A Fin Taller Than a Mast Rose Between Them. Then His Engine Died
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This Long Beach jet ski fin video was supposed to be nothing more than two friends showing off. Diego Ramirez, 26, had his phone zipped into a waterproof pouch strapped to his chest, and his best friend Trey Coleman, 27, was lining up to jump the wake of a container ship heading into the Port of Long Beach. It was a bright, hot Saturday in late September, the water was a deep clean blue, and the two of them had been doing the same jump for an hour. They had no idea something had been following the ship in.
Chasing the Big Wake
Every jet ski rider in Southern California knows the trick. The giant cargo ships that come into San Pedro Bay push out long, rolling wakes, smooth hills of water that you can ride up and launch off like a ramp. It is not exactly legal to get close, so riders hang back a quarter mile and wait for the swells to reach them. Diego and Trey had been doing it since high school.
“We’ve seen dolphins, sea lions, a gray whale once,” Diego said later. “We’ve never seen anything that scared us. Not once.”
In the video, the container ship is a dark shape on the horizon. Trey guns it up the face of a wake, flies off the top, whoops, and lands hard in a burst of white spray. Diego is laughing behind the camera. And then the laughing stops.
A Fin Taller Than a Mast
Right between the two jet skis, less than thirty feet from either rider, a fin comes up out of the water. It does not splash up like a dolphin. It rises, slowly and steadily, dark gray and smooth, water sheeting off its edges with a hissing sound you can actually hear on the clip. It keeps rising past the height of a person. Past the height of a pickup truck. When it finally stops, Diego estimates it was well over twenty feet tall, taller than the mast on most of the sailboats in the marina.
“My brain just said shark,” he said. “And then my brain said no, sharks are not that big. Nothing is that big.”
Both riders swerve hard in opposite directions. Diego’s jet ski bucks in the churned water and the camera flips from sky to sea to sky. When it steadies, the fin is still there. It is not chasing them. It is just moving forward, silently, in the direction the ship had gone.
The Hump Behind the Fin
Then it turns. In the video, the fin arcs back in a wide, slow curve, and the sea behind it rises in a long, smooth hump, the way water bulges over a submarine running just under the surface. The hump is longer than both jet skis put together. Much longer.
Trey was closest. He hit the throttle to get away, and his engine coughed, sputtered and died.
“It’s not starting!” he screams on the clip. “It’s not starting, it’s not starting!”
He yanks at the controls. He hits the start button again and again. The jet ski sits dead in the water, rocking in the swell, and the fin is coming around in its long curve toward him.
Why the Engine Died
Engines on personal watercraft stall all the time. They suck in seaweed, they flood, they overheat. Trey said afterward he had probably flooded it by gunning it too hard after the landing. But the man who runs the rental shop where the two friends service their skis told a reporter something else.
“I’ve had three customers this year come back with dead engines and the same story,” he said. “Something big in the water, and then the engine quits. Every time, the intake grate is clean. No kelp, no plastic, nothing. I don’t know what that means. I just know it’s three.”
Diego does not care about the reason. All he remembers is looking at his friend sitting on a dead machine in the middle of the ocean and knowing he had about five seconds to decide what to do.
Diego Turned Around
Every instinct told Diego to run. He did not. He swung his jet ski around and pointed it straight at Trey, and the last seconds of the video show him closing the distance as fast as the machine would go. And in those seconds, the camera catches the thing nobody can stop talking about.
The fin goes straight down. Not forward, not away. Straight down, like an elevator dropping, until the tip vanishes. And the water under Trey’s jet ski turns black. Not dark blue. Black, as if a shadow the size of a house had moved directly underneath him.
That is where the clip ends.
What Happened in the Next Ten Seconds
Diego told the story at the harbor that afternoon, still shaking. He reached Trey just as the water beneath him started to swell upward. Trey did not wait. He jumped from his own seat onto the back of Diego’s jet ski, nearly flipping both of them, and Diego opened the throttle with his friend clinging to his life vest.
Behind them, Trey’s empty jet ski rose up on a smooth hill of water, tilted, and slid off it sideways. Then the water went flat again.
They did not look back until they reached the breakwater. When they did, the dead jet ski was floating upright exactly where they had left it, as if nothing had happened.
The Search for the Jet Ski
A harbor patrol boat went out an hour later to recover the abandoned watercraft. The officers found it, towed it back, and noted in their report that the hull had a long series of shallow scrapes running along the bottom, evenly spaced, about a foot apart. Nobody on the patrol boat would speculate about what made them.
A marine biologist who reviewed Diego’s footage said the fin could be “a large basking shark or ocean sunfish distorted by the camera angle.” Commenters online were quick to point out that the two jet skis in the video give a perfect sense of scale, and that no basking shark in recorded history has a fin anywhere near that size.
Trey has sold his jet ski. Diego still rides, but he stays inside the breakwater now, and he never chases a ship’s wake anymore.
“Everybody keeps asking me if it was a shark,” he said. “I keep telling them the same thing. Sharks don’t follow container ships for forty miles. Sharks don’t turn your engine off. And when that thing went down under Trey, the water didn’t just go dark. It went warm. I felt it on my legs. Like something alive had just breathed out underneath us.”
