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They're not afraid to go back in the water
By THOMAS C. TOBIN
© St. Petersburg Times, DAYTONA BEACH -- It is Thursday afternoon, and Seabreeze High School is almost ready for the first big social event of the year.
It is easy to dream of the Atlantic Ocean, which, as the school's name suggests, is practically across street. But Jonny Legut is not dreaming. By 3:10 p.m. -- 30 minutes after the final bell -- the 17-year-old Seabreeze senior is perched on a dune above a favorite surfing spot about 2 miles north of school. The sun is powerless against glasses that hug his temples like sleek black orbs. The wind tugs at blond locks that dip and rise like choppy water. "There's not much that'll stop us," Legut says, shrugging at the scare that surfaced this week when eight surfers were bitten in five days by small sharks at nearby Ponce Inlet, one of the state's most popular surfing spots. A ninth person was bitten Saturday but was not seriously injured. Legut and his friends at Seabreeze High are part of a hard-core local surfing culture that is both annoyed and amused by last week's media reports, some from as far away as Spain, South Africa and Japan. For a surfer who sees sharks almost every day, the foreboding tone on CNN can be funny. Shark experts say the reported "attacks" in Volusia are really "nip-and-run" incidents in which a 3- to 5-foot black tip or spinner shark mistakes a human limb for bait fish. The shark bites down. It may even pull. "But it probably discerns rather quickly that there's another 5 feet of animal attached to that limb, and it's literally bitten off more than it can chew," said George H. Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File in Gainesville. "Predators aren't stupid," he said. "Predators are going to go after something that's smaller than themselves." One of the 19 bites reported this year off Volusia's beaches was a tiny nip on someone's pinky. Nevertheless, it went down as a shark bite, adding statistical heft to the county's long-held position as Shark Bite Capital of the World. "A PR guy once asked me, "How do you put a spin on that?' " lamented Joe Wooden, deputy chief of the county's beach patrol who also acts as a spokesman for all beach matters. The total of 19 bites surpasses by one the county record set in 1996 as sharks continue to migrate along the western Atlantic. Meanwhile, the only fear among local surfers is that the intense media interest has pressured Volusia County officials to overreact. Sharks became big news on July 6 when 8-year-old Jessie Arbogast's arm was wrested from a bull shark's gullet near Pensacola -- a tale almost too tall to be true. It didn't help that Time magazine recently dubbed this the "Summer of the Shark," or that it was recently "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel, or that the Pasco County Sheriff's Office sparked a media frenzy earlier this month with its "media alert" about sharks near Anclote Key.
When six surfers were bitten by sharks last weekend in Volusia County, Wooden arrived at the beach to find nearly 30 TV news trucks up and down the shore. News helicopters hovered overhead, hunting for sharks. Another surfer was bitten Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, when a shark nipped a 17-year-old surfer, the local television stations had been standing sentry on the beach for days, waiting for just such an occasion. That was it. The county immediately closed its best surfing beach -- the 1-mile stretch south of Ponce Inlet where most of the recent bites have occurred. The bite Saturday occurred about a mile south of the closed beach. An 18-year-old surfer was nipped on his left thigh and right foot. When officials decided Friday to keep Ponce Inlet closed through this weekend, many surfers were aghast. Some had held up their middle fingers Wednesday when beach patrol officers ordered them out of the water. While the other 46 miles of Volusia beaches remain open, it is the first time anyone can remember that any beach has been closed for more than a few hours. "I'm just flippin' out," said Jefferson W. Clark Jr., 45, a New Smyrna Beach lawyer and twice-a-day surfer who belongs to a group of surfers in their 30s, 40s and 50s. "We're all p----- 'cause we can't go out." The main reason was safety, but county officials admitted they were just as motivated by the escalating public relations problem. Some hotels reported cancellations, and the governor's office called to see what could be done. "We're trying to stop the bleeding," said Wooden, adding that the county also would be criticized if it did nothing. "I'm fighting the sharks off, and I don't mean the ones in the water," he said. "I mean the ones with the satellite dishes and the