The survivors, rescuers, and those who make regular pilgrimages to the waters off Lovers Point are reassessing their place amid the beautiful and fearsome power of the ocean. Now, they are left to …
Steve Bruemmer, who was attacked by a great white shark at Lovers Point in June, is still recovering from the bite that shredded his quadriceps and nearly killed him. He hopes to walk on his own again by Christmas.
A boat drives past the “shark buoy” stationed on the edge of Lovers Point marine reserve that picked up a ping from a passing shark the day before Steve Bruemmer was attacked. The buoy is monitored by a lab at the Hopkins Marine Station, but it’s not designed to be an early warning system. The day before, on the first day of summer, a “shark buoy” anchored on the edge of Lovers Point marine reserve picked up a ping – the first in a month.
Now, three months later, in the first in-depth interviews with the survivors, rescuers, and those who make regular pilgrimages to the waters off Lovers Point, all say they are coming to grips with what happened here and reassessing their place amid the beautiful and fearsome power of the ocean.
On the beach, Heath Braddock, a competitive surfer and church volunteer, was finishing up a lesson for a youth group from Kansas, many of whom had never set foot in an ocean. At this place once called “Lovers of Jesus Point” for the religious groups that first settled here, Braddock shared his love for God’s creation and encouraged the teenagers to overcome their fears of what may live below.
“You realize how small we are sometimes,” Braddock said. “Sometimes we need things like that to wake us up.”For 12 seconds, Bruemmer wasn’t sure whether he was drifting down or floating up. Was it only 12 seconds? Was that all it took to scrutinize this huge gray creature with its signature white belly? This was no hammerhead or sevengill or leopard shark, like the ones he shows off to visitors at the aquarium, the kind of sharks that have a sleekness about them.
Steve Bruemmer shows some of the scars that remain from a great white shark bite that left U-shaped lacerations from above his knees to below his belly button. Investigators measured the puncture wounds to help determine the shark was likely 14- to 15-feet long. The piercing sound bounced off the cove’s natural amphitheater, a crescent of concrete retaining walls and rounded rocks that hugged the beach.
Braddock arrived within minutes on the stacked surfboards, and the trio struggled to heave Bruemmer onto the spare one without tumbling into the cloud of red. Where was the shark? A great white shark swims between Seacliff State Beach and New Brighton State Beach in Santa Cruz County in September 2021. Within hours, a call came in to Chris Lowe who runs the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab, one of the oldest in the country. He’s also the West Coast representative for the International Shark Attack Committee, which has been keeping a file of shark incidents, from surfboard bites to deaths, dating back to the 1500s.
Since 1950, along the entire 840-mile California coast, only 204 shark incidents have been logged, including 15 fatal ones, all from white sharks. The first death ever recorded by California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife occurred right here, 25 yards off the tip of Lovers Point, on Dec. 7, 1952. A white shark gouged the back thigh of a 17-year-old boy, circling his frantic rescuers until they ferried the lifeless body to shore.
White sharks and humans have been coming into close contact around the Cement Ship in Aptos over the past five years as ocean waters have warmed since 2014 and enticed juvenile white sharks to set up a nursery there dubbed “Shark Park.” Three days after Bruemmer’s near-fatal encounter in June, the city of Pacific Grove followed state protocols and reopened the beach at Lovers Point. The Coast Guard searched the water and the local fire department sent up drones but found no sign of the shark.
For this 40-year-old who had studied Buddhism in Nepal, there was something about this watery wilderness that touched his soul. Just a couple hundred yards from shore, he had often paddled among pods of dolphins and humpback whales that crest up and out and swim so close that he said he hears their calls and smells their breath.
He should probably try to punch it, he thought. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Blunt force to the nose?The shark readjusted its bite once, then twice into the board, thrusting its caudal fins from side to side. Stickler held on, pushing his weight to the right to compensate.Like a battering ram, the shark surged from beneath and slammed the board again. Stickler lost his grip and he and Brutus tumbled into the sea.
A kayaker took this photo on Aug. 10 at Lovers Point as David Stickler furiously paddles back to shore, with his dog Brutus cowering on the back, after a great white shark bit down on his board and threw them into the ocean. A few days later, a warden from the state Fish and Wildlife knocked on Stickler’s door in Pacific Grove and measured the triple-row of bite marks on his board.
But was the shark that swam past the buoy the same one that attacked Bruemmer the next day? Again, the scientists say that will remain a mystery. David Stickler shows the scale of the shark bite on his paddle board. A state Fish and Wildlife warden measured them and determined the great white shark was up to 16 feet long.
Bruemmer is hoping to walk on his own by Christmas. He recently graduated from a wheelchair to a walker. In the meantime, he’s been staving off depression by finding daily moments of joy. Chris Villanueva, 52, is one of the swimmers – and one of the few Kelp Krawlers who occasionally looks at the shark buoy website. He has counted 11 pings over the past year and even saw a shark underneath him on one swim.
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