Shark attack gives boogieboarder nightmares in Florida ten years later

More than a decade after a 6-foot bull shark nearly bit off her right calf beneath the murky waves, Indian Harbour Beach boogie boarder Amy Tatsch still suffers from nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder.

An important memory that has stuck with her: Tatsch remembers how seconds after the shark’s unexpected attack she was paralyzed with shock and unable to move. Blood was bleeding from her mutilated leg into the sea as she drifted alone in the waves at Juan Ponce de León Landing south of Melbourne Beach.

“And then I spoke out loud. I said, ‘God, please get me out of the water so my family knows how I died,'” Tatsch recalls.

“Because I thought I couldn’t do it,” she said.

Aside from a slight limp and nerve damage, Tatsch still bears invisible scars from her shark attack on May 15, 2014. Immediately after the bite, doctors performed five operations on Tatsch’s injured leg during a 13-day stay at Holmes Regional Medical Center in Melbourne. Through physical therapy, she was able to transfer from a wheelchair to a walker, crutches and a cane in pain over the following months.

Tatsch is taking an unusual path. According to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File, there have only been 158 confirmed, unprovoked shark attacks in Brevard County from 1882 to the present. Only a small proportion of these rare attacks caused wounds as severe as the one she suffered.

“I still have nightmares about it. It hasn’t stopped in the last ten years,” Tatsch said.

“The nerve damage. The mental health issues that come with it. Definitely post-traumatic stress disorder. The fear – I couldn’t raise my children. My father had to raise my children until I got out of the wheelchair,” she said.

Bite Club: Facebook group for shark attack survivors offers support

In the turbulent weeks following her bull shark bite, Tatsch says she found important company and support from an unexpected source. She joined the Bite Club, a private Facebook group created by Australian surfer Dave Pearson for survivors of animal attacks. In March 2011, while surfing north of Sydney in New South Wales, he was brutally bitten by a shark that severed the muscles in his left forearm.

After Pearson was flown to a hospital by helicopter, surgeons performed a five-hour operation to prevent his mutilated arm from having to be amputated. But his physical and psychological trauma remained for years.

Bite Club now has nearly 500 members. In a phone interview with FLORIDA TODAY, Pearson recalled how a girl who survived a crocodile attack joined the Facebook group after being featured on an Australian television show.

“We’ve all been attacked by wild animals before, so of course we welcomed them on board. And since then we’ve specialized in other animals like lions, hippos, wolves, bears, dingoes here in Australia, all kinds of other animals that bite people,” Pearson said.

“We all feel pretty much the same, you know? I guess you’ve lost the power you once thought you had,” he said.

“(Bite Club) is much bigger than I originally expected, because when I was looking for a support group, there wasn’t one. Now we have one, and it seems really necessary as we keep bringing new people on board,” he said.

“I would have thought that when my injuries healed somewhat and I got back in the water, I would have the same feeling in the ocean – but it’s totally different. And it’s never the same. And my shark attack was 13 years ago,” he said.

Amy Tatsch was bitten by a bull shark in 2014

Tatsch was waiting for her third wave of the morning in the choppy, waist- to chest-deep water at Juan Ponce de León Landing when the bull shark struck.

“Just as I was ready to ride the wave, I lifted my left leg to turn around and catch the wave, and that’s when a shark hit me in the leg with its nose above my knee,” Tatsch recalled in a harrowing firsthand account published in “Bite Club,” a 2023 book by British author Douglas Wight.

“Then it reached under me and ripped out half of my calf,” Tatsch explains in the book.

The apex predator’s sharp, jagged teeth severed her Achilles tendon in two places: near her ankle and below her knee. She feared the shark would come back to kill her or that she would pass out from blood loss.

To this day, Tatsch says her boogie board was “my lifesaver” in the hectic moments after the attack — she climbed back on the board and paddled with one arm while using the other hand to press her shredded calf muscles against her leg.

“They wanted to cut off my leg. I mean, it was so close. Right here, by the bottom tooth,” Tatsch said ten years later during an interview at the Howard E. Futch Memorial Park in Paradise Beach, as she traced the scars left by the shark’s mouth with her fingers.

“He almost ripped off my whole calf,” she said.

Ten years after the shark attack, he still suffers from nerve pain

Ten years later, Tatsch takes medication for nerve pain and restless legs syndrome: “If I don’t take ropinirole, I could stand next to you to shake your hand – and accidentally kick you,” she says, laughing.

Her 2014 shark bite also took a financial toll. Tatsch, a mother of six, never returned to her job as a cafeteria worker at Ocean Breeze Elementary after the attack. In 2019, Tatsch started an online fundraiser to pay bills and keep the house she inherited after her father died. She was unemployed and suffered from PTSD, fibromyalgia, neuropathy and insomnia.

Now Tatsch delivers bouquets for Eau Gallie Florist and “I just love my job.” She has a few roommates who split the bills “so I can make ends meet,” and she gets emotional support from her boyfriend Dave Dormer and her “families” of friends at the neighboring Beachside Pawn and Side Pocket Pub. A group from the latter location spent last weekend camping at Long Point Park near Sebastian Inlet.

She now goes by the nickname “Shark Bait” and remains active in the Facebook group “Bite Club”.

“My family has been the best support I’ve ever had. Because you can talk about your PTSD. You can talk about everyone else’s stories. Everyone helps each other. It’s incredible,” Tatsch said.

“I still talk to Dave (Pearson) on the phone every now and then, even though he’s 13 hours ahead. We try to find a time to talk on the phone and open up to each other,” she said.

Tatsch returned to the ocean off the Space Coast years ago. But she said it will never be the same again.

“I’m worried about everyone in the water. The conditions were bad the day I was attacked. It was cloudy, the water was murky, the waves were heavy. I didn’t even think about it,” Tatsch said.

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