A drone operator who has spent two years scanning California waters for sharks captured the clearest footage of his life Wednesday morning when a nearly ten-foot great white glided directly beneath unsuspecting surfers in San Luis Obispo County.
Dave, the experienced drone pilot and surfer who filmed the encounter, has made a habit of hunting for the predators around the Pismo area from the air. On Wednesday, his patience delivered what he called the most striking vision of his long-running project.
“Hands down the most vivid, clear water shark encounter I have ever recorded… It’s 9’6″ long,” Dave wrote while posting the video to Instagram. The footage shows the massive fish swimming in shallow, clear water directly under the surfers’ boards before one of them got splashed in the face by the animal’s movement.
The surfer who took the splash appeared unharmed, and Dave expressed relief that the tense moment remained just that. He’s “happy it ended up just being a close encounter,” he said of the outcome.
The video’s clarity was so striking that some of Dave’s own friends questioned its authenticity when he shared it with them. One asked whether the footage had been AI-generated. Dave fired back with a reference to local witnesses: “How about ask the Pier Avenue crew if it’s real,” he added.
The encounter unfolded at Oceano in San Luis Obispo County, a stretch of Central California coastline that has seen repeated shark activity this week alone.
Earlier in the same week, a shark struck a fisherman off his kayak near Leffingwell Landing, also in San Luis Obispo County. The fisherman managed to climb back onto his kayak and attempted to paddle toward shore, but punctures in the hull caused the vessel to take on water and sink, forcing him to swim the remaining distance to safety, according to a statement from the Cambria Fire Department.
Dr. Chris Lowe of the California State University Long Beach Shark Lab reviewed photographs of the damaged kayak and concluded that “it was reasonable to assume the kayak had been struck by a shark.”
The back-to-back incidents mark an unusually active period for shark-human encounters in the region, with one interaction documented from above and another resulting in direct physical contact and equipment damage.