Jamie Wall

But he continued to say, grab your board, grab your board, grab your board.

And I looked behind me and by some miracle, my board was still attached to me by my leg leash.

I don't know how it didn't get severed when my leg was down the shark's mouth because that's the same leg that I tie the leash to.

I grabbed hold of my leash and I reeled my board in, which was only about six feet away from me, and I put it underneath myself.

Joe was to my left, and I looked at him, and I was bewildered.

And we were paddling, and he said, Todd, there's a wave coming.

We need to catch this wave.

I managed to paddle into a wave before it broke, catch it, and I rode in right next to Joe on our bellies.

My friends pulled me up out of the water onto the beach by my arms.

They knew it was real bad because of the tremendous amount of blood and the huge gaping hole that was my whole back.

They could see my lungs inflating and deflating.

At the same time, my arms are in front of me like this, and I'm watching blood literally being pumped out of my wetsuit sleeves.

What that took was 500 stitches on the inside and 200 staples to close it up completely, and that's about 60 inches of bite, including all the puncture wounds and my leg, and it was tremendous.

I think the shark would have eaten me if the dolphins hadn't distracted or hurt him.

Mentally, I can't go out as far as I used to or be the farthest one out or wait for the best wave on the outside.

I'm hoping that's going to get better.

But as for right now, I try to surf the inside as much as I can, obviously.

Did you?

You find most things challenging, don't you?

Yeah, how was that?