Capitola paddleboarder reports being attacked by a possible sea lion

A woman paddleboarding off of Capitola says she was bitten and jerked by the hair by what she believed to be a sea lion.

The incident happened around 8 a.m. on Sept. 23 in the waters between Pleasure Point’s Privates Beach and the Capitola Wharf, according to NBC Bay Area. Heather Gray said she was caught unaware when a marine animal knocked her off her board and bit her hands, arms and feet.

“I was like, what’s happening? It was like a horror movie,” Gray told the news station. “The thing that was the most bizarre was that it grabbed my hair.”

“We’re so used to seeing them, we get really comfortable with them, and I knew this wasn’t really like normal,” she added.

It took her about five minutes to get back on her board and paddle away, with the animal continuing to trail her for a while. She said she later received tetanus and rabies shots for the bites.

It was an unhappy first, Gray said, as she has enjoyed local waters for decades without anything like it happening before.

It was “kind of like being attacked by a dog, but worse, because you’re in the water,” her friend Buddy Griggs told KTVU.

Documented incidents of sea lion-on-human violence are rare. Online speculation has risen that this particular animal was afflicted with domoic-acid toxicosis, a condition caused by sea lions eating fish and shellfish that in turn have consumed toxic algae.

Sea lions with this toxicosis can show a “hyperenergetic fight-or-flight kind of aggressive or scared behavior,” John Warner, CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center in Los Angeles, told CNN in 2025.

If “someone swims or walks next to them and they don’t see the animal or the animal doesn’t see them, that’s where some negative interactions can take place,” he said.

However, in last week’s case, there is no evidence the animal was poisoned or even if it was a sea lion, as it left the scene before it could be examined, Sausalito’s Marine Mammal Center told NBC Bay Area.