got a ‘shark camouflage pattern’ painted on HIS board, we’d better not attack HIM , then !!” ] hahahaha … if it was Australia, and this ad came out in the April 1st issue of ‘Tracks’, then, well…
SHARK CAMO,
I tried to get Surfer or Surfing mags to acknoweledge my attempts at this some 10 years ago.I never got a reply.
Now it’s the rage!
You want to know what is the best anti-shark repellent is…
…Don’t eat shark or alot of seafoods before you surf.Herb
I put one of these on a board for a kid last year. Not sure if it really made him feel safer or he just liked the design. Either way he has not been bit yet but neither have I ride with a picture of a wounded seal on the bottom of my board!
Why would a picture of a roadkill Zebra deter a shark?
And, according to a book I’m reading, The Shark Chronicles, Whitey has really good vision, possibly even sees colors.
Kevlar wetsuits are the way to go. We’d all surf like Devo, but surely be spit out by a curious shark.
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Generally speaking the probabilities of a shark attack on a particular person, other things being equal, are very small. It is literally and obviously more likely that you'll die in a car accident (40,000 Americans per year) than a shark situation.
No. This is a misunderstanding of probability statistics.
It’s true that the average person is much more likely to die in a car crash than suffer a shark attack. This is because, while most everyone drives and therefore has a pretty equal chance of the car crash, the vast majority of people, say 99.9% of people have an absolute zero chance of a shark attack because they never, ever go into the water. We surfers are often in the water so we have a decently high chance of shark encounter.
So…The proper way to compare these two events is not by the number of deaths each activity has each year for the entire population, but by number of encounters per hour spent doing the activity.
In the last three days alone there have been sharks spotted at Wadell Creek twice and a board bitten at Pismo Pier. I hear of at least 50 encounters a year. (and i’m not trying to hear this stuff). So, to come up with a statistic of when it might be useful to have some sort of shark camo (if the stuff works or not is another question), you add up all the surfers in california and all the times they went surfing. Let’s say it’s 2mil surf sessions a year in california, and 50 shark events. So that’s your odds. 1 in every 40,000 times surfing you will encounter a shark to some extent.
Now take that car death statistic and figure that 250mil Americans make an average of say 3 trips by car/bus per day and that’s 273billion car trips and from that you get your 40,000 deaths. or 1 in every 6.8million car trips you will die in an accident.
You would have to have real numbers for number of surf sessions, shark encounters, and trips in a car to get the real probability. But you can see how a surfer is probably more likely to see a shark than he is to die in a car crash.
shark camo…i just float like a turd…that keeps everyone away
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shark camo…i just float like a turd…that keeps everyone away
Every one except surfers at the superbank! have you tried it?
Josh.
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Quote:shark camo…i just float like a turd…that keeps everyone away
Every one except surfers at the superbank! have you tried it?
Josh.
ummm… I think he might have Josh… did you see where Cheyne lives ?
No, at the superbank you wouldn’t float LIKE a turd to keep the crowds away… you’d have to eliminate the word ‘like’ to do that… and even then , I doubt EVERYONE would leave the water. [see attached for plan B, though !]
'oooh ... that's a stinky idea chip'
… puts a whole 'nother slant on ‘taking the drop’, don’t it ??
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No. This is a misunderstanding of probability statistics.
It’s true that the average person is much more likely to die in a car crash than suffer a shark attack. This is because, while most everyone drives and therefore has a pretty equal chance of the car crash, the vast majority of people, say 99.9% of people have an absolute zero chance of a shark attack because they never, ever go into the water. We surfers are often in the water so we have a decently high chance of shark encounter.
Here is an interesting statistic:
In the book “Great White Shark” ( Richard Ellis and John McCosker, 1991. Harper-Collins publishers), they list 114 documented “credible” attacks worldwide by Great White sharks between 1926 and 1990 (not counting attacks on abalone divers). Among those 114 attacks, there are two persons who have been attacked twice–one in South Africa (surfer), one on the west coast of the USA (diver). Obviously both survived the first attack. The surfer in South Africa was killed on the second attack; the diver survived both attacks.
Sounds to me as though the odds are pretty high (e.g. ~ 1/60 during your lifetime) if one surfs/dives in an area in which Great Whites are common.
If ya don’t want to die from a shark attack, don’t go in the water.
If you do surf, and know there’s a shark about, (s)he can’t kill you if you’re already on the beach, so leave the water.
No statistics there, just common sense certainty.
That said… I have been surfing Diamond Head (Lighthouse) for 34 years. When I started, we’d never see sharks. Maybe 15 years into it, we started to see 'em; it got to the point where you’d see a shark 3 out of 4 times in the water. Blacktips, whitetips, once a largish hammerhead, mostly unidentified. You’d only see them on the surface or in a wave face, but there was no mistaking what you’d see. Lately, they’re still around but not seen as commonly, but in the last few months they have certainly been seen many times, so the “man in the gray suit” is still in the neighborhood.
It became apparent that for every time you’d see a shark, they’d probably seen you or recognized that you were in the water, many times over. Still, to my knowledge, no one has been bitten, or even harassed in any significant way, in all those 34 years.
So it becomes apparent, at least at Lighthouse, that the probabilities of an attack are very, very slim. Everyone has realized this, and for years now no one bothers to leave the water, move inside, or even pull up their feet (not that this does any good if you’re on a 6’2").
So what? Well, most of the time you’re gonna be okay, UNLESS it’s a large tiger or white shark. That’s all I can say from personal experience.
I watched a documentary where divers were flashing these large ‘cards’ that were colored with the markings of killer whales and when the whiteys saw these they instantly veered away. These cards had larger colors though. I dont think that a white shark that can reach speeds fast enough to breach will pick out the contours of a thumb print, as indicated in the pic on that board.
It just seems that for the $4 cost of some paint I could just do the design myself. What do I have to lose as long as I am decorating the board myself anyway?
an hour making a stencil for this would go a long way.
I’m not against the shark camo, but the owner/?? has been
in this group, in the past, representing it as scientifically valid and then
quotes personal experience but no scientific test.
He also mentions an old Cousteau movie where they are
shaking a similarly decorated Zebra Sea Snake at a shark(presumably a small shark)
and it goes away --as Scientific proof.
I saw one of those shark cowboy type scientists on the discovery channel a few years ago dicussing one of the side effects of long line fishing and drift netting. With the widespread use of long lines and drift netting, the world’s population of large pelagic tuna is decreasing quickly. When it gets really low, this guy says whitey will have to find a new favorite meal. He seemed to think that attacks at the beach would rise as the tuna decline.
Christian
Here’s the real deal. Wear a Polar Bear or Ape costume when you surf. Sharks don’t eat Polar Bears or Apes, when was the last time you heard of a Polar Bear getting attacked by a shark??? See mystery solved.
-Jay