Couple’s quick thinking saves shark stranded on Oregon beach. ‘Going to help you’
Dean Wood happened to look out his condo window when he saw something thrashing in the sand on the Oregon coastline.
“Oh my god, that’s a shark,” he told his wife, Nicole Lattanzi Wood.
The couple then rushed to the shoreline on Tuesday, Sept. 12, in Rockaway Beach, Dean Wood told McClatchy News by phone.
When they reached the 3-foot beached marine animal, they began to think of ways to get it back into the water.
Dean Wood said he didn’t want to pick it up by the tail, fearing the shark might bite him.
He also thought about dragging it back to the water.
“If I do drag it, I’m going to drag it to where I’m going to get sand in its gills going backwards, and I don’t want to do that because then I’m thinking maybe I will suffocate it,” he said.
So he grabbed a large piece of driftwood, placed it under the shark and gently tried to roll it back to the water.
His wife recorded the encounter on her phone as he tried to nudge it toward the water, videos show.
“It’s OK, we are going to help you,” Nicole Lattanzi Wood is heard saying in one of the videos.
But the shark was so weak, Dean Wood said, it kept “rolling back to kind of where we started.”
After about 45 minutes, they helped the shark into the water and the tide carried it further into the ocean.
“Finally he got out there deep enough, and we never saw him again,” Dean Wood said.
They think it was a salmon shark, which can grow to about 10 feet long. These sharks may be mistaken for a great white shark, according to Oregon Sea Grant.
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The couple lives in Estacada, which is about 30 miles southeast of Portland.
They visit the beach often, Dean Wood said, but this was the first time they stayed in Rockaway Beach, and the first time they saw a stranded shark.
“Hopefully, we did what anybody else would do,” he said.
If someone spots a stranded marine animal in Oregon, they can report it to the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network at 1-866-767-6114, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Rockaway Beach is about 85 miles west of Portland.
This story was originally published September 15, 2023 at 1:04 PM with the headline "Couple’s quick thinking saves shark stranded on Oregon beach. ‘Going to help you’."
