Watch: Girl, 11, frightened from surf by approaching shark
An 11-year-old girl playing in the South Carolina surf last weekend responded as any kid might after seeing the dorsal fin of a shark approaching from just feet away.
Sara Oister stood and ran with her bodyboard toward the shore, and her mother said it might be some time before Sara is brave enough to return to the water at Myrtle Beach.
“Welp, not sure we’re gonna get her back into the ocean,” Nicole Oister wrote on Facebook. “You can see whatever it is coming from the left towards her and she spots it and runs.”
The fin appears 10 seconds into the 14-second clip, and vanishes beneath incoming whitewater created by a small wave. The shark, if it was in fact a shark, can also be seen behind Sara as she runs toward the beach.
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Nicole Oister told ABC 6: “I was taking video of her and all of a sudden she starts running out of the water. She said she saw a fin coming up out of the water towards her … I looked back on the video to see if I had captured it [and] I did.”
Added Sara: “Even though I know we’re in their habitat, I didn’t think I was going into that day thinking I was going to be right next to a shark.”
The fin looks to belong to a small shark, which would have been searching for small prey items and not young girls on bodyboards.
George Burgess, the director emeritus of the Florida Program for Shark Research, told ABC 6 that an apparent increase in shark sightings is not surprising.
“What we are seeing, of course, is an increased population of humans that are in the water every year,” Burgess said. “So the density of humans in the waters is higher than ever. We’re engaging in aquatic activities that put us at risk.”
–Image courtesy of Nicole Oister