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Circling at Tower 16: An Adult White Shark Closes 2 Miles of Huntington Beach's Water

A foilboarder's report of a 10 to 12 foot white shark off Lifeguard Tower 16 shut the water from Seapoint Street to the Huntington Beach Pier for a day, as the director of the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab says the El Niño shark season could run well into December.

Nick Meyers, Nautical Nick6 min read
Circling at Tower 16: An Adult White Shark Closes 2 Miles of Huntington Beach's Water

On Tuesday afternoon, a foilboarder, a rider on a surfboard mounted on a hydrofoil wing that lifts the board clear of the water, floated near Lifeguard Tower 16 in Huntington Beach when a shark began circling him about 300 feet offshore. He paddled in. The animal was 10 to 12 feet long, and officials called the report credible.

That report, logged around 3 p.m., set off the city's shark response protocol, a set of rules that govern beach closures based on how a shark is behaving. The fire department said the shark was reportedly circling, a behavior Marine Safety's protocol classifies as aggressive, and city officials closed the water about 1 mile in each direction of the tower. The Huntington Beach Fire Department shut the water from Seapoint Street to the Huntington Beach Pier, roughly 2 miles of coastline, and kept it closed until 3 p.m. Wednesday, October 14. Marine Safety, the department's lifeguard and ocean rescue division, swept the stretch with drones, jet skis, and a rescue boat and did not find the shark. Nobody was hurt.

What the protocol does

Circling is the trigger. Marine Safety's protocol files it as aggressive behavior, and the closure clock started with the report. Derek Peters, the department's marine safety battalion chief, told the News Tribune that officers treated the foilboarder as a credible source even though no lifeguard independently confirmed the sighting. The rider, identified only as Patrick in a CBS Los Angeles account, said the shark appeared 20 to 40 feet from him and that he saw it with something in its mouth before he headed for shore. He did not think it was after him. "They were just crossing paths," he said.

Doug Leach, a Huntington Beach Fire Department battalion chief, told CBS Los Angeles that sightings happen along the coast from time to time, and that "the size of the shark is bigger than we normally encounter." The Orange County Tribune reported that officers posted warning signs along the sand and told the public to stay out of the water for the duration of the closure.

A red and white Keep Out sign reading Shark Sighted, Water Is Closed, posted on a wooden stake in the sand at Huntington Beach with the pier and a lifeguard tower behind itThe sign Huntington Beach Marine Safety stakes on the sand when a shark closes the water, with the pier in the background.

The same protocol ran at the Sunset Beach stretch of Huntington Beach earlier this year. Around 10 a.m. on Wednesday, April 29, 2026, officials said a 9 to 10 foot white shark was actively feeding on a sea lion carcass near shore, and the city closed 1 mile of ocean in each direction of Tower 12, at Pacific Avenue and 12th Street, for an expected 48 hours, KFI AM 640 reported. It was the second shark closure in a week. Days earlier an aggressive shark near the Huntington Beach Pier had forced a 2 mile closure that canceled a day of the Vans Jack's Surfboards Pro surf contest; the water reopened later that Friday and the contest resumed Saturday.

An adult, not a juvenile

Chris Lowe, a professor of marine biology at California State University, Long Beach, and director of the campus's Shark Lab, told the News Tribune that the Tower 16 animal was an adult, not one of the juveniles that have made the Southern California coast famous in recent summers. Juvenile white sharks, Lowe said, run roughly 5 to 10 feet and prefer water between 67 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit (19 to 22 degrees Celsius). They usually aggregate off Baja California, but warming water there has pushed many of them north. Lowe said the Tower 16 shark might have been hunting elephant seals.

A white shark seen from directly above, swimming through green water with its pectoral fins spreadA white shark seen from a drone. Lifeguards and the Shark Lab use drones to confirm sightings and size the animal.

The Shark Lab planned to send researchers to the Huntington Beach stretch on Wednesday to try to confirm the sighting with drones and other tracking gear, Lowe said. He told The Inertia that white shark bites remain rare and that researchers have not seen them trend up with the growing number of sharks offshore. Asked whether bites could rise, he said, "That's certainly a possibility. But we haven't seen that."

A sharky fall

Peters said Huntington Beach typically sees more white sharks in the spring and fall, when migratory animals move through the Southern California Bight, the curved stretch of coastline between Point Conception and the Mexican border. This year the pattern has stretched. Experts told the News Tribune that El Niño, a periodic warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific that reshapes ocean conditions along the West Coast, is behind the rise in sightings, and Lowe said water temperatures off the coast are "just right" for juvenile white sharks. He told CBS Los Angeles that the season has further to run: "We're just getting into the thick of the season, so this could go well into December." With El Niño now shaping the ocean, the station reported, "a sharky summer" is turning into "a sharky fall."

The same stretch of Orange County has run through similar closures in past warm years. In October 2015, a surfer at Sunset Beach reported a white shark that came too close to him, and lifeguards closed about 2 miles of water from Surfside to Sunset Beach, plus part of Bolsa Chica State Beach, until the next afternoon, according to CBS News coverage at the time. In June 2016, an Orange County Sheriff's helicopter spotted 3 great whites of more than 8 feet near Anderson Street off Sunset Beach, and officials closed about 1 mile of water from Warner Avenue to Anderson Street.

The closure was due to lift at 3 p.m. Wednesday after a final round of patrols, with or without a second look at the shark. Lowe's forecast stood. "It's not over yet," he said.

Sources

Circling at Tower 16: An Adult White Shark Closes 2 Miles of Huntington Beach's Water | Nautical Nick