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PACIFIC GROVE – Somehow, he wasn’t desperate for air. He didn’t feel the pain across his abdomen and thighs. He didn’t notice the blood. A strange sense of calm enveloped Steve Bruemmer as he hung weightless underwater and stared into the cold black eye of a great white shark.
Across the street from the beach at Lovers Point, a home security camera captured the signs of the first shark attack here in 70 years. Beyond the cars driving down Ocean View Boulevard and the snack shack selling chocolate-dipped ice cream cones, a giant splash disrupts the water’s flat surface. Then nothing. For 12 seconds.
Just 150 yards from shore, Bruemmer had been finishing up a blissful mile-and-a-half solo swim when an ambush predator charged from below, plowed into Bruemmer mid-stroke, flipped him over and dragged him under. For 12 seconds, the 62-year-old retired IT worker who volunteered Mondays at the nearby Monterey Bay Aquarium vanished beneath the water.
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. A great white shark wearing an electronic tag had swum past emitting a signal monitored by a lab at the nearby Hopkins Marine Station and uploaded to a public website.
But Bruemmer, who started ocean swimming 12 years ago with the encouragement of his triathlete wife, Brita, rarely checked the shark buoy pings. He left that to his brother-in-law, George Matsumoto, a biological oceanographer at the aquarium’s research institute in Moss Landing. Every once in a while, Matsumoto would send an email to Bruemmer, who swam with a group called the Kelp Krawlers several days a week at Lovers Point – and sometimes beyond to the shark buoy, a two-mile roundtrip.
You should know there’s a shark that’s hanging around, Matsumoto would write.
Does that mean I shouldn’t swim? Bruemmer (rhymes with swimmer) would write back.
No, there are sharks here all the time, he would respond.
George, stop sending me these emails, then. If I’m going to swim anyway, I’m going to be freaked out about sharks all the time.
The shark buoy isn’t designed to be an early warning system for swimmers. It’s one of several anchored between Pacific Grove and Tomales Point to study the large-scale migration patterns of the predators along the California coast.
But nothing could have predicted what happened at Lovers Point this summer: not one, but two great white shark attacks – in the span of two months. The first since 1952.
The ocean ambushes puzzled marine scientists who have spent their adult lives studying one of Earth’s most storied and mysterious creatures. And they shook the local community of swimmers and surfers, disrupting an almost-religious connection to the water, forged in the months and years before the attacks.
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. For each of them, it comes down to a deeply personal question about taking risks and finding meaning that decades of marine science can’t answer: When will it feel safe to get back in the water?
“Swimming in that cold, beautiful water wakes me up and reminds me that I’m alive,” Bruemmer said. “There is some irony that this thing that made me feel alive almost wound up killing me.”
On the morning of June 22, an unnerving quiet had settled over Lovers Point. The water was so glassy, it barely lapped the shore. Paul Bandy and Aimee Johns, a police officer and a registered nurse from Folsom, were enjoying their 12th wedding anniversary, paddleboarding through the bay’s famed National Marine Sanctuary. They were used to seals barking and seagulls cawing every time they came here, but that Wednesday morning just after 10:30, they were met with a disturbing silence. So they turned back early, heading around the rocky point and into the cove.
“It was almost an eerie feeling,” said Johns, an oncology nurse at Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, “like, where is all the sea life?”
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.
But little more than the length of a football field away, Bruemmer was beneath, coming face to face with 300 serrated teeth.
In 12 seconds, the couple celebrating their wedding anniversary and the surfer teaching teenagers to respect the ocean would be called into action and forced to overcome fears of their own.
“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. The broadside of this shark loomed beside him, its head a giant torpedo. The jaws that had clamped down on Bruemmer’s pelvis and spit him out were now closed. But those menacing rows of lower teeth, razor-sharp triangles that had torn through his torso, were jutting up and gruesomely visible.
“God,” Bruemmer thought to himself, “don’t bite me again.”
