Surfer Bitten In The Face By Shark At Florida Beach – And Survives

A shark bit surfer Mark Sumersett in the face at a Volusia County, Florida, beach this week.

“It was the scariest thing I’ve probably ever been through in my life,” Sumersett told WESH TV. “I’ve been in bad car accidents. Nothing like this.”

He is the seventh person to have been attacked in that area of Florida this year.

He was on a wave at approximately 7:50 a.m. on Tuesday at New Smyrna Beach when he jumped into the ocean.

Sumersett did not see the shark as it came towards him.

The shark bit into his face, creating a two-inch laceration in the right half of his face.

Sumersett had worse lacerations in the left half of his face, starting at his eye and ending at his jawline.

He received at least 20 stitches at the local hospital.

“It was pressure, and I’ll tell you that pressure, it was like a crunch,” he recalled of the moment that he sensed the shark sinking its teeth into him. “I heard the crunch. It felt like a bear trap crunching on my face.”

Sumersett arrived in Florida from South Carolina on Monday to take advantage of the waves from Hurricane Lee.

He remembered seeing multiple sharks when he got to the beach and felt apprehensive about going into the ocean.

“I had a feeling. I had a feeling I was going to get bit yesterday. I really did. Honestly, I had intuition,” he explained.

Sumersett noted that it was a swift bite and that the shark swiftly let him go but also left him bleeding quite a bit.

He was scared that the shark would come back after smelling his blood.

“I jumped on my board and paddled in. I thought that sucker was going to come back for me,” he explained. “I thought he was ’cause I was bleeding so bad.”

Volusia County, Florida, is known for shark attacks, specifically on the hands, feet, ankles, and thighs. But sharks biting faces is a rare occurrence.

New Smyrna Beach is known as the shark bite capital of the world.

Sumersett claimed that the gold chain he was wearing provoked the shark.

There’s also the possibility that the shark thought that Sumersett was food.

Even with the shark encounter, Sumersett still intends to get back to surfing after he fully recuperates.

Discovery’s Shark Week host Dr. Austin Gallagher explained to uInterview important information about what a person should do if they encounter a shark in the water. 

He advised that if you come across a shark while you are swimming, you should try to assert your dominance rather than swim away from the shark. 

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“Standing your ground and making eye contact with, you know, the big predatory sharks like tigers and whites usually is what you need to do,” he stated. “In order to, you know, kind of assert your dominance.”

Typically, when one sees a shark their first instinct is to get away from it as fast as possible, but this can actually make the situation worse. “If you start swimming away fast, yeah, that’s what you want to do, but sometimes you look like a prey item.”