IT’S JAWS TWO
Kids, 13 and 12, survive bites off Fire Island
young swimmers got the scare of their lives after being chomped on and bloodied by sharks off Fire Island, officials said Wednesday.
Both attacks happened around noon, officials said, when a 13-year-old boy identified only as Max was bit on the leg while Boogie boarding at Atlantique Beach.
About 5 miles away, Lola Pollina, 12, also felt the jaws of an underwater beast clamp down on her while swimming.
Pollina was about 5 to 10 feet off shore when she was attacked, her father said.
“It was like bedlam. I see her going into shock, kind of, I saw the thrashing about,” Philip Pollina said.
Lola was only waist deep in the water when she claimed she saw a fin.
“I was standing there and the water was cold so I didn’t really feel anything. Then I saw something next to me and I felt pain,” she said at a press conference outside of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Islip.
“It was like a whirlpool-looking thing next to me,” she added. “So I ran out to my mom and my leg was all bloody.”
Max’s nightmare encounter left him with a grim souvenir — a shark’s tooth. The camper at the town of Islip’s summer camp for 10Two to 15-year-olds “stumbled out of the water” and was tended to by lifeguards, town spokeswoman Caroline Smith told the Daily News.
“Today, one of our young campers was on a Boogie board. A wave knocked him off and he actually got bit. He walked out of the water and a lifeguard went right over to him and saw that he was bleeding,” Islip town supervisor Angie Carpenter said at a press conference.
Chief lifeguard Craig Amarando said guards rescued him “right away.”
“We had him under our tent administering first aid. That’s when they noticed the punctures,” he said, referring to the wound on his leg. “We figured it was a shark right away. We dressed the wounds appropriately.”
Emergency medical technicians removed a piece of tooth from the boy’s leg, which is being tested to determine the species of the shark that bit him.
He added that the victim remained “in good spirits” throughout the ordeal.
“He was very brave. He was alert the whole time. He was scared, of course, but he was a brave boy,” Amarando said.
The camper was taken to Southside Hospital, where he is being treated for nonlife-threatening injuries.
Islip closed its beaches Wednesday immediately after the attacks were reported.