Surfer bitten, board snapped by shark off Northern California: reports

A surfer was bitten by a shark that broke his board in Northern California this week, in the state’s first shark incident of the year.

“It was like being hit by a car,” Tommy Civik told Bay City News, according to SFGate of the incident in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco. “All of a sudden, I was shot out of the water.”

South Coast Fire Protection District Chief Jason Warner told SFGate that his team responded to a beach in Gualala, California, before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, and bystanders told him that a “big” shark “hit the surfer and the surfboard, threw the surfer up in the air a bit, and broke the board in half.”

He said it “latched on to half of the board and [was] kind of thrashing it around.”

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Civik told the Los Angeles Times that he never saw the shark.

“My board snapped in half on impact,” he said. “My friend watching said that I flew in the air. I’m still piecing together what happened. …The whole thing was so jarring, I was just trying to get away.”

Peter Tira with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife told SFGate that Civik needed stitches and DNA from his wound will be used to identify what type of shark attacked him.

“I was unbelievably lucky,” Civik told The Times. “My board took all the impact, and the teeth just grazed me,” Civik said. “I had quite a bit of adrenaline, and since I could walk, I drove myself to the hospital.”

His friend Marco Guerrero told the Times he saw the shark attacking what he at first thought was a seal.

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 “I just remember Tommy saying, ‘I’ll meet you out there,’ and suiting up. I was looking out at the waves when I saw the thrashing,” he explained. “I said, ‘Oh that’s a shark attack,’ thinking it was attacking a seal. I didn’t realize it was Tommy.”

After the attack, Civik said he “just put [his] head down and swam, fast.”

“I didn’t know where the shark was, so I just focused on getting away,” he told The Times. “After a minute, I realized that if the shark [had] wanted to bite me again, it would’ve. It all happened so fast.”

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Civik’s attack comes less than a month after an open ocean swimmer was killed by a shark in Santa Cruz County, and following a record year for shark incidents in 2025.

“However, there were only 3 incidents with injuries last year, far below the highest year, which was 1974 with 7 injuries confirmed,” Tira told SFGate.