A Florida fisherman’s angling excursion took a turn for the horrific after a shark chomped off his finger while he was trying to unhook it. A clip of the angler’s accidental amputation has scared up 11 million views on TikTok.
“I’m the guy who possibly lost his finger to a lemon shark,” said Brett Reeder in a video describing the attack, which occurred while he was shark fishing in the Content Keys, a few miles south of Miami.
“We’d hooked our last shark of the day [a 6-foot lemon shark],” Reeder described. “And I needed my hook back, so I tried to get ahold of him to get my hook back and got unlucky.”
In the 10-second clip of the incident, Reeder can be seen trying to corral the predator while on a boat, and his family looks on in anticipation. All of a sudden, the shark clamps down on his finger and does an apparent death roll, causing the onlookers to cry out in shock.
“F – – k! I lost my goddamn pinky! F – – k!” a pained Reeder yells on camera, holding his now four-fingered hand as blood spatters the boat deck.
In the aforementioned recap, the waterman described how the lemon shark “spun around and caught the top of my hand and got my pinky and started twisting.”
“I could’ve sworn I heard a pop,” recalled Reeder, first believing the shark had swum off with his appendage.
His wife was reportedly able to apply a tourniquet to his dangling digit as they headed back to shore. He was then airlifted to a hospital — received a unit of blood in the helicopter to counteract his falling blood pressure — and immediately underwent surgery to reattach his pinky.
It remains unclear if medics were able to save his hand; however, Reeder reported that he’ll know if the operation was a success later this week.
Meanwhile, his good humored TikTok audience proved his pinky predicament was ripe for punning.
“Can you pinky promise u lost it?” quipped one wit. Goaded another, “Do it again you still got 9 trys [sic].”
One gawker even wondered if Reeder could set the clip to the nauseatingly catchy “Baby Shark” song — to which fan Ogeelashs obliged in a follow-up TikTok post.
Thankfully, laughter appeared to be the best medicine. “Y’all got me dead,” the fisherman wrote in the comments.
The incident comes amid a rash of shark attacks and sightings along the Eastern Seaboard. There have been six attacks over the past month off of New York’s Long Island alone, with the latest occurring Wednesday after Max Haynes, 16, was bitten on the foot while surfing near Kismet Beach on Fire Island.
