A kayaker fishing about a half-mile offshore near Paradise Cove was hospitalized Sunday morning after a shark bit him twice on the lower body. The attack was reported at 8:32 a.m. as a bite or sting in the 28200 block of West Pacific Coast Highway, and the victim was en route to a hospital by 8:55 a.m. His condition was not immediately known.
The confirmed attack was reported by the Los Angeles County Fire Department, according to ABC7 Los Angeles, which first detailed the timeline of the kayaker's morning on the water turning into an emergency transport. The outlet reported that the man was fishing near Paradise Cove, a stretch of coastline popular with anglers and paddlers, when the shark struck.
A Familiar Stretch of Coastline
This isn't the first time the waters off Malibu have produced a shark encounter involving a kayaker. In 2015, a 10-foot hammerhead bit a kayaker on the leg about 1.5 miles offshore near Deer Creek beach, an incident detailed by the Los Angeles Times. In that case, a nearby fisherman pulled the injured kayaker onto his boat and helped control the bleeding before reaching shore, and Los Angeles County beaches remained open afterward.
Farther back, county records show just one fatal shark attack between 1950 and this year — a kayaker killed by a great white off Malibu in 1989, according to the Times.
A Season Scientists Called Sharky
The Malibu incident lands at the tail end of a year researchers had already flagged as unusually active for sharks off Southern California. Shark sightings surged at regional beaches during an unusually warm spring, and the Times reported that experts were predicting a particularly active summer for the animals. Separately, NBC Los Angeles reported that researchers pointed to unusually warm water as one driver of the uptick, with one scientist saying plainly that it was shaping up to be “a very sharky summer.”
That same NBC report noted that Newport Beach lifeguards confirmed an 8-foot great white circling a surfer near 35th Street in late March. The Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab, which has tagged 390 sharks since 2010 with roughly 233 still active in its tracking system, has been central to monitoring that activity, per the Times.
Other Recent Encounters in the Region
Other kayakers have had close calls with sharks elsewhere in California in recent years. In 2021, a Boy Scouts youth camp participant was bitten on the hand off Santa Catalina Island and airlifted for surgery, prompting lifeguards to close the ocean for a mile in each direction for at least 24 hours, according to NBC Los Angeles. In 2024, a 46-year-old man was hospitalized after a shark attack in Del Mar that left him with significant but non-life-threatening bites to his torso, arm and hand, as reported by USA Today, which noted that a two-mile stretch of coastline was closed to swimmers and surfers for roughly two days afterward.
Nationally, shark-bite numbers have ticked upward in recent years. The University of Florida's International Shark Attack File logged 69 unprovoked bites worldwide in 2023, six above the five-year average, with the 36 U.S. bites that year accounting for about 52% of the global total, per USA Today. A shark-tracking site reported that, as of Oct. 4, 2026, the United States had recorded 13 shark-attack bites for the year with no fatalities, while worldwide figures as of mid-September stood at 44 bites including eight fatalities.
Despite the sightings and the string of incidents, long-term research suggests the overall risk to individual beachgoers remains low. A Stanford University and Monterey Bay Aquarium analysis found that the odds of being bitten by a white shark in California coastal waters have dropped by 91% since 1950, even as the population of sharks along the coast has grown. No further details on the condition of Sunday's victim had been released.
