Shark Attack in West Palm Beach 10'

Along with my good buddies Brock and Cesar, we decided we wanted to do something completely new with our lives and wanted to take up the wonderful sport of kite boarding. Its almost like every time I’ve ever been to a beach I’ve always seen the bright colorful kites with people flying right behind them, but I’ve never been able to actually get down to the nitty-gritty and try kite boarding, in fact the closest thing I’ve done to kiteboarding is controlling a sailboat! And that’s not close at all if you know anything about the two sports. Usually when we try something new we look to find an instructor but we were not able to find and instructor that was able to work with the random hours that we wanted to kite board! Especially since the courses were anywhere from 9 to 12 hours! There was no way we would be able to find time to do that and still have fun in the same day, the sun is only up for a portion of the day! And I don’t know about Brock and Cesar but after my life threatening experience while skinny dipping in the dark, the last thing I want to do is be caught in the water at night. From local kiteboarders we found out a great place to board, it was off the coast of West Palm Beach, Luckily West Palm Beach isn’t too far from us, its actually only about 3 hours away! The only problem is that with 3 very large kite boards and all of our supplies it wasn’t too easy to fit everything inside of my 2-seater, or Cesar’s sedan. And since Brock doesn’t want to ever put miles on her truck we decided that it would be a lot easier to just rent something a lot bigger and drive it down since we were only going for the day. After renting some kiteboarding gear from a local shop we made our way down to the Hertz at the Orlando International Airport, We wanted to rent the biggest baddest pick up truck they had but we realized that a Ford Explorer would get the job done since it came with roof racks and all. We drove the Explorer back to my house where we strapped up all of our kiteboarding gear and we hit the road. We made one stop on the way there at Okeechobee so we could get a little something to eat, we each went with a “$5 Footlong” from Subway and got back to hit the road. We got to Vero Beach in almost no time! Once we got there we went directly to the beach we were already dressed for it so we walked right up with our kite boards. Off in the distance we could see what seemed to be a professional kiteboarder just doing his thing but we decided we didn’t want to go that far because we were just amateurs and didn’t want to embarrass ourselves, the first hour was nothing but pure failure, Cesar was the first one to actually get the right idea, he said he was just copying the guy we saw off in the distance, so when I looked for him I couldn’t find him. All of a sudden a lifeguard in a boat zoomed right by us, we automatically knew something was wrong. It was almost just like the movie jaws, all of us afraid of getting eaten by these massive creatures of the sea we quickly rushed out and darted for the shore. We met up with some officials on shore and they told us that a kiteboarder was found in the ocean severely bleeding with a group of sharks surrounding him. The scary part is that the beach was still left open! According to Shark Professionals there is only about 4 fatal shark attacks a year it is very rare for this to happen, 4 seems like a pretty risky number for me so I decided to sit the kiteboarding out for the rest of the day, Cesar did the same. Brock’s always the crazy one and he was still in the water kiteboarding like there was no tomorrow as Cesar and I watched him hoping he wasn’t next on a shark’s hit list. After Brock was finished we went over to a local restaurant and had a light meal where we relaxed. Overall it was a nice day, besides the fact someone was attacked by a shark of course.