Quick Take
An Aptos surfer whose close encounter with a great white shark went viral is sharing what happened from his perspective, including the moment he realized a drone hovering overhead was trying to warn him of danger.
For nearly 35 minutes, it had been the perfect Santa Cruz County surf session.
The morning sun lit up a clean south swell off Seascape Beach, the lineup was nearly empty, and Aptos surfer Max Eder had already caught one wave worth remembering.
Then a drone appeared overhead.
It hovered. It dropped lower. Its propellers buzzed louder and louder.
“There wasn’t anybody on the beach,” Eder recalled. His friend, Rex Boyes, who was surfing with him, looked at him and said, “I bet you that drone is trying to warn us.”
Eder looked up at the drone, then scanned the water around him.
Seconds later, he spotted a massive shadow moving beside his surfboard.
“It was like this big ominous figure that kind of was flanking me, and then the dead giveaway was this huge dorsal fin,” he said. “It was maybe a foot and a half away, 2 feet tops.”
A great white shark was swimming alongside him.
The June 10 incident, captured from above by drone operator Nick Bertocchini, has since exploded across social media and national TV, giving millions of viewers an aerial perspective of one of the closest documented shark encounters involving a Santa Cruz County surfer.
But Eder says the experience he lived was very different from the one people watched online.
“The drone footage was 10 times more frightening than the actual encounter,” he said.
Born and raised in Aptos, the 55-year-old Eder has spent decades surfing local breaks. He has seen sharks breach in the distance and noticed suspicious movement in the water before, but never experienced anything like this.
“This was the first time I looked at something and knew without a doubt it was a shark.”
Almost immediately after Boyes voiced his suspicion that the drone operator was trying to get their attention, Eder said he turned and found himself staring at the shark.
“It’s a fight-or-flight situation at that point, and you kind of have basically three options available to you: one is to panic, two is to calmly try to remove yourself from the area, and then the best one is some of the comments I have read were like, face off with it and stand your ground,” he recalled. “And you know, I chose Option 2.”
“I knew thrashing around wasn’t the right thing to do, so I just focused on paddling smoothly back to shore.”
While Eder headed toward the beach, the drone captured the shark circling behind him and briefly breaking the surface with its dorsal fin.
Boyes, meanwhile, didn’t waste any time in removing himself from the situation.
“That guy paddled faster than I’ve ever seen anybody. Next thing I know, he was on the beach,” Eder said.
Only after both reached the sand did the reality begin to sink in.
“We were both rattled,” Eder said. “It was fantastically beautiful but completely frightening at the same time.”
The waves were still breaking perfectly, and the session had lasted barely half an hour. There was even a brief conversation about paddling back out.
“I said, ‘I’m out of here,'” Eder laughed. “I got my one good wave.”
The experience became even more unsettling when the two surfers viewed the drone footage that Bertocchini shared with them. Watching the shark’s path from above changed everything.
“I sat in my truck and watched it a couple of times and just thought, ‘Wow, that was way too close for comfort,'” Eder said. “When you’re in the water, you can’t see what’s happening underneath you. The video lets you see every move it made.”
He believes the shark’s behavior was more than simple curiosity.
“It was circling and coming from behind,” he said. “But I also think that if a shark truly wanted to attack, you would never even see it coming.”
As the video spread across the country, so did the messages and online commentary.
Friends from Texas texted him. Local surfers called to check on him. Complete strangers weighed in from behind keyboards.
Some praised his calm reaction.
Others joked that they were “rooting for the shark.”
Eder recalls sitting with his wife reading the comments. “We were reading some of those comments in funny voices and laughing,” he said. “But then you stop and think, if somebody actually had to tell my family I was killed, they probably wouldn’t think it was funny.”
The experience hasn’t changed how he views sharks or the ocean.
Instead, it reinforced a perspective built over a lifetime spent in Monterey Bay, where he says an abundance of marine life – whales, dolphins, sea otters, seals and, yes, sharks – are evidence of a thriving ecosystem.
“It’s their world,” he said. “We’re just tourists in it.”
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