Cameron Whiting had just completed an easy 1.5-mile open water swim and was bodysurfing at Del Mar Beach Sunday morning when a member of his swim group started yelling.
At first Whiting heard only fear in her voice; then it came to his mind that she was screaming, “Shark!”
One of the new members of the swimming group – a 46-year-old man whose name has not been revealed – was attacked. The woman closest to him screamed for help.
As it was just before 9am and lifeguards were not on duty, help had to come from the swimmers closest to the person in distress. That was Whiting and another member of the group, Kevin Barrett. The pair were about 100 yards from shore while the others were back on the beach and thinking about breakfast.
Barrett sprinted toward the man and the shark. Whiting, 31, who had trained as a marine lifeguard, quickly looked over the shore to make sure someone was calling for help, then began swimming away.
As he moved his arms rapidly, two fears struggled within his mind.
The first was the realization that he was swimming straight toward an active shark attack. The second was the fear of what he would find when he got there. Would his fellow swimmer have all of his limbs? Would he be alive?
“That’s what scares me the most,” Whiting said. “To go up to him and realize that…”
But when he swam about 50 yards to a spot just behind Barrett, he saw the victim was conscious and his organs were intact. However, he was bleeding heavily.
They were about 150 yards from shore; it was hard to imagine he could have gotten there on his own. When they turned him over, blood started pouring through his wet suit.
As they began to pull him toward the beach, a surfer came by and moved his board forward.
They put him on the surfboard and Whiting climbed in behind him to paddle along. Barrett swam alongside the victim to steady him. The woman who had called for their help followed suit.
“That’s when I started to see the full extent of the blood,” Whiting recalls. It was “flowing in both directions and forming a big streak” in the water.
Whiting rowed as fast as he could. All he could think was that he was “surrounded by blood, and there was still a shark out there.” The trip to shore “seemed like an eternity, but was probably only a few minutes.”
Eventually they reached a place where they could stand up. Rescuers picked the man up and carried him, still lying on the board, to the beach.
By then, lifeguards — who were waiting to go on duty nearby — had quickly arrived on the scene.
They laid the victim in the back of the lifeguard truck to assess his injuries.
The victim said the shark hit him once, then bit him. Then the shark came toward him again. He tried to punch the shark, hitting it in the nose with his fist and suffering deep cuts on his hand in the process.
He also had injuries on his torso, where the shark had first bitten him.
Whiting said he tried to protect the man from looking at the deep wound on his chest.
They put a bandage on his arm, then bandaged the wounds on his chest as best they could.
An emergency room doctor, who was walking his dog on the beach, came over, looked at the wounds, and advised rescuers to keep applying pressure.
Finally, the ambulance arrived.
As paramedics brought the man in, Whiting tried to reassure him and tell him he was going to be OK.
The man thanked him so calmly that Whiting wondered if he was in shock.
He was rushed to hospital and is expected to survive. On Monday he was awake and smiling.
After the attack, lifeguards closed Del Mar Beach for 48 hours. Officials urged people to remain calm.
The ocean is full of sharks, and they rarely harm humans, said John Ugoretz, environmental program manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Scientists believe that when they do attack, it’s probably because they mistake humans for prey such as seals or sea lions.
“There have been 215 incidents involving sharks in California since 1950,” Ugoretz said. “That’s less than three per year.”
Of these, 16 people died.
“It’s also incredibly rare to encounter a shark,” Ugoretz said. “The chance of getting stung by a stingray is very, very, very high.”
Ugoretz said one thing is true: The number of reports of people not being injured in shark encounters has increased significantly, but he doesn’t blame the sharks for that.
“Two decades ago, if someone was hit and uninjured, they might tell their friends. Now they tell the whole Internet,” he said.
State data Surveys show that non-injury incidents due to interactions with sharks began to increase around 2004. Facebook was also founded that year.
Jonathan Edelbrock, Del Mar’s chief lifeguard and community services director, said Sunday’s conditions may have been confusing for the shark.
He said the light was dim and the water was cloudy, similar to the last time a shark attacked a human at Del Mar Beach in November 2022. That swimmer also survived.
Whiting doesn’t want to miss out on going out in the ocean because of the incident. In fact, he said some of the swimmers in his group are already planning to get in the water, albeit at a different beach.
“We are all excited to get out to sea,” he said.
