A man spearfishing off the coast of Pebble Beach was badly hurt after being bitten by a shark on Friday, authorities said.
Two off-duty Monterey County sheriff’s deputies were wrapping up a day of fishing in Stillwater Cove when someone alerted them to the situation, according to the sheriff’s department.
The man was with his father several hundred yards from the shore when the shark bit him in his right thigh, a state fire captain told the Associated Press.
An on-duty deputy had responded with a medical trauma kit, and one of the off-duty deputies trained in emergency field medicine used a tourniquet to stem his massive blood loss, sheriff’s officials said. He was then transported to a trauma center, according to Cal Fire.
The victim was seriously injured but his leg was intact, the AP reported. Officials with Cal Fire and the sheriff’s department had not received an update on his condition but said he would likely survive.
Paramedics concluded a shark was involved in the attack because of the victim’s bite marks but they did not know what species it could have been, according to the Mercury News.
A sheriff’s helicopter searched the area and found “a large aquatic animal off Pescadero Point, which may have been a shark” in the area where the victim had been fishing.
The cove was subsequently evacuated. It was unclear when the beach was set to reopen.
Officials told the AP there haven’t been any recent shark sightings at the Monterey County beach. In March, a kayaker in Monterey Bay was knocked into the water by a great white shark, though he was not bitten.
Beaches in Santa Cruz were also closed four days this July when a shark bit a kayaker’s boat, also sending that man into the water.
Further down the coast, however, scientists at Cal State Long Beach’s Shark Lab told KPCC the young great whites that had been congregating for the past few years in hot spots including Dana Point and San Onofre seem to have migrated to warmer waters in Baja California.