Submerged in the chilly Pacific in his black wetsuit and white swim cap, Bruemmer felt a strange connection to the pelagic predator suspended an arm’s length beside him. He didn’t realize the extent of his injuries: the lacerations on his left arm, the tears and punctures across one-third of his body from his abdomen to his thighs. Through the prescription swim goggles that had remained in place during the chaotic tumbling, he stared into the coal-colored eye that faced him. He looked for a pupil or whites of its eye but saw none. Instead, the shark’s head bobbed back and forth, back and forth, as though it was considering whether to go in for the kill.
“Look at me,” Bruemmer said to himself, channeling an earnest appeal. “I’m wearing a white cap. I’ve got a white face. I am not a seal. Leave me alone.”
With his one good arm, Bruemmer swung out to strike the shark’s head. But the saltwater swallowed the force of the blow. When his fingertips made contact, catching for a moment on the rough denticles of the shark’s skin, he could do little more than push at its lower jaw. As best as he could, he kicked at it with his badly injured right leg.
Then, somehow, the great white disappeared into the murky darkness and Bruemmer scrambled to the surface.
Gasping for air, he looked down. All he could see was red.
His wetsuit was punctured and ripped from beneath his belly button to above his knees.
“I could die,” he said to himself.
Then in a voice he didn’t recognize, he let out his first scream.
The piercing sound bounced off the cove’s natural amphitheater, a crescent of concrete retaining walls and rounded rocks that hugged the beach. The camera across the street picked up his terrified voice: “Help! Help!” It started strong and high, then as though shifting into slow motion, the intensity drained into a deep moan.
Braddock, on the beach with the church group, thought the screams were part of a training exercise at first. In his 30 years surfing in Monterey Bay, including 10 as a surf instructor, he had never seen a shark. But he had helped with countless rescues of beginning surfers who drifted out too far. He grabbed two of the large practice surfboards the teens had just pulled to shore and ran straight for the water.
At the same time, the Folsom couple returning on their paddleboards rushed toward the wounded swimmer wildly slapping at the water, uncertain whether he was suffering a medical emergency or engaging in mortal combat.
“I’m coming for you!” Bandy called out, devising a plan as he cut through the water: If it was a sea lion, he’d smash his paddle on its head. If it was a shark, he’d ram the paddle down its throat.
He found neither, only a wounded man in a pool of blood on the verge of losing consciousness.
“Grab my paddle!” Bandy said.
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?
Braddock led the caravan with Bruemmer clutching his ankle from the board behind. Bruemmer’s mangled legs kept flopping off the bloody, slippery board, so Johns, on a board behind Bruemmer, grabbed his ankles to keep them from falling back in. Then suddenly, she was the one who fell into the water, yanked off her board by the momentum of Braddock’s powerful strokes.
With the shark possibly lurking nearby, she had to choose – swim back to the safety of her paddle board or stay in the water to protect the wounded swimmer.
“I chose to stay with Steve,” she said. “I was committed to it.”
As blood poured into the water, Johns kicked frantically, helping propel the chain of boards to shore. Sharks are known to disable their prey and return later to finish them off.
“I’m thinking I might as well be chumming the water,” she said.
The rescuers heard the sirens before they finally safely touched the sand, where stunned beach-goers pulled off their shirts for tourniquets. The swimmer’s grip on Braddock’s ankle was so tight, he had to peel off the fingers one by one.
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.
Lowe has viewed autopsy photos and stitched-up injuries, and interviewed survivors and bystanders, always searching for clues about one thing: why sharks attack.
“Sadly, despite the fact that there are over 5,000 records, we can’t answer that question,” Lowe said. “That’s a frustrating thing that a lot of people don’t like to hear, but that’s the simple reality. If anything, sharks occasionally make a mistake.”
The largest and most dangerous “macropredators” in the world, white sharks typically eat fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. But scientists have found little evidence they treat humans as prey; even in the rare instances in which they bite, they don’t consume.
For the average American, there’s a greater risk of being killed by lightning, fireworks, a train crash or a bear, according to an analysis by the International Shark Attack Committee, than by a shark.
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. The attack was so notorious that a black-and-white photo of his body on an autopsy table turned up two decades later in a scene in the blockbuster movie “Jaws.”
