Best Foot Forward

I didn’t feel any pain, only pressure.

My friends and I had been surfing a reef break on the west end of Kauai when the tiger shark came up vertically from below and grabbed onto both my legs. I stuck my right hand into its mouth to try pry my legs out. That didn’t work. It started swaying me back and forth out of the water, so I instinctively punched it in the head in the desperate hope it would let me go.

Finally it released me and I scrambled back onto my bodyboard. When I started paddling back to shore, my right leg began to spasm and shake. I thought it was the shark coming to finish me off. I looked over my shoulder and my heart dropped. My right leg had been completely severed below the knee and was squirting blood in time with my pulse, sending the limb into spasm.

If it weren’t for the swift actions of my friends, who dragged me up the beach and made a tourniquet from a leash before rushing me to hospital, I would have died.