Hall of Fame surfer Ian Cairns is from Western Australia, where a shark detecting system has been tested out for the last couple years. He now calls Southern California his home, and after he saw a woman attacked by a shark in Corona Del Mar in 2016, he decided to help bring shark-detecting technology to Newport Beach.
“This is a marker buoy for where one of the sonar transponders is. There’s five sonar transponders on the ocean floor,” Cains said, after paddling about 150 feet from the Balboa Pier to check out one component of the Clever Buoy System.
He says each transponder/trans-juicer creates a virtual net across the ocean using sonar. If you were looking from above and the sound waves could be seen, it would look like fan-shaped objects in the ocean, covering about 500 yards of the water. Each transponder, or trans-juicer, emits 720,000 sound waves per second. If something comes swimming by, the object disrupts the sound waves, and that’s how the system knows there’s something in the water.
All five trans-juicers are connected to a box near the end of the Balboa Pier through underwater cables.
“This is the brains of the Clever Buoy System,” said Richard Talmage, Clever Buoy’s Chief Technical Officer, while pointing to a trans-juicer box.
Talmage says the computer system inside a locker on the pier sees what’s happening in the water in real-time
Last month, the sonar got a hit on November 4 at about 9:45 a.m.
“If the system believes there’s a shark out there, what we’ll see is an alert like this on the phone, “ said Clever Buoy Marine Biologist Colby Bignell.
Bignell says on November 4, an alert went out via the Clever Buoy app and alterted local lifeguards, who have a verison of that app that is not yet publically available.
Once an alert does go out they are able to look for sharks visually.
On November 4, Bignell says lifeguards sent up a drone to take a look at the water.
“If and when we do actually verify that there is a shark out there, the lifeguards then decide to make their next steps in their response plan,” said Bignell.
According to the city of Newport Beach’s website, there may have been about a 10-foot Great White Shark in the water during that day.
“There are definitely sharks out here,” said Cairns.
Cairns has seen the alerts during the ongoing pilot program that kicked off in October. Some of the alerts have been for tagged sharks, which is kept track by a buoy about 250 feet away from the end of the Balboa Pier.
Cairns can’t disclose the exact number of sharks the system has detected since October because the information isn’t public yet, but he hopes this system could help create a shark early warning system to keep beachgoers safe.