Source: Calif. Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. | Graphic by PAI/BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
In May 2020, surfer Ben Kelly was killed off Sand Dollar Beach in Aptos when a young adult white shark, about 10 to 12 feet long, bit into his leg. It was the first shark fatality in California since 2012.
Some studies show the population of adult white sharks is slowly growing along the Northern California coast, from just over 200 to nearly 300 in the last decade. Other scientists report far more and believe the total population reaches upwards of 3,000, many swimming to feed between Baja California and Hawaii in what’s known as the “shark cafe.”
But trying to decipher the sweet spot for white sharks, where and when they are likely to attack a person, never holds up to scrutiny, Lowe said.
“We can come up with generalities in terms of the habitats that they use, the depths that they prefer, the temperatures that they prefer,” Lowe said, “but statistically, it would have zero relevance because the probability of being bitten anywhere, even within the best habitat, is already infinitesimally low.
“I can guarantee you probably 20 white sharks swam underneath 50 swimmers and surfers just today,” between Santa Barbara and San Diego, he said. “Those people don’t know the sharks are there. We do. We have seen it from the air.”
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. Within days, the shark buoy would ping again, twice.
Those drawn to Lovers Point as a place for healing, a bracing physical or spiritual experience, were forced to recalculate the risks of confronting a killer shark.
Kelly Majid, a 50-year-old widow whose morning swims helped her overcome her grief after losing her husband to cancer, sat at the edge of the beach every day for a week and cried. Would she lose this, too?
Half the 40 active members of the Kelp Krawlers were afraid to go back in.
David Stickler, a local paddle boarder, stayed out of the water for nearly two months. After teaching a sunrise yoga class on a bright August morning, he decided he had waited long enough.
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. Sometimes, they headed straight for the tip of his board, then dove gently beneath it, creating just enough wake for Stickler and Brutus, his German Shepherd rescue dog and constant companion, to steady themselves.
On this first day back in the water, with his phone in a dry bag and Brutus on the back of his board, he set off.
What were the odds of a second shark attack here, so close, so soon, anyway?
“Why would I live here,” he said, “if I’m going to be scared of what’s in front of me?”
Stickler had been on the water for only 10 minutes when he spotted the shadow cruising beneath his board. At first, he thought it was a small whale or maybe a big dolphin. But as he paddled on his knees just beyond Lovers Point, the ghostly figure took a turn too sharp for a whale. He was considering its size when a cannonball of muscle careened into the right side of his board, throwing him off balance. Astonished, Stickler dropped his paddle and grabbed both sides of his board as the shark’s dripping head rose up and chomped through the veneer and into the board’s stiff foam. Its snout receded and all Stickler could see were its terrifying, jagged teeth.
“There’s a little voice in the back of your head that’s going, ‘Holy shit, this is actually happening,’” he said. “I’m watching it thrash on the board. I’m watching the eyelids roll back. I’m watching the teeth chew into my board.”
He should probably try to punch it, he thought. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Blunt force to the nose?
“It’s exactly three feet away from my face,” he said.
But just out of reach.
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.
Finally, the shark let go. For a moment, Stickler felt a blip of calm.
Then … BAM! 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. Where was the shark? Where was Brutus?
Stickler flipped the heavy paddle board and lunged himself on top, then spotted Brutus furiously swimming behind him.
”Come on, come on,” Stickler called, dragging Brutus onto the board. The dog cowered under his knees.The shark had badly damaged the board, but spared them both from its bite.
Just then, he heard a voice call out: “Are you OK?” It came from the loudspeaker of a tour boat that had seen the commotion.
As the boat drew near, Stickler noticed a scrum of men gathered in a circle at the back wearing maroon and orange robes. They were Buddhist monks. And they were praying.
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.
In June, a forensic scientist in Sacramento tested Bruemmer’s wetsuit for shark DNA, taped it back together, measured the distance between puncture points and tried to reconstruct the exact angle the shark may have hit.
The investigations determined what most people already knew – that a great white was responsible for each.
But something else became clear: It wasn’t the same shark. From the bite marks, scientists estimated the shark that attacked Bruemmer was 14 or 15 feet long. The one that bit Stickler’s board was a foot longer.
