Nerve-Wracking Video Shows Shark Chasing Foil Surfer for Miles Off Santa Barbara Coast

Two foil surfers surfing off the Santa Barbara coast were joined by an unexpected visitor who suddenly initiated an intense chase before finally leaving them to enjoy the rest of their run.

Tavis Boise was foil surfing from University of California, Santa Barbara to Carpinteria with his friend Ron Takeda when a shark suddenly appeared and began to chase Takeda.

In a video uploaded on YouTube by Boise, he can be seen recording their surfing experience using a selfie stick, with Takeda trailing him in the background.

In the video description, Boise mentions that a 10- to 11-foot shark appeared in the middle of their 20-mile downwind foil run.

Describing the encounter as a “full game of cat and mouse,” Boise said that they buzzed over the shark, which “triggered an intense curiosity.”

The dorsal fin of a shark can be seen running parallel to Takeda’s surfboard in the video. The shark closely followed Takeda for over two miles, matching every move that he made on his surfboard.

Before he even saw the shark, Takeda said he heard water splashing and gurgling behind him, according to a New York Post report. Although Takeda kept making tight turns, the shark thrashed hard to match his every turn, the report said.

“He turned left, it turned left. He sped up, it sped up,” Boise mentioned in the video description.

At one point in the video, Boise can be heard shouting “Go, go, go!” to Takeda after he realizes that the shark was relentlessly chasing his friend.

The New York Post report added that the shark pursued him several minutes after the video recording ended.

After some time that “felt like an eternity for Ron,” the shark finally swam off “in search of something else to play with,” Boise said.

Thankfully, Takeda never fell off his board and maintained his composure despite the chase.

“Ron performed amazingly under pressure and kept his cool for all of those minutes while being chased,” Boise wrote in the description.

The pair finished the next 10 miles of their run without falling.

In another follow-up video, Boise and Takeda can be seen joking about their encounter with the shark.

They joked that it wasn’t a real shark in the water and was, in fact, a crisis actor dolphin that they hired from Florida.

“It was not AI,” Takeda clarifies in the video.

Shark Encounters in California

Earlier this week, Sunset Beach at Huntington Beach was closed for 48 hours after a white shark was spotted in the surf line.

Lifeguards spotted a nine-to-10-feet shark feeding on a carcass of a sea lion at Sunset Beach on April 29, 2026, and it showed aggressive behavior near the shore, according to a Fox Weather report.

White sharks, also known as great white sharks, are common in California waters, although instances of shark attacks on humans in the state are rare, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

There have been less than 250 reported shark incidents since 1950 in California involving many species of sharks, of which the majority involved white sharks, according to the CDFW. Of those, less than 20 were fatal and all the fatalities possibly involved white sharks.