Column: Distance swimmer Steve Robles survived a shark encounter, but it left a mark

Slip into the sea with Steve Robles, the swimmer with the Freddy Krueger scars along his right side where a great white ripped into him off the Manhattan Beach Pier almost four months ago. Slip into the sea and start to wonder what lurks below.

It’s always the unseen stuff that gets to you, right? Thumping with adrenaline and surrounded by friends, Robles made it to shore that day, and surgeons later pieced him back together.

Now the South Bay real estate broker is back in the ocean for his weekly pier-to-pier swim: out around the Hermosa Pier, past the bad wig of dangling monofilament and rusty hooks, then north for two miles to Manhattan Beach.

Whistling through the graveyard. Back on the sea horse. Back to his beloved long-distance swimming.

“Before the incident, it was a very enjoyable activity,” says Robles, 50. “You’d be getting a good workout and paying attention to the ocean conditions.”

Now?

“I’m really not sure what I want to do now,” he says of the potential for future distance swims.

The peace of mind comes and goes. Where he used to think about the currents and swells, every shadow and color change can spook him. Was that a brush of kelp against the leg or something else?

Over time, do those jitters go away? Robles is trying to find out.

Almost every Saturday he’s back at the base of Hermosa Pier, meeting up with his little swim club. No wet suits, no fins, they splash into the surf around 8:30 a.m., then bang out a two-mile swim like a cluster of sardines. Takes about an hour.

“It is scary going out there,” he admits.

Once out, Robles says he’s more careful to stay close to the group, including Nader Nejadhashemi, Mary Ellen Farr, Sue Brilliant, Myka Winder. They were with him that freaky day, and they know if it hadn’t been Robles it might’ve been one of them.

There wasn’t anything unusual about that summer day, and that’s the notion they all can’t forget — no stirrings, no intuition. In Southern California, shark attacks are almost as rare as snow storms, especially considering all the bait that floats out there every day, thousands of surfers in wet suits, looking like seals.

In Robles’ case, the 7-foot shark that attacked him July 5 had been hooked by anglers on the pier. While in distress, it lashed out at Robles as he swam past.

“We classify shark attacks as provoked and unprovoked,” explains Christopher G. Lowe, marine biology professor at Long Beach State and director of the school’s shark lab. “If you screw with a shark, it’s going to bite you ... but any large animal would. In that same situation, a sea lion would’ve done exactly what that shark did.”

As white shark sightings rise, Lowe is sharing his data with lifeguards. He says great white populations in California, benefiting from coastal clean air and water regulations, have been growing the past 15 years.

“It’s unbelievable how fast they’ve come back,” he says of sharks and other large sea creatures.

“The incident that happened with Steve should be a wake-up call,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Robles says plans for another long-distance swim in Hawaii are on hold as he sorts through whether he has the will to put in the eight- to 12-mile training swims necessary for those salty marathons.

It would be a difficult dream to defer. Robles started swimming competitively at age 7, through high school and college. When he was done with school, he just never stopped, taking up distance swimming.

The way a jogger or a cyclist uses the sport to stay fit and sane, that’s the way Robles uses distance swimming. A little over a year ago, he swam from Catalina to L.A. in 13 hours, after being pushed four miles off course by the currents.

Now the sport that defined him gives him pause. Sports comebacks are a dime a dozen, and most don’t pan out. Most also don’t involve permanent gashes across your rib cage.

But if you can’t find serenity in the Pacific, where do you find it? On the 405? Hollywood Boulevard? Don’t hold your breath.

“The payoff is absolutely the satisfaction of doing what you put your mind to doing,” he explains of distance swimming. “To push forward to see how mentally strong you are. The self-satisfaction of that is like nothing else.

“You know, the rest of my life I’ll be Steve Robles, the guy who swam Catalina.”

And more than that. The rest of his life, he’ll be Steve Robles, the guy who got back in nature’s shark tank, pursuing the pastime he loves.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

twitter: @erskinetimes