A surfer was bitten in the neck last weekend by a shark at a beach near Monterey, California. 27-year-old Eric Tarantino was surfing for only 10 minutes at Marina State Beach before he was attacked on the forearm and neck by a nine-foot shark.
Tarantino was saved by friends who pulled him out of the water and stopped his bleeding before he was airlifted to safety. Tarantino saw the shark prior to the attack however he could not escape in time.
The sheer force of the great white shark is reflected in the images of the young man’s surfboard which bore a 19-inch gash in it following the attack.
Four years prior to the incident, Tarantino’s friend and fellow surfer, Todd Engris, was attacked by a shark at the same beach. Engris told “The Today Show” that the news of the attack on Tarantino “shakes me up.”
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Notwithstanding the grizzly nature of these as well as other shark attacks, the video from Today explains that “experts say beach goers are more likely to drown than be attacked.”
Actually, human attacks on sharks are far more common than vice versa. On average, five people are killed by sharks each year. However, up to 70 million sharks are killed each year by fishermen, according to University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File.