ZIHUATANEJO, Mexico -- Bruce Grimes gingerly clenches his stitched right hand, asserting as best he can that he was accompanied by angels the morning a large bull shark chomped "softly" on his arm as he paddled his surfboard.
"I could feel the inside of its mouth with my hand," he says while sitting on a small wooden stool inside his downtown surf shop. "It was steely, all hard inside, like a bear trap."
Grimes was sitting with his legs in the water when the predator nudged his board. He could feel its rough skin with both feet, so he knew it was large. He shot to an "L" position, his body prone, bent legs in the air, arms outstretched.
But the shark bumped the board again, harder. It was clear it wanted what was on the board, so Grimes began to paddle. The shark bit his slender arm once, then left him alone.
Grimes, 49, a transplant from Florida who owns a downtown surf shop, hobbled ashore with his right side drenched in blood. He drove himself to a hospital, where doctors closed his arm and hand with more than 50 stitches.
The attack, which occurred May 24, was the third on a surfer in less than a month off beaches north of Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo.
The other victims, from San Francisco and Mexico, were bitten in the thigh and buttocks areas and bled to death soon after reaching the beach.
In the aftermath, following a ceremonial shark massacre and community panic one expert described as "everything you saw with the movie 'Jaws,' only in Spanish," mania still flares.
Sharks teem in imaginations. Nothing like this had ever happened in this region, a newly discovered surfers' paradise popular among Southern California wave riders.
Experts cite colder La Nina conditions and the associated nutrient boost for possibly luring the sharks. There was a similar phenomenon near Acapulco, 140 miles to the south, in the early 1970s -- four fatal attacks in succession.
Such spates, which have occurred in Hawaii, Florida, Australia and elsewhere, are anomalies. The global average is 3.8 fatal shark attacks annually despite thousands more people entering the ocean each year.
But reasoning is lost on local commercial divers, who are afraid to enter the water, and on commercial fishermen, who are illegally hunting sharks they say jeopardize their livelihoods.
Two local captains nodded in agreement when a third, Jaime Cortez, suggested that bull sharks -- alleged culprits in the three recent attacks -- have developed a taste "for the sweet blood of humans." Conservation groups and scientists call the notion absurd.
