(KRON) — A body that washed up on the north side of the Monterey Bay was confirmed to be Erica Fox, a strong ocean swimmer who went missing during a suspected shark attack at Lovers Point in Pacific Grove.
Fox was a 55-year-old triathlete who swam in the ocean for many years with her local swimming club, called the Kelp Krawlers. On December 21, Fox was swimming with more than a dozen Kelp Krawlers members when two witnesses reported seeing a shark encounter one of the swimmers near Lovers Point. U.S. Coast Guard officials told KRON4 that they received a report of a possible shark attack.
Fox never made it back to shore. Six days later, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office found a body in the ocean at Davenport Beach, on the opposite end of the Monterey Bay from Lovers Point. Late Monday afternoon, the sheriff’s office wrote, “The individual was positively identified as Erica Fox.”
Fox’s husband told the Mercury News that his wife was still wearing her wetsuit, a Garmin fitness tracking watch, and a “shark band” around her ankle. Great white sharks migrate seasonally into the Monterey Bay to hunt for seals and sea lions.
A “shark band,” according to the company that sells them, has a magnetic field that causes a “deterrent sensation” in sharks to keep the apex predators away.
“Sharks use electroreception — sensitivity to electric fields — to hunt and navigate. Our tech’s patented magnetic deterrent field is exponentially greater than any electric field a shark would naturally encounter and causes avoidance behavior,” the company wrote on its website.
Fox’s Strava account shows she usually swam along the coast of Pacific Grove and Monterey twice a week. In June, she competed in San Francisco’s Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon.
Fox understood the risks of swimming in waters that are home to great white sharks, friends and fellow Kelp Krawlers said.
“She developed a deeply intimate relationship with the Pacific Ocean not by studying it or by looking at it, but by getting into it — again and again and again, on choppy days and gloriously calm days, logging what I can only guess are thousands of miles,” wrote Fox’s friend, Monterey County Weekly reporter Sara Rubin.
In addition to her love for ocean swimming, “She didn’t want to live in fear. She lived her life fully,” Fox’s husband told the Mercury.
The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office wrote, “The Sheriff’s Office extends its deepest condolences to Erica’s family and friends during this tragic time.”