DENVER (CBS4) – A Denver man is back in Colorado after a summer trip to the East Coast that left him with multiple scars, a leg cast and an unbelievable story to tell.
Christopher Myers survived an attack by a shark while he was swimming in Massachusetts. He returned to Denver on Tuesday and shared his story with CBS4 at LoHi Athletic Club where he gingerly used the exercise bike.
Myers and his son were in Cape Cod on July 30 trying to swim out to a sandbar that was several hundred yards away from the beach when the attack happened. Just moments before, his son had actually asked what wouuld do if they ran into a shark. Myers jokingly replied “We’d be in trouble.”
The shark, which apparently was a great white, came up out of nowhere.
“I felt teeth rip into both my legs. I knew it was a shark,” he said.
Amazingly, Myers was able to fend the shark off, but not without getting some pretty serious injuries. He suffered deep puncture wounds, severed tendons, and needed 47 stitches.
“He had my left leg in a vice but with my right leg I was able to kick at him. I couldn’t see underneath the water, but I was kicking at his nose; I was hitting his teeth. I’ve got cuts all over the bottom of my right foot,” he told CBS4.
The shark let go and then resurfaced seconds later.
“My son and I were about five feet apart and he surfaced right between us. So we saw the dark colored back and the huge dorsal fin,” he said. “We say six to eight feet of what had to be a 10 or 12 foot shark — maybe bigger.”
At that point Myers was bleeding badly. He started to swim back and nearly passed out before reaching shore.
Myers, who grew up on the East Coast, admits he had no idea that there were sharks in the area where he was and says he would have thought twice about swimming out so far had he been aware.
Myers is helped to an ambulance by rescuers on July 30. (courtesy: Cape Cod Times)
“Maybe I was the last person not to have heard that there were sharks off of Cape Cod, but I hadn’t heard that. If I had, I probably would have .. been more careful,” Myers said in a news conference in a Massachusetts hospital a few days after the incident. “We were told afterward that there had been a seal — something else I wish I had noticed.”
The attack marked the first time a shark had bitten someone off Cape Cod since 1936.
Myers says he’s happy to be alive and grateful to those who helped rescue him when he got back to the beach. He hopes to get his cast off in about three weeks and is expected to make a full recovery.
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