Huge great white shark spotted swimming near surfers in Pismo Beach. See the video
After surfing for 34 years, David Steiner knows he's not alone in the ocean.
The idea of creatures lurking beneath the waves used to freak him out. But now, the Arroyo Grande resident is a bit of a shark enthusiast — and he captures drone footage of the 'king of the ocean' whenever he can.
In April, he took videos of great white sharks swimming near Oceano and Pismo Beach. He posted the videos on his Instagram @caveman_476.
One video shows a massive shark slowly cruising through the shallow waters off Pismo Beach as surfers wait to catch waves nearby.
'They're definitely seasonal, and they're back in town,' he said.
Seeing the sharks on video and understanding their habits eased his fears about encountering them.
'I started really watching what they were doing, and they were just ignoring surfers completely,' Steiner said. 'That kind of helps my mentality with staying in the water.'
In 2022, he saw an 8-foot-long shark and a 10-foot-long shark swimming together, and he sailed closer to check them out.
'It's kind of surreal, because, you know you probably shouldn't be tempting fate,' Steiner said. 'But it's too hard to not take the opportunity to just have a longer glance at them.'
Normally, he sees sharks swimming out past the furthest waves. When the waves are tall, the sharks travel deeper into the ocean. When the surf is flat, sharks swim about 100 feet from shore, he said.
'They're just like the perfect creature,' he said. 'They're so still. Like, when I had one just right next to me, I didn't know it was there, and then I realized, we never know they're there.'
Back in April, Steiner said his friend was chased out of the water by a great white shark between Pier Avenue and Grand Avenue in Oceano.
So on April 16, Steiner packed up his drone and set out to find the shark.
'I flew it up and immediately saw it,' he said.
For three days, the shark swam to the same spot at 10:45 a.m. Steiner suspected that the shark was hunting for fish in the rip current.
Steiner then took the drone to Pismo Beach on his 49th birthday. On April 21, he spotted a 12-foot-long shark that he called Big Mama.
'I swear to God, this thing's body was so fat, I thought it was somebody's boat. I thought it was an orca. And then when I saw it was a great white, I was trembling,' he said.
The shark swam near a group of surfers, and Steiner started to worry.
'I have tried flying my drone in people's faces, and they don't react anyway,' he said. 'They wave you off, they don't know what you're trying to tell them. There's no speaker.'
Steiner moved his drone above the shark, and luckily, the surfers paddled to shore. When he later posted the video on Instagram, a surfer messaged him and said when he saw the drone, he decided to stop surfing for the day just in case there was a shark nearby.
Steiner had a message for swimmers on the Central Coast: 'Don't be afraid of the water,' he said. 'The lack of incidents proves to me that they're not interested.'
Steiner recounted an incident in 2019, when a shark approached his paddle board in the water off Oceano.
He paddled out about 100 feet from shore, then spotted a 13-foot-long great white shark beside him in the water.
'It popped up right in front of me, and it was bigger than my board,' he said.
Then, the shark darted through the water — leaving not a ripple on the surface of the ocean.
'It turned, made a U-turn, and it came to the other side of me and stopped,' he said.
A wave rocked the paddle board, and Steiner fell into the water, landing in the patch of ocean where the shark had just appeared.
'I was just waiting to get bit,' Steiner said, but the shark swam away — uninterested in him.
To calm himself down, Steiner visualized the videos he'd seen of sharks swimming around surfers without interest. He figured that sharks swim near humans every day without taking a bite.
San Luis Obispo County's last recorded fatal great white shark attack happened near Morro Rock in 2021. Before that, only two fatal shark attacks had been recorded in recent history, one in Morro Bay in 1957 and another in Avila Beach in 2003.
Considering the number of non-lethal shark encounters that occur regularly, Steiner doesn't worry too much about the big fish. In fact, when he's windsurfing, Steiner will sometimes approach sharks to get a closer look.
'You just, kind of, ride with them and watch them swim. They're not concerned with you,' he said. 'They're just, like, the king of the ocean.'
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