Cover photo: Screenshot from the Lineup video

A video of an animal breaching a peaceful surf lineup right off Bikini Beach stirred the Uruguayan and Latin American surfing community. Several people have ventured without hesitation to say it's a shark, but no one can say for sure.

In fact, Andrés Fernández, one of the three friends who were having a quiet day of winter surfing, is still confused about what it could have been, although he doesn't hesitate to say that he wants to know what that clearly large animal that passed so close to the three of them really was.

“It was August 16th, the wave was good in Bikini. It was a dark day, and suddenly the waves stopped sending sets. It stopped for about 10 minutes, and in that calm, a creature appeared to our right, that is, from the peak of Bikini toward the rocks. And the thing was: I was well to the right and heard a whale-like noise… What I'm going to say is very confusing: I heard a whale-like noise (the blowing sound) and when I looked, I saw a black back with no visible dorsal fin, but it had little scales. It seemed like everything in the center of the spine had little scales. Like a single row of scales… I looked for whales that had that and I didn't find any,” he said.

And then what you see in the video happened: “It passed behind us. Obviously, we couldn't see what it was. It seemed to have hit the rock because we were quite deep, and it sort of curled up and went to the bottom. We don't know if it was attacking something, but in the rush, we ran away. The one closest, further to the left, was Damián, a friend, who didn't see it but sensed it was close and ran away.”

“It's unclear what the creature was. It was large—not to exaggerate, about 70 centimeters wide, if not a meter—and it seemed to be very deep underwater. It went to the bottom and disappeared; the moment passed, and nothing else happened… It was like a herd of something with a larger animal,” says Andrés, who, after feeling safe, said they continued surfing for another half hour.

“There's a screenshot where you can clearly see a shark fin… But that's where I sort of contradict the information I gave… It's really complex,” the surfer reflects. “I've been trying to define what it was for a while. What I felt was the whale's blow, but then it disappeared. So, if there's another animal that does that, maybe it accompanied that creature's attack… To eat, too. And maybe that's what helped us. Luckily, nothing happened, but the scare was huge,” he concluded.