A 23-year-old spearfishing woman was bitten by a shark in the Bahamas on July 4, 2015.
Katie Hester was fishing with her boyfriend Max Gluckler, who had just speared two hog fish, off the coast of Port Lucaya.
The fish had drawn the attention of two reef sharks.
Hester was swimming back to the boat and only had 6 feet to go when she felt pressure on her leg.
At first she believed it was only a friend playing a joke, but then she saw a six-foot-long shark next to her.
Ms. Hester yelled “shark” to warn her friends.
The shark bit her twice and as it began to shake her, she grabbed its fin and pushed it away.
She was able to make it back to the boat recalling to Wpbf “I used all of the adrenaline I had. I flew up that ladder.”
Her boyfriend, not knowing she had been bitten swam out to scare the sharks away.
Once he climbed onto the boat he realized what had happened.
“It was bad. It grabbed her in two big bites. One was like hamburger, all ragged. The other one you could see the bone on her calf and on her shin,” he said.
Thankfully he had extensive first aid training and applied pressure to the wounds as his father throttled the boat toward shore.
After arriving in Port Lucaya, an ambulance took Ms. Hester to the hospital where she received treatment to her torn right Achilles tendon along with stitches to her injured leg.
Thankfully her foot was not lost and she should be able to walk again in three weeks.
A video interview with Ms. Hester is available on wpbf.com
Reef sharks are normally docile and normally only prone to attack if threatened or after food. The presence of two dead fish was a serious contributing factor in the incident.
This is the 51st bite of 2015 and has been marked on the 2015 shark attack bites tracking map.
On July 6th a photographer and friend of pop star Justin Bieber was bitten by a reef shark at an undisclosed location.
