Shark! How One Surfer Survived an Attack
By Cathy Free from Reader's Digest | July 2008
Silver fog blanketed California’s Monterey Bay on a late August morning last year. For Todd Endris, it was a perfect end-of-summer day for surfing.The lanky 24-year-old aquarium technician zipped into his wet suit and headed to Marina State Beach, two miles from his apartment. As he waded into the surf, a pod of dolphins played in the waves just ahead of him. Other than a few dedicated surfers, the dolphins were the only creatures visible in the bay. Endris paddled strenuously and caught a wave in, then headed out to find another.
Resting on his board 75 yards from shore, he turned to watch his friend Brian Simpson glide under the curve of a near-perfect wave. Suddenly Endris was hit from below and catapulted 15 feet in the air. Landing headfirst in the water, he felt his pulse quicken. He knew only one thing could slam him with such force. Frantically paddling to the surface, he yanked at the surfboard, attached to his ankle by a leash, climbed on, and pointed it toward shore. But within seconds he was hit again. An enormous great white shark had him in its jaws, its teeth dug into his back.
Shark-human encounters make headlines, but they’re rare; fewer than 50 people were attacked in the Monterey Bay area between 1959 and 2007. It is thought that sharks mistake humans for prey, but some experts say that great whites just don’t care much what they eat. “Anybody who surfs or dives where seals and sea lions are prevalent could be asking for trouble,” says George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File in Gainesville, Florida, a group that tracks shark incidents worldwide.
Despite the warnings, Endris routinely surfed in such waters. As soon as he was big enough to straddle a board, he took up surfing. More than once over the years, he’d been called out of the water when someone thought they’d seen a shark. “It wasn’t something I dwelled on,” Endris says. “As a surfer, if you did that, you’d never go into the ocean.”
In Monterey Bay that August morning, the great white dragged Endris below the surface. Attempting to force the shark to release him, the surfer slugged it on the snout over and over. The 16-foot shark had clamped down on his back with three rows of razor-sharp teeth. Endris felt no pain, only a tremendous pressure as the shark dipped him beneath the roiling water and shook him back and forth in its powerful jaws.
A few feet away, Joe Jansen, a 25-year-old college student from Marina, was relaxing on his board when he heard a loud splash. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted a gray creature rising 12 feet out of the water with Endris and a blue surfboard in its mouth. At first, Jansen thought the creature was a whale, “the biggest thing I’d ever seen.” Then he heard Endris scream. He paddled as fast as he could toward shore, looking back every few seconds. When he made eye contact with Endris, he paused. “Help me!” yelled Endris, disappearing beneath the water again. The shark now had the surfer by the right thigh and appeared to be trying to swallow his leg whole.
Another 20 feet beyond the chaos, Wes Williams, a 33-year-old Cambria bar owner, stared from his surfboard in disbelief. Six bottlenose dolphins were leaping in and out of the water, stirring up whitecaps. Williams watched as the dolphin pod circled Endris, slapping their flukes in agitation.
With a burst of adrenaline, Endris thrust his head above the surface, gasping for air. He barely noticed the dolphins leaping over his head. Suddenly the shark released him. Fighting to stay afloat, Endris thought he saw the dolphins form a protective wall between him and the great white.
Joe Jansen had paddled only 15 feet toward shore in his panic when he decided he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t go back. He entered the pool of bloody water, half expecting to be attacked. “Quick! Get on your board!” he shouted to Endris. “C’mon, pal — it’s behind you. Let’s go!”
Less than a minute had passed since the shark had taken its first bite. Endris pulled his board close and crawled onto it. Jansen was horrified but stayed calm. “You can do it,” he said. “There’s a small swell coming. Let’s take it in.” Williams had also swum back to help; as soon as they reached the beach, they were joined by Simpson, who had been in shallow water when he saw his friend attacked. The three lifted Endris under his armpits and dragged him onto dry sand.
“That’s when the pain hit,” recalls Endris. Simpson tried to reassure his friend. “It’s okay, buddy. You’re going to make it,” he said, though he feared Endris wouldn’t last until the paramedics got there. “I thought, Who’s going to call this guy’s parents and tell them he’s dead?”
As it happened, Simpson, an X-ray tech at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital, had witnessed his share of trauma cases. Working quickly, he wound a six-foot surfboard leash tightly around Endris’s leg to help slow the bleeding. There wasn’t much he could do for the 40-inch gash on his friend’s back. When Endris craned his neck to see his injuries, Simpson and the others shielded his eyes. “It was hard to look at. We just kept saying, ‘Take deep breaths. It’s not that bad. Hang on.’ ”
It took ten minutes for a beach patrol crew, traversing the steep dunes in a four-wheel-drive pickup, to transport Endris to an ambulance. He was helicoptered to a trauma center in Santa Clara, where surgeons spent six hours putting him back together.
“He looked like an emery board,” says Maria Allo, MD, who oversaw Endris’s care. “We used a couple of gallons of saline to get the sand off his muscles and skin.” The shark’s teeth had nearly punctured one of Endris’s lungs and had missed his aorta by two millimeters. He had lost half of his blood and required more than 500 stitches and 200 staples to close the deep gashes.
During his six days in the hospital, Endris thought about the ocean. He replayed the attack in his mind as he recuperated; he wondered if he’d ever surf again. After his release from the hospital, he retreated to his parents’ San Jose home so his mother, who retired from nursing in 2001, could care for him. Once Endris was back in his Marina apartment, he began having a recurring nightmare: the great white shark plowing through the water, about to knock him off his board. At the moment of impact, he would wake in a sweat. “I would have this feeling of dread and panic in my chest, and there’s nobody to talk to,” he says. “Who can relate? It’s not like there are shark attack victims around every corner.”
Endris took to focusing on the positive from that August day. “A lot of things came together to pull me through,” he says. “The guys who rushed to help, the dolphins — they all saved my life.”
He had heard about a common practice in Taiji, Japan, where dolphins are herded into small coves and slaughtered to be sold at fish markets. Hoping to do his part to protect them, he joined several organizations dedicated to their preservation. “I tell my story now to anybody who will listen because I want people to know how truly remarkable dolphins are,” he says. “They’re as smart as humans, and I believe they’re capable of empathy. When I was being attacked that day, maybe they were trying to protect their young or acting on instinct, but they drove the shark away. If they hadn’t, there’s no doubt in my mind it would have come back.”
Vocabulary
1. Find these words in the story and, using the context clues, define their meaning.
strenuouslycatapultedtraversingtrauma
Reading Comprehension
2. Why do sharks attack humans?
3. How did Endris fight the shark? How did he escape the attack?
Critical Thinking
4. Considering what Endris went through, do you think surfing should be allowed in areas where shark
attacks have occurred previously?