A family vacation in the Abacos islands took a bad turn when a father was bitten by shark estimated at six feet took a chunk out of his calf while he was spearfishing.
“After I had speared the grouper, I was swimming back toward the boat to put them in the cooler, and I was probably in about 5 feet of water,” Erik Norrie, who is the CEO of Sea Hawk Paints, told Tampa, Fla.-based Fox 13. “And all of the sudden I felt this [crunch] on the back of my leg. And just as I looked back, he was just finishing his bite and ripping and swimming off, and you could see a piece of my leg in his mouth.”
A doctor, vacationing from San Diego, happened to be within three minutes of them and helped the family get Norrie to shore and to a medical facility, then to Jackson Hospital in Miami.
“I’ve been struck by lightning, bitten by a rattlesnake, and punched by monkeys not once but twice,” Norrie said on the Sea Hawk Facebook page. And now I can claim that I’ve survived a major shark bite. It’s called the shark bite diet — you can lose two pounds in three seconds!”
