10 years after a gator bite, Florida diver is attacked by a shark
On the first day of the annual lobster mini season last week, Justin Stuller was diving for dinner with his family and friends off Stock Island near Key West when he noticed what might be a good get — an injured hogfish that someone speared but which got away.
The wrasses are sought after for their sweet, flaky, white meat. Stuller, 38, a seasoned waterman from Estero who owns a popular kayak and fishing outfitters business, grabbed the fish and swam back to his boat before realizing it was too small to keep and releasing it.
But as he did, a large lemon shark, which Stuller estimated to be about eight feet long, slammed into him and bit into his right leg around the knee area.
The strike happened in an instant, and Stuller didn’t see the apex predator approach.
“I saw it afterwards, as I rolled over,” he said Wednesday in a phone interview from Estero, just south of Fort Myers on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The first thing Stuller and his friends did was make sure his wife and three small children got out of the water.
Once he was on the boat, his friends cleaned the wound and wrapped it up before gunning it back to shore to seek medical attention. They were lobstering in the Snipe Point area in the Gulf of Mexico, so the trip to the dock took around 45 minutes.
Stuller went to Lower Keys Medical Center, where he got 24 stitches and 12 Steri-Strip butterfly bandages.
“They did a really good job,” he said.
Despite the intense experience, Stuller said he has no intention of staying out of the water.
“I’d have been in the next day if I figured out how to keep my leg clean,” he said. “It was a very un-traumatic experience. We cleaned it all up, and I lost very little blood.”
And, it was a productive day. He and his crew had just caught their limit of lobster — six per person, per boat in the Florida Keys — before the shark bit him.
He did venture out for more lobster last Thursday, the second day of the two-day recreational season. But this time, he drove the boat and stayed on the vessel while his family and friends hunted for bugs.
“The next day, I was captain,” Stuller said.
The attack was the second time in his life when a wild animal sunk its teeth into him.
About 10 years ago, Stuller had just received his alligator hunting license. He and two friends shot an arrow into one end of a gator and a harpoon in the other. The reptile was deep in a drainage ditch, and as Stuller was pulling the lines, it snapped at him, biting his left leg above the knee.
Unlike the shark bite, the wound the gator’s jaws left became infected.
“There was a lot of penicillin after that one,” Stuller said.
This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 2:32 PM with the headline "10 years after a gator bite, Florida diver is attacked by a shark."
