For most people, getting bitten by a shark would mean a trip to the hospital, just to get things checked out. No so for Frank O’Rourke, a 23-year-old competitive surfer from Jacksonville Beach.
At around 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, O’Rourke was surfing near the pier when a shark decided to give his arm a taste. The whole thing was caught on video, which shows O’Rourke briefly struggling with the shark after he gets knocked off his board.
“I felt something jump out of the water and latch onto my arm by my elbow. It just grabbed onto me and thrashed in the water and swam away,” he told First Coast News. “I’m very lucky that I still have an arm. You can see the jawline, like where the jawline is of the shark. There’s still blood on my surfboard.”
“It was kind of panic, like, ‘Did that just happen?'” said O’Rourke’s friend, RJ Berger, who witnessed the attack. “It kind of took him a couple seconds to, like, gather himself and realize, like, ‘Wow, I just got bit by a shark,’ and then we all went into the beach.”
Berger guessed it was likely a 3-to-4-foot spinner shark that was behind the attack. After O’Rourke got to the beach and had lifeguards treat his injuries, he decided that a hospital visit wasn’t necessary and instead chose to go to a local watering hole.
“He immediately went to a bar ’cause he was like, ‘I got bit by a shark,’ and people were like, ‘I’ll buy you drinks.’ So he went and hung out at the pier,” Berger said.
