“Same beach, same exact rock, same place, same reef, same everything,” Cole Taschman said.
While the odds of being bitten by a shark are remarkably low—1 in 4.3 million, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History—one Stuart, Florida, man has beaten those odds twice in just over 10 years.
More than a decade after his first shark bite, Cole Taschman, 28, is recovering from another bite he suffered at the same beach.
Taschman’s first encounter occurred when he was 16 while surfing in waist-deep water at the “Stuart Rocks” break off Bathtub Beach in Stuart, Florida, when a roughly 5-foot-long blacktip reef shark clamped onto his right hand. Taschman managed to fend off the shark by striking its head with his surfboard. He then used his T-shirt as a makeshift bandage and paddled back to shore. The injury required 12 stitches and a cast…