OCEANSIDE - Standing in front of the city's main lifeguard tower Tuesday, Capt. Bill Curtis wondered if perhaps channel surfing helped spur a recent spate of shark sightings near Oceanside beaches.

"It was the same week that Shark Week was on the Discovery Channel," Curtis said with a shrug and a slightly raised eyebrow.

Whatever the case, Curtis said bathers streamed out of the water five times early this month, telling lifeguards they saw a shark. Some said they thought they saw a great white, a predator fond of eating seals but pegged as an underwater bogeyman by movies such as the 1975 classic, "Jaws."

Curtis said no lifeguards saw any sharks off the Oceanside coast, though reports came to towers at Buccaneer Beach and the beaches just west of Wisconsin Street, Oceanside Boulevard and Breakwater Way. He said the city commissioned a helicopter fly over to look for any predators cruising the surf zone.

"They didn't find anything in the flyover," Curtis said.

Though news of the sightings, and of bathers leaving the water, have made their way throughout the close-knit beach community, regular swimmers in the area seem to be taking the reports in stride.

When she first heard about the sightings, Laura Price of Oceanside, who swims around the Oceanside Municipal Pier with a group of friends almost every day, said she was on edge. She said that her first trip into the water after learning the news she thought she saw a fin poking out of the water at the end of the pier.

"It was probably a dolphin. But we lost it, and we couldn't see it anymore, so we just turned around and went right back the way we came," she said.

Price said subsequent trips around the pier have been uneventful.

"It's not like pandemonium or anything," she said.

Because lifeguards never took official action to clear the water or perform a rescue, Curtis said the precise dates of the shark sightings never generated formal incident reports. But, after asking around the department, lifeguards recalled that two of the five sightings occurred on Aug. 2 and Aug. 9.

Curtis said he is sure there are sharks out there in the Pacific. But he said he is not so sure what prompted the rash of unconfirmed reports.

"What people saw? I don't know," Curtis said. "Was it a pod of dolphins? I don't know."

Curtis also said fishermen who frequent the Oceanside Municipal Pier have reported seeing a large hammerhead shark swimming nearby.

Jeffrey Graham, a marine biologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said Tuesday that there is no reason to believe that recent warm weather would send great white sharks closer to the coast. However, he added that hammerhead sharks are known to swim closer to the coast when the water gets warm.

"We had a sighting of an 8-foot hammerhead right off the Scripps Pier," Graham said.

He added that he does not believe bathers should worry about shark attacks this summer.

"I always tell anyone who asks that you have a better chance of dying driving your car to the beach than you have of getting attacked by a shark," he said.

- Contact staff writer Paul Sisson at (760) 901-4087 or psisson@nctimes.com.