On Sunday morning, around 9 a.m., a surfer was attacked in the waters off North Salmon Creek Beach near the town of Bodega Bay, an hour and a half north of San Francisco. The man, whose name has not been released, was seen struggling with the shark as it bit his leg and apparently clamped down on his surfboard.
According to witnesses, as a swell rose in the water, they lost sight of the surfer, but as he came into view the scene unfolded. “I saw the dorsal fin of the shark and then I saw the tail fin of the shark kind of going down into the water,” surfer Jared Davis told local media. “It definitely wasn’t a quick attack. It was nice and slow.”
The man then yelled “shark” and called for help. According to Davis, he had a red stripe down his leg. Surfers were able to get the man to shore and wrap his leg, which reportedly had artery damage, in a tourniquet fashioned from surfboard leashes. The man, in his 30s, was then transferred via helicopter to a hospital in Santa Rosa. The man’s surfboard, a Lib Tech Ringer, had a large, circular bite, indicating the size of the shark.
“I asked the patient, ‘did you get a chance to see it?’ And he did get a chance to see it and it was a pretty large shark that did bite him,” paramedic Jonathon Bauer told reporters. “He actually said he had a struggle with it, as well.” The patient was reportedly in stable condition in Santa Rosa.
There was apparently another shark incident at this same beach in 2019 when a shark grabbed hold of a surfer’s leash, before ripping it away from the surfboard. The surfer was not injured.
