On Saturday afternoon, a Santa Monica man was bitten by a 10-foot hammerhead shark. The victim, Dylan Marks, and his friend Kyle Hudgins were fishing near Deer Canyon Beach, which straddles the Malibu/Ventura county line.
At around 3 pm, the pair were kayak fishing for yellowtail about two miles from the coast. According to Hudgins, Marks was hanging his foot in the water when the shark bit him.
The hammerhead was circling their kayaks before the bite. “We saw this fin and then it dove,” Hudgins told NBC. “We didn’t see it for like five minutes and then all of a sudden he had his foot over the side and he just got bit. And then he put his foot up on the kayak and he said, ‘Oh, dude. I just got bit!'”
Hudgins called 911, and the pair were brought to shore by the Coast Guard, who were able to staunch the bleeding in Marks’s ankle. Marks, a 29-year-old from Santa Monica, was airlifted to hospital in Thousand Oaks, where he underwent surgery. He is in stable condition and expected to fully recover.
According to Chris Lowe, the director of the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab, hammerheads are coming closer to shore as water temperatures rise. This comes a week after another group of kayakers were circled by a hammerhead off the San Diego coast.
