About 10 minutes after surfer Tommy Civik entered the water in Mendocino County, he was slammed by a force from below so hard that it was “like getting hit by a car.”
The 26-year-old had gone out on the water around 8:30 a.m. Tuesday. It was a clear and crisp day in Gualala, and he was paddling into the depths to reach pristine, unbroken waves when he was struck by the shark. The attack happened less than a month after an open-water swimmer was killed by a shark in Monterey Bay.
Civik is originally from Point Arena, about 20 minutes north, a small city where coastal and marine life are a familiar part of the landscape. Surfing has been part of his routine for years, and like any surfer, he said, he had passing thoughts about sharks as he swam.
“I wasn’t thinking that this would be the day it would happen,” Civik said.
But the sudden attack sent him flying.
“My board snapped in half on impact. My friend watching said that I flew in the air,” Civik said. “I’m still piecing together what happened. …The whole thing was so jarring, I was just trying to get away.”
Although Civik never saw the shark, he said he immediately knew what it was from the force of the slam.
His friend Marco Guerrero, who witnessed the incident from a nearby sandbar, described the scene to Civik as “violent,” with the shark’s tail “whipping” high above the water.
“I just remember Tommy saying, ‘I’ll meet you out there,’ and suiting up. I was looking out at the waves when I saw the thrashing,” Guerrero said. “I said, ‘Oh that’s a shark attack,’ thinking it was attacking a seal. I didn’t realize it was Tommy.”
With only the tail of his board left and far out from shore, Civik said he “just put [his] head down and swam, fast.”
“I didn’t know where the shark was, so I just focused on getting away. After a minute, I realized that if the shark [had] wanted to bite me again, it would’ve,” Civik said. “It all happened so fast.”
Guerrero described the shark as “big, around 6 feet long,” with a white underbelly.
At 8:45 a.m., the South Coast Fire Protection District received a “call of distress,” said Chief Jason Warner. A bystander on a nearby cliff saw the attack and called 911.
The Coast Life Support District and the fire department, one of the few local departments with a water rescue team, according to Warner, responded to the scene with Jet Skis, prepared to pull Civik from the water.
But once they got there, Civik was already out, standing on land with a torn wet suit and a broken board.
“We gave each other a big hug when he got out of the water,” Guerrero said. “He said, ‘Don’t go in!’ The slam was really the worst part.”
Civik didn’t initially see the puncture wounds until his friend pointed them out.
“I was unbelievably lucky. My board took all the impact, and the teeth just grazed me,” Civik said. “I had quite a bit of adrenaline, and since I could walk, I drove myself to the hospital.”
According to Warner, first responders found that Civik had lacerations on his legs, but he made the decision to take himself to the nearby hospital.
“In 20 years working at coastal fire departments, I had yet to respond to a shark attack. They’re very infrequent,” Warner said. “Luckily, he had minor injuries.”
“One of the paramedics, a surfer too, couldn’t believe that a shark attacked him. We have three generations of surfers among us, and not one time was there a shark attack.”
Civik handed over his wet suit and board to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Service, where officials will test DNA to confirm the kind of shark.
Peter Tira, a spokesperson for the agency, said officials suspected it was a great white shark, a species known to live in the area.
Research shows that great white sharks have a hunting tactic called breaching, where they will rise quickly to hit surface-dwelling prey, such as seals, to shock them before they bite.
On Dec. 21, Erica Fox, a well-known figure in the local open-water swimming community, was killed as she swam in Monterey Bay. Her body was recovered six days later. It was the second shark encounter at that location in three years.
But Tira stressed that shark attacks on humans remain very uncommon in Northern California. Officials recommend that surfers “exercise caution” and avoid surfing alone.
As for Civik, the experience hasn’t soured him on surfing.
“Honestly, I would surf again,” he said. “If it’s already unlikely to get attacked by a shark once, how could it happen twice? I don’t think this will stop me.”
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