After shark attack, he’s ‘luckiest guy’
San Francisco man recounts his harrowing experience while snorkeling at Gray Whale Cove
SAN FRANCISCO >> Nemanja Spasojevic thought he hit the jackpot.
While snorkeling and fishing for dinner at Gray Whale Cove State Beach off the San Mateo County coast at about 9 a.m. June 25, he came across the rare sight of five Dungeness crabs climbing on top of each other in the underwater sand.
“I said ‘wow’ to myself,” Spasojevic said. “It’s like striking a gold mine.”
Savoring the moment, he started picking the crabs up one at a time for a close look, knowing he could get the choicest catch if he was deliberate. He already had been in the water about 45 minutes, so this was the last snorkeling stop before heading back to shore.
As he went to pick up the next crab, his leg reflexively lurched after feeling a sudden sharp pain — “almost like a strong mosquito bite” — and “a little bit of a push.”
As he grabbed his leg and looked back, a juvenile shark’s nose and beady black eyes came into focus. Just like that, he realized he had been bitten.
In the Bay Area, shark sightings and attacks are becoming more frequent as global warming’s effect on their food supply drives them closer to populated areas. Researchers have discovered a dramatic increase in the number of great white sharks swimming in Monterey Bay in recent years.
Locally, a 26-year-old Santa Cruz surfer was killed last year by a great white shark at Manresa State Beach in Monterey Bay. And as recently as Wednesday, a 15-year-old boy was bitten on the hand by a shark while kayaking off Santa Catalina Island, according to The Associated Press.
“I could see it (the shark) maybe 3 feet away after I grabbed my legs and swam up,” Spasojevic said in an in
terview Wednesday at San Francisco’s Dolores Park, near his home. “I couldn’t see the entire body or a belly. But I knew it was a shark.”
In that moment, Spasojevic didn’t feel much except the freezing water seeping into his wetsuit from the shark’s punctures. “There was no major body trauma or anything,” he said.
But fearing another attack, he frantically swam toward an outcropping of jagged rocks on the north side of the cove hoping if the shark was still nearby he could kick it away and escape. “Bashing a bit on the rocks was a better alternative” than succumbing to another, more severe bite.
“I told myself, I’m going to just get out of the beach and drive ASAP to check into a hospital because of the punctures,” Spasojevic said. “I didn’t notice I was bleeding severely or anything. In the marine world, you’re always more worried about getting tetanus or an infection from a scrape or a seal bite. Even if it’s little, it can be dangerous. So I knew I needed to get help.”
Moving onto the rocks, Spasojevic managed to get out of the water after climbing over a canyon-like area near the cove’s north cliff face. The only people he spotted on the beach were a fisherman and some hikers above the cove.
As he limped on the white sand, Spasojevic noticed that his wetsuit bulged at his ankle, a sign that water had seeped past the strong elastic designed around the end of the legs to keep it out.
When he opened his wetsuit to release the water, the sight of a viscous, pinkish mix of blood and saltwater horrified him. The wound was much more severe than he first thought, and here he was alone on the beach.
“It was like the blood fell out almost solid,” Spasojevic said. “I took my gear off, fins, GoPro, Gauge and bagged them. Then I emptied my dive bag and let go of two rock crabs I picked. I then took a rubber waistband, removed weights and made two loops around my leg, making an improvised version of a tourniquet. I packed up and started walking.”
Limping across the sand toward the steep slope leading up to Highway 1, Spasojevic realized his leg had filled with blood again and he wouldn’t be able to make it. Looking around, Spasojevic spotted a fisherman. “Help!” he yelled as loud waves crashed on the shore. “Shark attack! Help!”
He then collapsed onto the sand and laid his head down on the beach’s slope to keep blood in his brain. Quickly springing into action, the fisherman called 911 and delegated a family to watch over Spasojevic as he raced up the stairs to flag down paramedics on the freeway.
When he heard the sirens, Spasojevic knew he would survive. He was carried up the path to an ambulance by two paramedics and taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where he was stitched up.
“I got home at about 9:58 p.m.,” Spasojevic said. “I watched ‘The Simpsons’ and went to bed.”
Less than a week since his scrape with the shark, Spasojevic said he’s eager to get back into the water, though maybe not Gray Whale Cove for some time. He still walks with a slight limp, his leg swollen and wrapped with gauze but otherwise fine.
Spasojevic, a Serbian immigrant who came to San Francisco in 2006 after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had always been comfortable in the water.
He remembers chasing octopuses off the coasts of Croatia and Montenegro and spending hours in the water on vacations, snorkeling, surfing, diving and fishing. When he was about 5, his father made him a trident.
After moving to San Francisco, he was eager to get in the area’s ocean waters, so famous for diving, fishing and snorkeling. About 6 feet, 2 inches tall with a square jaw and a muscular, swimmer’s build, Spasojevic looks every bit the “sea dog” — as he puts it — that makes magazine covers.
It took his wife, Tanja Milutinovic Spasojevic, a couple of days for the news of the shark attack to set in. She was sitting on the couch when she heard a knock at the door and two San Francisco police officers told her her husband had been bitten by a shark and was being taken to a hospital. She said the thing that surprised her the most about the experience was the shock.
“When you’re in a state of shock you really don’t think, your mind refuses to absorb the full extent of what you just heard,” Tanja Spasojevic said. “A couple of days ago, I knew he was OK but that’s when I started crying. Now I can let my full emotions out. I’m just so happy he’s OK.”
Now Nemanja Spasojevic is part of the statistic that says a person’s chance of getting attacked by a shark in the United States is about 1 in 11.5 million and of getting killed by one less than 1 in 264.1 million, according to research from the Florida Museum of Natural History, which tracks and studies shark attacks internationally.
“I feel like the luckiest guy in the world,” Spasojevic said. “It happens so rarely here that you don’t think it’s going to happen. When I deep dive in Mendocino or the Sonoma coasts, there you get like a kind of eerie feeling. But not here. I never thought it would happen here, and to me.”
After being contacted by shark experts and researchers eager to learn more about his encounter, Spasojevic was told that juvenile sharks love to feast on the Dungeness crabs he intended to have for dinner after his dive.
“I thought it was my secret stash of crab,” he said. “But I guess it was that
shark’s stash.”