vans." The county is being too restrictive, said Clark, who stood on the beach near Ponce Inlet, a surfboard planted in the front seat of his black BMW. "They're trying to do something they cannot do, and that's protect you from a shark." A few yards away were blood drops in the sand. They belonged to Wednesday's bite victim, who left on his own after the beach patrol wrapped his foot in gauze. "You can't really get distracted by it," said Russ Novak, 16, a one-time Seabreeze High football player who is second in his class with a 4.3 grade point average and comes from a family of surfers, including his father and two siblings. Sharks, he said, are "not that big of a deal." "Not to us, anyway," added Legut, who was surfing in January when a spinner shark bumped the back of his board and shot out of the water. The contact threw him off balance but he held on and never got bit. Legut admits, "It was pretty scary," but not something that would keep him out of the water. "It's one of those things where your chances are like one out of a million," said Charlie Hood, a Seabreeze junior who illustrates how chillingly nonchalant a dedicated surfer can be. Amid a crowd of surfers two weekends ago at Ponce Inlet, Hood, 16, and Legut were drifting down the beach. "Somebody yelled, "Shark!' and of course everybody thought they were BS-ing," Hood said. "We see this big 8-foot shadow going through the water and all the kids are going, "Quick, get it!' And the shark just starts flipping out because everyone's paddling toward it." Ponce Inlet, about 20 miles south of Seabreeze High, is rich with bait fish traveling to and from the Halifax River -- an ideal feeding ground for sharks. But the nearby jetty and the lay of the sea bottom also make it favorite for surfers from all over Central Florida, with waves that are 2 to 4 feet higher than anywhere else. Hood, Legut and Novak are among a newer breed of young Daytona surfers who defy the scruffy, devil-may-care stereotype of previous generations, said Seabreeze principal Jim Kirton, 57, himself a one-time surfer whose last ride on a board was "about 80 pounds ago." "The surfers had a bad rap for a long time. They were dope heads," Kirton said. "But now, your surfers are very bright and intelligent kids . . . and they talk English." Indeed, Hood, Legut and Novak are well-mannered and affable young men. They also sport taut, tanned abdomens that can easily withstand the ill effects of a thousand Big Macs. Getting up on a moving surfboard a hundred times a day will do that for a midsection. The school's unique location, a block west of State Highway A1A and about 100 yards from Daytona's famous beach, is the reason for its strong kinship with the water. Among its graduates are generations of surfers and lifeguards. Whoever designed the campus in the early 1960s positioned an opening along one of the walkways, a perfect perch from which to judge the day's surf. Although some of today's surfers gauge beach conditions on the Internet while in computer class, there is no substitute for a live look during a break between classes. Said Kirton: "You can see the waves every day, and they stand on the second floor and drool." The school year cuts dearly into the young surfer's ideal day, which includes five to seven hours of surfing to start, followed by a break for food, a little hang-out time at a friend's house, then four or five hours of surfing before the sun sets. "Usually there's like two types of moods out there," said Hood. "Sometimes everybody will be all quiet and just kind of focused and not talk to each other. That's kind of cool because it's nice and peaceful. Then other times everybody kind of circles up and talks and just kind of chills out and waits for waves." "For me," Legut said, "it like frees me from the outside world. When you go out, there's like nothing else. You're just by yourself, with your friends, hanging out." On Thursday as the football team went through its drills and the television reporters did their evening standups, there is Jonny Legut skipping into the surf with the energy of a child. Miles away from the inlet where people have been bitten, he is oblivious to sharks. On one of his better rides, he stands up and slices north along a wave, making the most of a "mushy" 2-foot surf. One second, two seconds. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. He wipes out and tries again. And again. He paddles back out, making smooth motions with his hands, hoping a shark will not mistake them for panicky fish. But sure enough, he gets hit. The animal gets his left forearm and it hurts really bad. Legut brushes his arm and screams. "Jellyfish!" -- Photographer Jamie Francis contributed to this report.
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