Newport Beach 8ft Great White Scare Triggers Sharky Summer Warning

Now, Phongngo is telling her story:

“I went to this beach my whole life with my friends,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything bigger than a stingray. I look over to my right foot, and I see something. It’s a fish. I was like, ‘oh wow, that’s a really nice fish.’ Then, it started circling me, and I thought it might be a dolphin. And then after three seconds, I realized it was a shark."

Another swimmer, a tourist, was in the water at the time, and recalled:

“I was going over the waves, going under the waves, then I heard a surfer, and she was like, ‘there’s a shark! There’s a shark!’ I’m looking around at my friends, thinking, do we run? Is this real? So, then we start swimming back in.”

After Phongngo reported her account to the lifeguards, they debated with her, thinking she probably saw a dolphin. “I don’t think they [believed me],” she said.

The shark was never located, however, lifeguards declared it a valid encounter with one official saying, “We deemed that it was a credible shark sighting.”

With a marine heatwave off the West Coast, and a projected, potential “Godzilla” El Niño coming later this summer, experts are predicting a particularly sharky summer in Southern California. Following the alleged encounter in Newport Beach, Dr. Chris Lowe, director of the California State University Long Beach Shark Lab, told NBC:

“We started seeing baby white sharks about four-and-a-half feet long about a month ago, which is really early. Now the simple explanation for that is the water is really warm right now, unusually warm for this time of year. So based on that, we predict it’s going to be a very sharky summer.”