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.
“We always struggle with our ability to understand these things, and then be able to articulate these things to the public,” Lowe said. “Are we further creating the monster that the public already believes sharks to be?”
After the attack in August, Stickler received so much unwanted attention, he shaved off his beard. He was tired of being recognized but even more annoyed when people downplayed his experience, calling it an “incident,” an “encounter,” but not an attack.
“It wasn’t traumatic because I didn’t get hurt?” he asked. “I wish I had just a nick, then it would be validated trauma.”
His board is too damaged to return to the water. As he paddled with Brutus back to shore that Aug.10 morning, he realized it was taking on water and listing to the right. Maybe a museum or a scientist will buy it as a curiosity, he said, so he can afford to buy a new one.
But he had to get back in. In September, Stickler plunged into the surf at Lovers Point, a shocking jolt of cold that invigorated him. As he began to swim, however, he felt a quick pang of panic when he brushed a strand of kelp: “Death could be popping through at any moment,” he thought.
When he gets a new board, he’ll start paddling in the harbor. Then, hopefully, he will work up the courage to return to deeper water.
“The value in living life, taking chances, making educated risks,” he said, “that’s where all of life’s magic comes from.”
Bruemmer is embarking on his own journey to return to the water.
The lacerations that ripped across his abdomen and shredded both quadriceps, one to the bone, took hundreds of stitches and staples to close. If the shark had chomped down just a millimeter to the side, it would have hit a major artery and he would have bled to death, like teenager Barry Wilson did here 70 years ago.
“He got very, very lucky,” Dr. Nicholas Rottler, Bruemmer’s surgeon at the Salinas hospital, said during a news conference in June, “probably one of the luckiest patients I’ve seen in the last decade, honestly.”
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.
He and Brita, his wife of 27 years and a doctor at the Big Sur Health Center, have been repopulating “little free libraries” around town. They’re visiting the aquarium and entertaining friends more often. He couldn’t go close to the tidepools in his wheelchair when friends visited recently, so he sketched them from a perch above.
He’s always been a positive person, Brita said, and is focusing on the fact that the shark didn’t leave him permanently disabled.
“He’s going to get better,” she said. “So he just keeps focusing on that.”
On occasional Sundays, when the Kelp Krawlers gather at Lovers Point, he returns to meet with his old friends as they pull on their wetsuits. He still believes in his longtime mantra: Sharks aren’t hunting people. “We are not their food.” Only now he believes, “it’s almost entirely true.” So he scans the water as his friends swim, supporting their individual decisions as he comes to terms with his own.
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.
“I know they’re out there,” he said, “that experience was really tough, because I’m out in the middle of the ocean, out by the buoy, going, ‘What do I do now?’ What can you do? You just gotta keep swimming.”
After the attacks, Majid, who is raising two children since her husband died two years ago, moved her swim closer to shore. But in an act of personal defiance, she is now swimming without a wetsuit.
“It’s about surrendering,” she said.
Bruemmer is certain of one thing: He will not swim again at Lovers Point. He will not swim again in the open ocean.
He recognizes what he is losing, the invigorating saltwater, the sunlight filtering through incandescent bulbs of kelp, the bright green seagrasses waving at him, the otter that nibbled his toes – all the things that made him feel deeply, personally connected to the wild world.
The attack stripped that away.
“It was too powerful, too damaging, too violent, too close to death,” he said. “I’m not going back. It’s just that simple.”
He’s not giving up swimming, though. Nine weeks after the attack, once Bruemmer’s wounds had healed enough, nearly 30 fellow Kelp Krawlers helped him re-enter water for the first time.
They gathered around his wheelchair, lifted him up and gently placed him in a heated swimming pool deep in the Carmel Valley, 20 miles from Lovers Point.
Then, as everyone cheered and took photos, he slipped off the inflated edge of a blue floatie, and started a freestyle swim, taking one stroke at a time, just like he had before the shark attacked. “There’s something about the flowing water that is wonderful,” he said.
He kept going until he reached the concrete edge.
Then, he turned on his back, his face to the sky, and smiled.
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