The mind-bending video that went viral Sunday of pro surfer Mick Fanning being attacked from behind by a great white shark, then disappearing from camera view for what seemed like an eternity before cameras caught him emerging from a rolling wave and frantically swimming toward shore, is chilling even if you know Fanning survived what literally turned out to be some hand-to-hand combat with the shark that knocked him off his board during a competition in South Africa.
Perhaps what's even more counterintuitive than Fanning's escaping injury -- the shark bit through the ankle leash that attached Fanning's leg to his surfboard, but not him -- is this: Fanning, like so many others who are attacked by sharks and live to tell about it, indicated no plans to quit surfing. This, despite the fact that he actually got a good look at the shark, whose enormous fin emerged from the water just a few feet away before Fanning turned his head at the last instant as the beast was about to hit him.
But Fanning's response isn't unusual. Bethany Hamilton, who lost her left arm at age 13 in a 2003 shark attack while surfing at Tunnels Beach in Kauai, later went back in the water and became a winner on the pro surfing tour. Diana Nyad was followed by shark spotters in kayaks equipped with sonar devices that were supposed to repel sharks, but she adamantly refused to swim inside a protective cage during her historic swim from Cuba to Key West that attracted worldwide attention though she was traveling in dangerous waters.
Even a recreational surfer like Chad Renfro of Jacksonville, Florida, who was the leading scorer for Barry University's basketball team when a shark attacked him, leaving him with 85 stitches and a severed tendon in his left foot, eventually went back in the water.
Renfro, now 25, can instantly recite the day it happened to him by rote: May 23, 2012. A day that started like any other surfing day.
"It happened at Jax Beach, which is the beach where my dad taught me to surf," Renfro said in a phone interview Monday. "I was just surfing by myself. I was probably in chest-deep water. I'd just caught a wave. I was heading back out. My feet were hanging off the back of my board, and I just felt something like a clamp on my foot -- and as soon as I felt it, I thought 'Oh crap, a shark!' because I couldn't imagine anything else with that impact.
"Then I was pretty much like Fanning is in the video -- I began to freak out."
Unlike Fanning, Renfro was at least still lying atop his board. "And I paddled as fast as I could," he said. "Once I got back on shore, I took a look at my foot, made sure all my toes were there. Then I sat on the beach hollering and waiting for help. A girl was walking past me and asked me what was wrong because there was a lot of sand on my foot because I'd tried to walk. I just said, 'Call 911.'"
Renfro had the presence of mind to tourniquet his bleeding foot with the leash from his board even before medical help arrived. First a lifeguard on an ATV rushed over, and then his girlfriend (now fiancée), who had been farther down the beach.
"I'd say it was only about five minutes before I was in an ambulance and off to the hospital," he said. "Then I was into surgery."
And yet, frightening as his incident was, Renfro remains grateful he never came eye to eye with the shark, as Fanning did. "That would've been way, way more scarier," Renfro said. Nor was the shark that bit Renfro -- which probably measured about five feet in length -- as terrifyingly large as the great white that went after Fanning.
George H. Burgess, who maintains the International Shark Attack File data as part of his job as director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, says judging from the size of the shark's fin, the beast that attacked Fanning was probably about 15 feet long.
Think about that for a moment.
If it was taken out of the water and propped up vertically, it would tower five feet higher than a basketball rim.
Fanning, still breathless after he was pulled from the water by race personnel and interviewed on live TV in the rescue boat, said he got in a punch on the shark's back in self defense. But would a beast that big even feel it?
"See any teeth?" the TV interviewer asked him.
"No," Fanning said, mustering a laugh.
He laughed.
"Fanning shakes it off," the play-by-play announcer on the Fox TV broadcast later said.
Shakes it off.
How?
Burgess -- who says he tried a little surfing himself as a New York kid growing up near Southampton, Long Island -- thinks he understands what makes people who survive shark attacks go back in the water to surf. He suggests their after feeling is pretty much the same as the before feeling they had.
"There are a lot of sports we engage in with some degree of concern over injury, right?" Burgess said. "And it may be as small scale as going out and playing tennis and getting tennis elbow. Or running and getting shin splints. Some people jump out of perfectly good airplanes with a piece of silk [parachutes] on their backs. I was into playing basketball and ended up with five knee operations. And yet I kept playing with full appreciation for what might happen next.
"Now, why did I do it? You can call me stupid or a gamer -- whatever you want. But as far as surfers go -- it's no different. That's a risk they accept. You can drown. You can break your neck if you hit bottom. Cuts and bruises are the norm. That's part of the gig ... and they also know and have to accept additional worries and concerns when they're in those particular locations [where] sharks are more abundant."
So it goes back to the upfront bargain all surfers -- or risk takers like sky divers or race car drivers -- make with themselves before they ever start?
"If you go into that kind of place, you're essentially signing an unconditional contract [that] I accept that heightened risk of sharks in addition to all the others when I go on the [surf] board."
OK.
But that explains only the before. What are the after deliberations when you've had an encounter with a shark?
"Obviously, nobody wants to get bitten by large great white sharks, but I've also never met a surfer who blamed the shark," Burgess said with a laugh. "The fact of matter is, those guys will be back in the water very quickly, saying, 'My time wasn't up. And damn, the next wave was great, dude.'"
Though North Carolina experienced an unusual uptick with six reported shark attacks this month, Burgess' research shows Florida is the most likely place in the world to be bitten by a shark.
Burgess says worldwide there were three fatalities among the 72 unprovoked shark attacks on humans last year ("unprovoked" meaning those that don't happen in fishing boats, or the like), and roughly half of those attacks occurred in U.S. waters.
The caveat? Burgess says about 15 to 20 attacks happen in Florida annually -- the same waters where Renfro still drops his surfboard into the waves and paddles out again, though the top of his left foot where he was bitten remains numb to this day.
"The first time I went back, it was eerie," Renfro admitted. "The whole time I was looking around. But eventually, you just get past it. They said it was probably either a bull or a lemon shark that bit me. But we have black tip sharks here as well. We have great whites. Hammerheads are a big thing, too. They were tracking a pretty big shark off the coast here recently.
"But I figure, 'What are the chances I'll get bit again?' Probably about the same as they were last time, right? So you know" -- here he laughed, too --- "You just try to stay positive. I don't surf by myself as much as I used to. I'll stick with the crowd more now. But Florida is sort of a shark capital. You just understand you're in their territory."
That's it?
Pretty much, Burgess agreed.
"Most of the time, humans are not, in fact, consumed by the shark, though that doesn't matter to someone who's been bitten by one," the scientist says. "If anything, what's more likely is scars associated with shark bites are quite frankly used to full effect on Friday and Saturday nights."
Indeed, Renfro even joked to a TV interviewer after his attack that doctors X-rayed his left leg to make sure none of the shark's teeth were still lodged there, but "No souvenir."
Laughing now, Renfro says, "It's true. The only shark tooth I've ever found was as I was just walking on a beach."