Tiger shark takes bite of North Shore surfer

Joshua Holley says he’s not upset that a tiger shark bit him while he surfed Tuesday off the North Shore, and plans to get back in the water as soon as doctors say it’s OK.

"We’re in their domain," he said after the incident. "That respect will always be there for the shark. He’s doing what he does naturally."

Holley, 28, was paddling back out through a channel to a surf spot called Alligator Rock after catching a good set shortly before 1 p.m. when he felt an "unreal push on the left side of my body."

"Its whole weight came at me," he said of the 8- to 10-foot shark. "I could feel the body on me pretty much."

He said the force of the initial attack nearly knocked him off his board, and the weight of the shark felt like "someone landing on you."

With adrenaline surging through his body, he didn’t feel any pain immediately after the shark bite.

"All I could feel was this popping sensation, like if you were to step on a balloon," he said. "It had like this pop, and that’s when I knew that it bit."

After the initial bite the shark came around to the front of Holley’s 6-foot-10-inch board, and in a moment of panic, Holley grabbed the shark’s gills with his left hand and punched the shark’s snout twice with his right.

Then the shark "submerged like a submarine and just disappeared."

Holley recalled yelling, "It’s not my day to die" at the shark as it came at him the second time without opening its jaws. Holley said he went into survival mode and punched the shark in its nose because he read it’s the animal’s most sensitive part.

The scariest part of the ordeal was after the shark submerged, leaving Holley to paddle about 40 yards to shore with blood dripping from his foot into the water.

"I didn’t know where he was going to come from or what angle," he said. "He came out of nowhere and just went nowhere."

After the shark disappeared, Holley looked back and saw three large cuts on his left foot and called out to a bodyboarder at a nearby surf spot called Leftovers. The bodyboarder and a surfer came over and helped Holley paddle back to shore, then put a towel around his foot. Holley’s board was never damaged.

"I really appreciate those guys," Holley said. "Wherever you guys are, God bless you. Thank you guys so much for helping me out. It was pretty frightening."

Holley, a Waialua resident who’s been surfing for 15 years, has seen sharks on other occasions, but never so intimately.

"It was definitely a tiger shark," he said, adding that he could see the animal’s unique leopardlike print under the high sun. "When it made that turn to come on my right side, I got a good look of the size of the shark."

Holley was taken to Wahiawa General Hospital, where doctors sewed up the wounds on his left foot with 42 stitches. He walked out of the hospital on crutches about four hours later and told reporters he will have to undergo surgery to repair two tendons that were severed from his toes.

Holley, who drives a train at Dole Plantation, was off on Tuesday and had a funny feeling before going out into the water, his father, Harold Holley, said his son had later told him. He said when he saw his son, the towel that the foot was wrapped in was soaked in blood.

"He’s so lucky to have his foot," Harold Holley said.

Tuesday’s attack was the first on Oahu this year and the first one confirmed statewide this year, according to Randy Hone­brink, education coordinator and shark specialist for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

Honebrink said Tuesday’s attack occurred 30 to 45 yards offshore in a channel by Alligator Rock in water that was 30 to 40 feet deep.

"It’s not unusual for it to be swimming around in a channel that would get it closer to shore," he said.

Holley said the water was murky, Hone­brink said, "so the shark probably wasn’t able to get a good view of what was up at the surface."

It’s not unusual for tiger sharks to be in Hawaii waters, "but the unusual thing was that after it bit him, it kind of stayed up on the surface," Hone­brink said. "It hit him from the left, stayed at the surface and started swimming around the nose of the board. … I’ve never heard of a shark staying up at the surface after it hit somebody. You would think that once it bit the guy’s foot, it would realize it’s not something worth pursuing. But it stuck around a little longer."

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Star-Advertiser reporter Dan Nakaso contributed to this report.