Shark alert: Surfer Daniel Caban ‘rattled’ by close encounter off Caves Beach
Daniel Caban surfed the waves in Newcastle totally oblivious to the 3.5m great white shark sharing the beach close by.
NSW
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TALK about timing.
Moments before this amazing photograph was taken yesterday afternoon off Caves Beach, south of Newcastle, surfer Daniel Caban was paddling furiously onto a wave.
Little did he know that a 3.5m great white shark was about to explode from the water, right where he had just been.
The 20-year-old university student was gloriously oblivious to the predator in his midst, even after it breached so spectacularly behind the breakers, until people on shore started yelling and waving at him to come in.
“It was just me and one other guy out there,” he said yesterday, shortly after his close encounter.
“A big set came through; he got the first one and I got the second one, but neither of us had any idea what happened.
“We were probably about 50m offshore and the shark came out of the water right where we would have been sitting if we hadn’t got our waves.
“I’ve never seen a shark in the water before. Everyone else around here has their shark stories, but I’d never seen one. I guess I still haven’t, but I’ve definitely got a story now.”
Mr Caban said the gravity of what happened still hadn’t quite sunk in.
“Give me a couple of days and I might go back out, but right now I’m just a bit rattled,” he said.
The spectacle occurred about 2pm at the south end of Caves Beach, near the entrance to Lake Macquarie.
Fellow surfer Nathan McLaren, who captured the image, said people on shore had spotted a shark earlier in the day breaching close by.
“I was taking a sequence of shots of him (Mr Caban) surfing a wave and all of a sudden this shark just came right out of the water,” he said.
“Everyone was in a bit of shock, saying: ‘Did that really just happen’, but I went back through the photos and there it was. It jumped out of the water about a metre and I would say it would have been at least 3.5m long.”
Mr McLaren said he had seen sharks in the area before, but it did not deter him from heading in for a surf.
Southern Cross University shark researcher Dr Daniel Bucher said great white sharks had been clocked swimming at more than 30km/h in the swim up to a full breach.
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