Lifelong surfer Jim Affinito is convinced a shark wanted to eat him for Halloween dinner.
The Prunedale resident was enjoying a surfing session on Monday, Oct. 31, with no other surfers around on a beautiful late autumn afternoon off of Otter Point in Pacific Grove. At age 50, he has surfed many times in those same waters since he was a teenager.
After about 45 minutes Affinito paddled out to deeper water about 100 yards offshore then sat up on his board waiting to catch a wave. Suddenly he felt a hard jolt from below that sent him into the air.
"It was like Mike Tyson hit me from below," Affinito says.
A press release by the Pacific Grove Police Department describes the incident as a "shark encounter," but Affinito characterizes it as an attack. "It sure felt like one," he says.
"My three seconds in the ocean was terrifying and it was not a little bump or encounter. My perception was that that thing wanted to eat me," he says.
In what he believes took all of about three seconds, Affinito's thigh was hit by one of the shark's fins, hard enough that he's limping a day later. "That was the only bad injury," he says. "It's like if you took a baseball bat and hit your quadricep perpendicular to the leg."
The leash connecting his ankle to the surfboard was momentarily tangled up in the shark's tail. Both human and shark fought to untangle themselves. Affinito immediately made it back on his board and he "motor-armed it back to shore," terrified the shark would come for him again. The fast paddling may have pulled some muscles in Affinito's chest.
Affinito says a father and son on shore witnessed the entire incident and called 911 as soon as they saw the shark. Affinito himself never saw the shark in total, just a gray mass for a fleeting moment. "I felt his body flexing," he says. The witnesses estimated the shark was approximately 15 feet long.
The shark's impact with the board left a conical imprint the shape of the shark's nose in the bottom of the board, breaking the hard fiberglass surface exposing the foam inside. Affinito says what appeared to be shark skin was caught in the break.
There is also what appears to be teeth marks in the side of the board. The California Department of Fish and Game took the board for testing.
Affinito believes the shark decided he wasn't edible, after trying to bite into something hard that the shark thought would be soft. "It didn't feel to me like an investigatory chomp."
In what Affinito calls a "weird coincidence," it turns out he, as an ICU and surgical nurse at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, took care of Steve Bruemmer, who suffered a major shark bite in June while surfing off of Lovers Point, about a half mile east from where Affinito was surfing on Monday. The nurse cared for Bruemmer immediately after surgery.
"It's just odd that I got hit by a shark not far from where he did," Affinito says. They spoke on the phone the next day, two people with a shared experience few others in the world have gone through.
"We were just talking about decompressing and dealing with any PTSD that may come from it. He's a really sweet and open man I'm grateful to have," Affinito says.
Asked if he'll ever return to surfing, Affinito was reticent. "I don't know. I've been a surfer for the majority of my life and the idea of just quitting surfing doesn't seem quite right," he says. It will likely be a process.
What Affinito says he knows for sure is that the ocean is different now. There are more sharks present close to shore in Monterey Bay.
This is the third such shark/human interaction in Pacific Grove in just over four months, starting with Bruemmer's bite on June 13. He was bitten across his abdomen and thighs, resulting in surgery and a three-week stay at Natividad Medical Center. He was discharged three weeks later to continue his recovery at home.
The second incident was in August, when paddle boarder Dave Stickler and his dog Brutus escaped injury after a shark bit Stickler's board also about 150 yards off of Lovers Point, causing them to momentarily fall off. They were able to get back on; a nearby whale watching boat helped Stickler find his paddle so he could paddle back safely to shore.
In the first two incidents coastal access was blocked for a few days, but this time the area surrounding the point off of Ocean View Boulevard will remain open, P.G. Police said. Signs were posted to make the public aware of the incident.