Run-ins with sharks are just part of the game when you’re spearfishing in the Gulf of Mexico. And Wesley Fayard, an experienced scuba diver from Mississippi, has experienced plenty of those. But on June 29, while diving roughly 50 miles off the coast, he had his closest call yet. After spearing two mangrove snappers in deep water, Fayard was blindsided by a 6-foot bull shark that tried to steal the fish off his stringer. The attack could have been far worse, and he says he was blessed to swim away with both hands.
“I’ve had plenty of encounters with sharks and times when I’ve gotten a little shaken in my boots, so to speak,” Fayard tells Outdoor Life. “Most of the time, you’ll see the shark pretty early on, before he’s coming in to bump you or really check on you. But that just wasn’t the case this time.”
Fayard went out that day with some other members of the DeepWater Mafia, a local dive club that coordinates group outings in the Gulf. He says he joined a trip last minute and hopped aboard club member’s 31-foot Contender along with six other divers, one of whom was a doctor with experience working in the ER. Fayard didn’t know this when they left the marina — the two hadn’t met before — but having a doctor on board would become very important later that afternoon.
The group left Pascagoula around 7 a.m. and ran approximately 60 miles to the south. They made a couple dives and spearfished around some pyramids, which are large artificial reefs designed to attract fish.
“Some of the guys shot some nice mangrove snapper, and we definitely had a good box of fish,” Fayard says of their first two dives. “I saw a shark on the second dive, but it was just like a normal day. You see the shark come in, he’s kind of swimming around, but I didn’t really pay him no mind and he didn’t really pay me no mind.”
Photo courtesy Wesley Fayard
From there, the group worked their way inland. They stopped to spearfish at a couple more pyramids and then headed for a natural reef roughly 50 miles offshore that some of the guys knew well. Two of them dove down and found some fish, but they didn’t stick around for long.
“They came up with a couple nice snapper and said the sharks were being aggressive. There were five or six bull sharks there, and they kept circling [the guys] pretty tight,” says Fayard, who was up next to dive. “It wasn’t really that big of a deal to me, I’ve been in that situation before, but we moved about 1,000 feet over to another reef in the same area.”
Looking back on the incident, Fayard thinks that one of the aggressive bull sharks must have followed the dive boat to the second reef. Like other predators, sharks can learn to associate humans with free meals, and Fayard says that on past dives, he’s watched the same shark follow a boat from spot to spot. At the time, however, he was focused on finding his own fish. He dove through a murky top layer down to a max depth of 113 feet, where it was relatively dark near the bottom.
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Fayard speared a big, 15-pound mangrove snapper right away. It wasn’t a perfect shot, so he had to tussle with the fish for a while before he could string it up. After reloading, he speared and fought another nice snapper and then added it to the stringer that was attached to his hip. But when he checked his surroundings again, he could no longer see the reef. Holding the speargun in his left hand, he looked around for which direction to go.
“I was about 20 feet off the bottom, and I remember looking to my right, and there he was. He was over my right shoulder and coming from behind me,” Fayard says of the six-foot-long bull shark. “He was only about four or five feet away, and it startled me. So, I turned very quickly, backing away and turning my body toward him.”
Fayard thinks the sudden movement triggered the bull to go for the two snappers before they got away. The fish were still attached to his hip and floating up against his side when the shark attacked.
Photo courtesy Wesley Fayard
“He closed those four feet in a split second,” says Fayard, “and all I could see was bubbles. It was just, bam, my hand’s in his mouth, and I’m screaming, trying to pull away.”
After thrashing on his right hand for a few seconds, the shark let go and disappeared just as quickly as it showed up. Fayard swam for the surface, both snappers still on his hip, only pausing for a minute during his ascent to decompress. Because he was wearing gloves, he couldn’t tell how bad the wound was, but he knew he had to get out of the water fast.
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Once on the surface, his dive buddies hurried over and pulled him in the boat. The doctor who was onboard went straight into ER mode, removing Fayard’s glove and wrapping his hand tightly with a towel to stem the bleeding. The boat’s captain used his inReach to contact emergency services, and by the time they were 10 miles out, a Wildlife and Fisheries boat showed up to re-dress Fayard’s hand and escort them into the marina. From there, Fayard was transported to one hospital, and then another, where he underwent surgery to repair the severed tendons in his right hand and wrist.
Photo courtesy Wesley Fayard
The doctors told Fayard that he might lose some strength in a couple fingers, but they expect his hand to fully recover. Which, for him, feels incredibly lucky. He says the glove made a huge difference that day, and it was one of several factors that made the attack less bloody than it could have been.
“I had a very good cut resistant and puncture resistant glove. And that saved my hand without a doubt. I wouldn’t still have my pinky and ring finger, that’s for sure,” says Fayard, who plans to continue spearfishing in the Gulf, but with additional safeguards and newfound respect for bull sharks. “I know that I could have done things differently. But I also know that it could have been a lot worse.
“I call it a blessing,” he continues. “I’m a Christian man, and I do believe that God was looking out for me.”
