Woman Survives Deadly Shark Attack In Florida Keys By Punching It In The Face

A woman who was on a snorkeling trip with her friends in Florida Keys survived a deadly attack by a 6-foot shark that latched onto her leg by repeatedly punching it in the face.

Heather West, 42, was underwater diving in Dry Tortugas National Park when the attack took place. West told UPI that she and her friends were headed to Loggerhead Key to swim in the Little Africa reef but decided to return to land because of choppy conditions. West was swimming parallel to the beach when she felt something tug on her foot.

West shared a string of videos of the horrific encounter on TikTok. In one of the clips, the woman said she initially thought her friends were trying to prank her, but when she realized it was a lemon shark that had clamped onto her foot, West was left scared to the bone.

The shark bit her flipper at first and sunk its teeth right through her skin. "He just like rips me and rips me underneath the water – and immediately, whenever he started the yank, I immediately was like, ‘Oh s*** – this is a shark," West said in the TikTok video.

When she realized the shark was nowhere close to letting go, West started kicking the animal with her other foot. "All I was thinking was, ‘No, that’s mine – you can’t have it.’ So I rolled over on my back, as I’m being pulled through the water and trying to kick him with my other foot – but I have a fin on, so I can’t really get the propulsion I need to really smack him in the face the way that I want to with my foot," West said in the video.

The shark began grasping onto her tighter, preventing her from swimming away. "When he ripped me the second time, I was p***ed off, because I knew that, if he got the third rip in there, I wasn’t going to have a foot left," West went on to say.

It was not long before her adrenaline kicked in and West started punching the shark. "I look down and see that my foot’s still there, so I got really excited, and I started screaming. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I won! I won! I won! I can’t believe I won."

"I knew it was a battle for the foot – and one of us was gonna win, and one of us was gonna lose. And honestly, I didn’t expect that I was gonna be the winner of this," West added. "I guess I had like a nick in my artery, because it was squirting blood, so they’re having to keep a lot of pressure on that and get me tied off," she continued, adding that onlookers on the shore made a tourniquet out of towels and shirts.

According to the International Shark Attack File, there have been 10 recorded lemon shark attacks before West's case. Lemon sharks inhabit coastal waters and can grow up to 11 feet in size. It is, however, a rare case for these sea creatures to attack humans.