A Largo man is in good spirits and in good condition after almost becoming shark bait down in the Bahamas. He’s at Tampa General Hospital right now, awaiting skin graft surgery. Erik Norrie survived the potentially deadly attack back on July 29 and says he owes his survival to his strong faith in God. We spoke with him exclusively from his hospital room at TGH Monday, where he was just about to meet with the surgeons who will oversee his skin grafts.
“Thumbs up!” said Norrie enthusiastically, as he took some of his first ginger steps on his injured leg.
The fact that he can walk is no small miracle. His lower left leg is bandaged and sore from that nasty shark bite.
“It’s called the shark bite diet, you can lose two pounds in three seconds,” he joked before turning serious. “My father-in-law jumped in the water, between me and the shark, which was pretty courageous on his part and it was a scary moment, I can tell ya!”
It happened just off the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas, where he and his family were vacationing. They had just had lunch, and Norrie went snorkeling and spearfishing for their grouper dinner for later.
“After I had speared the grouper, I was swimming back toward the boat to put them in the cooler and I was probably in about five feet of water,” Norrie recalled. “And all of the sudden I felt this [crunch] on the back of my leg. And just as I looked back, he was just finishing his bite and ripping and swimming off, and you could see a piece of my leg in his mouth. My first reaction was, ‘Aaaahhh!’ And I real quickly flipped my right foot into the shallowest water I could get in and I stood up and I picked my leg up out of the water.”
He was losing blood, and fast.
“I immediately threw the spear down with the fish because there was an enormous pool of blood around me and that shark was swimming all through the blood, sort of looking around, for more,” continued Norrie.
His wife Spryng and their four daughters witnessed the horrific scene.
“It was a reality as soon as I saw red covering the water,” said Spryng Norrie.
“My daughter, she got on the radio, calling out, ‘Help, help, my dad’s been attacked by a shark'” said Norrie, who tied the large rubber bands from his spear around his leg to cut off the blood flow to the lower half of his leg. Read on…..