Shark Chases Foil Surfer Off Santa Barbara Coast 

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Two Santa Barbara foil surfers found themselves in a high-speed chase when a 10-to-12 foot shark locked onto one of them during a 20-mile run off the coast on Saturday, April 25. 

In a video posted by Tavis Boise, he and friend Ron Takeda — both longtime foilers who live locally — are cruising past Leadbetter Beach, joking around and weaving through slightly choppy waters. But the mood abruptly shifts when a dorsal fin appears behind Takeda. 

The shark — possibly a great white or mako shark — is fast, deliberate, and closing in on Takeda’s board.  

“Don’t fall!” Boise shouts, half-laughing, half-panicked, as he films. He looks back at the shark, directly on Takeda’s heels. “Oh my god, it’s coming for ya! Ron, go! Go!” 

What followed was “a full game of cat and mouse,” Boise told the Independent. For roughly three to four minutes, the shark trailed just feet behind Takeda, matching his speed and every turn. 

The pair suspects that Takeda may have crossed over or bumped the shark, triggering its curiosity. 

“Imagine you’re a shark and you’re hunting and all of sudden your prey taps you on the head and starts running from you,” Boise said with a laugh. Foil boards can look a lot like rays in the water, he noted.

“It was a cat and I ran by dragging a string,” Takeda suggested, “and it chased it.”

Takeda barely saw it, but he could hear it: slicing, thrashing, and carving through the water just behind him — something he described as rare while foil surfing, since high winds usually drown out any noise. But that day, the wind conditions were just right for Takeda to hear everything.

At first, he thought he’d snagged seaweed or was dragging his waist leash through the water. Then he saw the silhouette beneath him — a “big, dark, girthy torpedo-shaped body” — and the dorsal fin cutting through the surface. 

“I heard this noise behind my board, like I was dragging something,” he explained over the phone. “I glanced back to see what was behind me, and I saw a trail of whitewater … and I’m like, ‘Whoa, what the heck.’”

The shark was thrashing to match every tight turn Takeda made, keeping pace as he tried to outrun it. And keep pace it did: Takeda said it seemed like the shark was never more than 2 feet behind him, if not directly underneath him.  

“The odd thing was I couldn’t really see it, but I heard it the whole way,” he said.

All he could do was keep his head down, focus on staying on the foil, and listen.  

“I would hear the whole thing move, like a mountain of water,” he recounted. 

At one point, he looked back to see the shark contorting its body into a U-shape to try to match his turn — “and that’s when I got the first sense that, ‘Oh, this thing is big,’ because it couldn’t make a sharp turn.”

He said he was hoping the shark would get tired of him and leave, but the creature was relentless. It stayed on him for several minutes. The water would momentarily go quiet, long enough for Takeda to think it left, only for the noise to come back. 

“I wasn’t scared. I was excited about it. But I didn’t freak out … this sport has a lot of anxiety built into it already,” he explained. “I always tell myself, ‘Okay, Ron, relax and foil.’”

“When that shark was on me, I knew what mode to go into,” he continued. “I knew I had to just filter out everything that’s going on and just concentrate on foiling correctly.”

Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, the water went silent, and the shark peeled off. Takeda didn’t fall once. They were halfway through a run from Campus Point to Carpinteria. “I never came off the foil for the remaining 12 miles,” Takeda said. 

When asked what was going through his head as his friend was chased, Boise told the Independent it was an adrenaline-filled, general feeling of, “Oh no, I can’t believe this is happening.” He said he was simultaneously trying to film Takeda and “not die,” deciding to put some distance between himself and the shark. He considered calling 9-1-1, but he assumed it would have taken about 10 minutes before the coast guard or harbor patrol showed up.

So, he watched and held his breath.  

“It kept after him for a couple of minutes after the video cut off,” Boise said. “The funny thing is, when I caught back up to Ron, he was just like, ‘It’s really fun out here!’”

It’s not the first time the pair has encountered sharks out in the water: Boise told the Independent that he’s often seen sharks while paddling across the channel — he was even circled by a great white off the coast of Hendry’s beach, he said — and Takeda has frequently surfed near tiger sharks in Maui. But Saturday’s high-intensity encounter was new for them. 

They were averaging about 12-15 miles per hour on their foil boards, “and this was the first time a shark has tried to match our speeds,” Boise said. This was certainly the first time Takeda has been chased by a shark, as far as he knows.

Although it sounds unusual and frightening, sharks have been documented in higher numbers around Carpinteria and other areas off Southern California in recent years. Carpinteria, in particular, has become a nursery for great whites, caught in photos and videos calmly cruising beside surfers — and usually going undetected.

Additionally, due to a marine heatwave currently scorching the Pacific Ocean, shark activity in Southern California has been at an all time high. 

But the pair said the last thing they want is to discourage others from getting in the water or trying the sport. It was an incredibly rare occurrence. Takeda was heartened by the fact that the shark could have easily caught up to him and bumped him off his board — but it didn’t. It didn’t touch him once, he said. He thinks it was just curious. 

“I spent my whole life in the ocean, so I’m always thinking about sharks. I grew up around sharks,” he said, citing years spent freediving and surfing in the Santa Barbara Channel. “I’m convinced that people are not on the menu. This incident is proof of that.” 

The video of the chase has since blown up. It was first posted by professional big wave surfer Kai Lenny — a friend of Takeda’s — wracking up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and catching the attention of news outlets from Surfer Magazine to the New York Post. 

With the video’s popularity, Takeda said he’s gotten a lot of aggressive comments like, “carry a gun,” “shoot it,” or “take pepper spray.” 

“But I think all shark attacks are mistakes — this one never touched me,” he said.

He and Boise were obviously not shaken by the encounter, completing the same run again on both Sunday and Monday.  One of their friends even spotted what looked like a juvenile great white — about 5 or 6 feet long — near Padaro Beach on Monday. 

The run with the shark was “very unique,” Takeda reiterated, in part because it was quiet, the two surfers remained close together, and Boise happened to be right there with a camera. 

They’ve received many accusations of the video being staged or made with AI, which the pair addressed in a followup video posted by Boise, titled, “SHARK ATTACK? RON LIVES!!!! WHAT REALLY HAPPENED!!!”

“Just so you know, it was actually a crisis actor dolphin we hired, it wasn’t actually a real shark,” Boise jokes. “We paid the dolphin. Shipped it over from Florida.”

“It was not AI,” Takeda chimes in. “I wish it was AI.”