I don’t make this stuff up, people.

From the Honolulu Star-Advertiser:

Joshua Holley says he’s not upset that a tiger shark bit him while he surfed Tuesday off the North Shore, and plans to get back int the water as soon as doctors say it’s OK . . .

[He} was paddling back out through a channel to a surf spot called Alligator Rock . . . when he felt an ‘unreal push on the left side of my body. Its whole weight came at me,’ he said of the 8- to 10-foot shark. ‘I could feel the body on me pretty much.’ . . .

After the initial bite the shark came around to the front of [his] board, and in a moment of panic [he] grabbed the shark’s gills with his left hand and punched the shark’s snout twice with his right. Then the shark ‘submerged like a submarine and just disappeared.’

He got 42 stitches in his left foot. The article is here, but you have to sign up to read it.

(Yes, I know where that surf spot is, and yes, we sometimes paddle down that way and even at times jump in the water thereabouts to cool off. It’s their ocean.)

(I originally posted this on Tumblr.)