Jumping the Shark.......

....literally.

This is a story from my local paper about a young woman who was surfing and bitten by a shark. It's quite a fasinating story in that once bumped and bitten, the woman grabbed the shark and took a little ride:

She just knows she swung her body toward the enormous creature, grabbed hold of its slick, slippery skin and "held as hard as I could" as the shark surged and rolled in the frigid water Wednesday morning.

"It wasn't like 'I have to fight for my life,'" the 20-year-old surfer said Thursday at a news conference at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, where she is recovering from the attack. "It was like, "Whoa, ah, whoa, what's going on?

...

And she has no memory at all of being pulled deep underwater, a moment her boyfriend and another surfer feared was her last.

...

Her mother, Mary, and brother, Arthur, sat with her as she described how she, boyfriend John Henry and a half-dozen others, including a Sonoma Coast State Parks lifeguard, were surfing in an area known as Boardwalks when she noticed the calm, glassy water between wave sets and "a weird feeling all of a sudden just hit me."

The group was about 100 yards offshore, but Halavais was slightly apart from the others as she paddled on her stomach and thought "this feels sharky to me."

No shit sherlock!

Henry already was paddling toward her when she was bumped from behind by something powerful - bitten, she later learned, clear to the bone in two places.

She turned and confronted a "huge, huge" shark, about 16 feet long with a 3-foot dorsal fin, enormous tail and a frightening girth, twisting toward her and she just threw herself on.

Hearing surfer "Super Dave" Bryant describe how the beast rolled, revealing its characteristic white belly, Halavais said she figures "it was just as scared as I was."When she finally emerged from the water, "everyone that was surfing with me was right there," she said, tears coming again.

One bite was within a half inch of femoral artery.

Once lucky ducky.