Rare double shark attack closes picturesque Florida beach
Two bathers were bitten just minutes apart, prompting authorities to close Fernandina Beach
Of 88 unprovoked shark bites that the Florida Museum of Natural History documented around the globe last year, more than one third took place along the shores of Florida, the shark attack capital of the world.
But the most of those attacks were on southern beaches between Cape Canaveral and Miami. Shark encounters are relatively rare further up Florida’s Atlantic coastline and are almost unheard of in northernmost Nassau County.
Or so they were before Friday afternoon – when consecutive attacks sent two people to hospital and shut down Fernandina Beach, just south of the Georgia border about 25 miles northeast of Jacksonville.
“I was in two feet of water or less, laying on my stomach,” the first victim, Dustin Theobald, 30, told News 4 Jax from his hospital bed.
Theobald said he had taken his eight-year-old to the beach and was watching the boy play in the surf when “when I felt something grab onto my foot and pull”.
