One Florida firefighter is a very lucky man after he was bitten on the hand by a shark while swimming in the surf off New Smyrna Beach, which is about a half-hour’s car ride from Daytona Beach.
CJ Lyles, 31, likes to surf in his spare time, and was out at the beach recently on a particularly good day for waves. It was an ordinary activity for Lyles, who lives in the region and has been surfing for years, often on boards made by his own father. Like most surfers, he has encountered sharks before, but never this up close and personal.
Finding himself surrounded by small sharks, Lyles decided to paddle back to shore, not particularly concerned about the small school around him. But then a slightly larger one, just over three feet in length, clamped down on the surfer’s left hand.
“I felt sharp teeth and pressure,” he said in post to the social media platform Instagram. He said it “scared the s— out of me” and he tried to pull away, but the writhing sharks made it impossible at first. While it felt like a very long time, he said, the shark did not actually hold onto his hand for a lengthy period.
But Lyles was so scared he said he didn’t even want to look down at his hand for fear of what he might discover. “I thought my fingers were gone,” he said.
Videos taken by others at the scene show Lyles trying to clean out the wounds with seawater as blood gushed from his hand into the tide. When he realized that he could not bend his index finger, the Edgewater city firefighter knew he had a bigger problem than what could be solved by simple stitches.
The inability to move his finger indicated that the tendon—the flesh strip that pulls body parts making them flex—had been severed. Luckily, surgeons were able to repair the tendon the next day.
In a lighthearted moment, Lyles laughed at the shirt his girlfriend brought from home so that he could change out of his bloodied clothes. It said “shark bite” on it.
Lyles did not lose any fingers after all, and is expected to make a full recovery within two weeks. He will also need physical therapy to regain full function and use of his hand and fingers.
There have been at least four reported shark bites in the waters off the coast of Florida in the past two months.
