Days after shark attack, Morro Bay man says he plans to surf again

It was a perfect day for surfing Sunday when Kevin Swanson decided to pick up his friend Andrew Walsh and go catch some waves at Montaña de Oro’s Sand Spit Beach — the kind of day when you wouldn’t imagine anything going wrong, Swanson said.

“It was a beautiful day, a beautiful walk down to the beach. We were seeing some great waves,” Swanson said. “(We) probably surfed for about 45 minutes to an hour, and the waves were breaking in one particular spot, and I was kind of paddling back up to that spot and sitting there waiting for my next wave. That’s when everything drastically changed. It went from a beautiful day, to a pretty violent and aggressive moment — I was attacked by a shark.”

Swanson, a 50-year-old Morro Bay resident, was bitten by what appeared to be a juvenile great white shark, between 8 and 10 feet long, and then dragged below the surface of the water.

On Tuesday, Swanson recalled the ordeal, back home after a brief hospital stay.

“What I remember when I was hit was being underwater pretty quickly,” Swanson said. “And I was dragged down a ways.”

The following seconds were a blur, but the next thing he knew, Swanson said he came shooting out of the water back onto his board, where he shouted a warning to his fellow surfers: “Shark attack!”

Swanson’s right hip and thigh were torn open from where the shark had bitten his leg and surfboard. His next few minutes became focused entirely on his survival, he said.

“I knew my leg was cut; I didn’t know how bad,” he said. “I looked at it, and I knew it was bad. I started paddling in. I was fearful of (the shark returning) until maybe five seconds or a little bit of time had passed, and then I realized the shark was not interested any more. … My main concern then was getting to the beach, stopping the bleeding and then getting help.”

Swanson, a financial adviser who was trained in combat lifesaving techniques during his time in the Army almost three decades ago, said his “fight or flight” instincts kicked in. He made it to the beach ahead of his friend, Walsh, and the other surfers.

He said that, while paddling back to shore, all he could think was, “If I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be out in the ocean — it was going to be paddling, trying to save myself.”

Once he made it to the beach, Swanson fashioned a tourniquet for his leg with his surfboard’s leash cord. Help then arrived in the form of two doctors who happened to be on the beach at the time of the attack. It was at about this point, when everyone was surrounding him and trying to help any way they could, that Swanson said it sunk in what was happening.

“It was pretty incredible,” he said. “Within three minutes, five minutes, people were on me; they were over me. There were professional doctors there. Then there were people there who weren’t doctors who were trying to help. … There’s no way it would have happened without them.”

One of those people called Swanson’s wife of 28 years, Toni Swanson, who was at home with the couple’s daughter.

“I couldn’t wrap my mind around it — I thought he was going to say that his board hit him on the head or he had a laceration,” she said, noting that her husband had injured himself while surfing before. “It sank in when I saw the surfboard. When (Walsh) lifted up the surfboard and said, ‘Eh, the shark got a pretty big bite, didn’t he?’ I just lost it. I started crying, our daughter started crying.”

By the time Toni Swanson and her daughter made it to the beach, Kevin Swanson had already been taken via helicopter to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo, where he was set to undergo surgery on a pie pan-sized laceration on his right thigh.

Toni Swanson and her daughter rushed from the beach to the hospital, only to find Kevin Swanson in “high spirits,” joking with the medical staff.

“It was like it hadn’t even happened,” Toni Swanson said of her husband during the hours before surgery. “He was joking around in the emergency room and making the doctors laugh.”

After receiving stitches to his thigh that night — nobody would tell him how many, he joked — Kevin Swanson was released from the hospital at 11:40 a.m. Monday and sent home to recuperate.

Since the attack, Swanson’s home has seen a revolving door of people stopping by to check on him, bring gifts (including wetsuits to replace the one ruined in the attack) and most of all, to hear his story.

“It’s been tons of outpourings from people,” Swanson said. “Those friends and  acquaintances have really kind of come together, and it’s nice.”

Swanson still has some lingering questions from the attack, such as why the shark may have attacked him, its size and whether there are more sharks in the area than normal — questions he hopes can be answered by a shark researcher that contacted him following the Sunday attack.

“It’d be interesting to know, and then, you know, maybe if you are a little more educated, maybe you make better decisions on where to surf, and things like that,” Swanson said, noting that he is not sure whether he will become involved in any shark safety outreach efforts in the future.

One question Swanson has no problem answering, however, is whether he will return to the water once the stitches come out next week.

“Absolutely,” he said. “As soon as I mend up, I look forward to padding out with a small group of friends. My inclination is 100 percent to get back out in the water.”

This story was originally published December 30, 2014 at 7:40 PM with the headline "Days after shark attack, Morro Bay man says he plans to surf again."