After surfing for 34 years, David Steiner knows he is not alone in the ocean.
The idea of creatures that lurk under the waves used for it to scare him. But now the resident of Arroyo Grande is a little shark enthusiast – and he captures footage of drones at the King of the Ocean when he can.
In April, he made videos of great white sharks floating near the ocean and a letter Beach. He posted the videos on his Instagram @caveman_476.
A video shows a massive shark that slowly travels through the shallow waters near the beach a letter while the surfers wait to catch waves nearby.
“They are definitely seasonal and again in the city,” he said.
San Luis Obyspo County San Louis County captured a video with a great white shark drone floating in the shallow waters near the beach a letter on April 21, 2025.
Seeing video sharks and understanding their habits eased his fears of meeting them.
“I really started watching what they were doing, and they just ignored the surfers completely,” Steiner said. “This kind helps my mentality in staying in the water.”
In 2022, he saw a shark of 8 feet long and 10-foot swimming, swimming together, and he sailed closer to check them.
“This is something surreal because, you know you probably shouldn’t be tempted by fate,” Steiner said. “But it’s too hard not to take advantage of the opportunity to just look at them for a long time.”
He usually sees sharks to swim past the most remote waves. When the waves are high, the sharks travel deeper into the ocean. When the surf is flat, the sharks swim about 100 feet from the shore, he said.
“They are just like the perfect being,” he said. “They are as motionless. Like when I had one right next to me, I didn’t know it was there, and then I realized that we never knew they were there.”
Great beaches of white sharks patrols
Back in April, Steiner said his friend was expelled from the water from a large white shark between Pier Avenue and Grand Avenue in the Ocean.
So on April 16, Steiner packed his drone and went to find the shark.
“I flew it and I saw it right away,” he said.
For three days, the shark was swimming in the same place at 10:45 pm Steiner suspected that the shark was hunting fish in the torn electricity.
Steiner then took the drone to the beach a letter to his 49th birthday. On April 21, he noticed a 12 -foot shark, which he called a big mom.
“I swear to God, the body of this thing was so thick, I thought it was someone’s boat. I thought it was a plow. And then when I saw it was a great white, I was shaking,” he said.
The shark floats close to a group of surfers and Steiner began to worry.
“I tried to fly my drone to people’s faces and they don’t respond anyway,” he said. “They wave you, they don’t know what you’re trying to tell them. No speaker.”
Steiner moved his drone over the shark and fortunately the surfers returned to the shore. When he later posted the video on Instagram, a surfer sent him and said that when he saw the drone, he decided to stop surfing the day, only if there was a shark nearby.
Steiner had a message about the swimmers on the central coast: “Don’t be afraid of the water,” he said. “The lack of incidents proves to me that they are not interested.”
San Luis Obyspo County San Louis County captured a video with a great white shark drone floating in the shallow waters near the beach a letter on April 21, 2025.
Meetings with sharks and “seductive fate”
Steiner told an incident in 2019 when a shark approached his board for paddles in the ocean.
He exploded about 100 feet from the shore, after which he noticed a 13-meter large white shark next to him in the water.
“He jumped right in front of me and was bigger than my board,” he said.
The shark then slipped through the water – leaving no pulsation on the surface of the ocean.
“It turned, made a turn and came from the other side of me and stopped,” he said.
San Luis Obyspo County San Louis County captured a video with a great white shark drone floating in the shallow waters near the beach a letter on April 21, 2025.
The wave shook the paddle board and Steiner fell into the water, perched in the ocean patch, where the shark had just appeared.
“I was just waiting to be bitten,” Steiner said, but the shark is emerging – uninterested in it.
To calm down, Steiner visualizes the videos he has seen from sharks swimming around surfers without interest. He decided that sharks swim close to people every day without eating.
The latest recorded fatal attack on the White Shark of San Louis Obyspo happened near Rock Moro in 2021. Previously, only two fatal shark attacks were recorded during the new story, one in Moro Bay in 1957 and another in Avila Beach in 2003.
Given the number of meetings with non-first-raised sharks that happen regularly, Steiner does not worry too much about big fish. In fact, when he is a windsurf, Steiner will sometimes get closer to the sharks to look more closely.
“You just, somehow, ride with them and watch them swim. They don’t deal with you,” he said. “They are just like the King of the Ocean.”