How to Heal from a Shark Attack at Corona Del Mar

For all its easy beauty – a half-mile of golden sand wedged between tidepools and bluffs on one end and a 1,000-foot jetty on the other – Corona Del Mar State Beach can evoke a touch of the sinister. Maybe it’s the steep and slippery rocks you climb over to get to the adjacent harbor. Or maybe it’s the tragic fact that two anglers on the CDM jetty drowned in 2007 after large waves washed them into the ocean.

It was in these waters where a white shark attacked triathlete and mother-of-three Maria Korcsmaros in 2016. Then 52, she was a couple hundred or so yards from shore, doing a routine practice swim along the ¾ mile of buoy line that runs parallel to the beach.

She never laid eyes on her assailant; the ocean was murky that day. But the memory of their encounter remains clear, and she recites it calmly upon request:

“It bit me dead center. The top of its jaw was on my back, the bottom against my stomach. It missed my heart by centimeters. When it withdrew, it almost pulled my tricep off.”

Somehow Maria managed to tread in the mélange of her blood and sea water, and she didn’t panic. Panic would have meant screaming and splashing, signaling that she was prey. Instead, she waved over lifeguards in a boat about 30 yards away, who came to her aid immediately.

“They leaned down from the back of the boat and grabbed me under the arms, one on each side,” she recalls. They laid her down, administering first aid, and then took her around the jetty to the Balboa Coast Guard station, where an EMS truck met them and transported her to Orange County Global Medical Center in Santa Ana.

There she underwent surgery to repair her tricep, to pump more blood into her body, to check for shark teeth that might have been left behind and to mend torn skin in different places around her torso. Three ribs were broken, her lung punctured, her pelvis fractured and part of her liver destroyed, (though it grew back). Doctors gave her a heavy dose of antibiotics to counteract the shark’s unclean mouth and the exposure of her wounds to sea water.

Seven stitches, 161 staples.

Immediately after the attack, Maria’s husband and 15-year-old son, who had been at the beach, rushed to her bedside. The media drumbeat for interviews soon began; fortunately, the hospital kept reporters at bay. Meanwhile, two highly respected shark experts made a request: could they come to the hospital and debrief her in person? She had just been in the ICU and then surgery, and she’d undergone unfathomable distress.

She said OK.

Headlines have sometimes referred to Maria as a “shark-bite victim,” but she gives off a distinctly non-victim vibe. A fitness instructor and personal trainer, she is confidently outgoing and, at 62, athletic and comfortable in jeans and a tee, her brown hair drawn back in a casual pony.

It’s her accessories that really stand out. She favors earrings with miniature sharks dangling from them, shark-patterned tote bags and a cap with a chunk taken out of the brim to look like a shark bite. She even has a full-body shark costume that attaches to her back, the animal’s jaws rising up behind her and poised to gnaw on her skull.

All of which gives rise to the question: how does a traumatized person come to poke fun at her own trauma? Is it just about having the last laugh?

The answer is probably more complex than that and likely originates in Maria’s resilient character. But she also leaned into community support, getting help from family, a therapist, ocean devotees and even fellow victims of animal attacks whom she found on Facebook.

And perhaps most notably, shark advocates, the people who study, love and defend the creatures who traumatized her in the first place.

He’s not an ambulance chaser, but Chris Lowe, a semi-retired professor who directs the CSU Long Beach Shark Lab, feels it’s important to talk to shark bite victims as soon after the attack as possible, before they lose their memories or jumble them trying to field reporters’ many questions.

“It’s tricky. These are traumatic things,” Lowe explains. “Maria was very open to talk about it. She was curious.”

While in the hospital, he looked at Maria’s wound marks in her arm and at her shredded wetsuit, determining the culprit to be a large juvenile white shark, the species responsible for 97 percent of shark attacks on humans.

Talking to victims benefits Lowe’s research, though sometimes the victims find it therapeutic. Lowe can help them better understand what happened to them.

“The number one question is why did it do this? I didn’t do anything. I was minding my own business,” Lowe says. The answer is that sharks attack humans in many cases because they mistake them for seals or sea lions, or they are simply hungry and curious, moving on when the bite yields an unfamiliar taste.

From her hospital bed, Maria also spoke to Ralph Collier, an internationally renowned shark expert who passed away in February.

These conversations helped her sort through her feelings when, after the incident, a stranger blamed her for the attack in a note on Messenger that said, “You know it’s all your fault” – presumably for swimming in open water.

“It’s not my fault, and not the shark’s fault,” she remembers thinking. And that’s when she started to “turn my fear into fascination.” She began learning about sharks and the threats to their existence, lead among them overfishing as well as climate change and habitat loss.

Only a few months after the accident, when a shark advocate from the nonprofit Shark Stewards contacted her about appearing at a rally in Las Vegas against the shark fin trade, she was in. “I thought, maybe there’s more I can do.”

Maria is now the SoCal chair of Shark Stewards for which she organizes an annual 5K run around the Back Bay estuary, and sometimes appears at community events to advocate directly to people. She also teaches Anaheim seventh-graders about sharks at the underserved South Junior High School and at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point.

“She becomes a very powerful ambassador for sharks,” Lowe says. “When I start talking science, I can see people’s eyes glaze over. When someone like Maria talks about sharks…. People listen to her differently.”

Back in the swim of things

Commitment to shark preservation was one thing; getting back in open water was quite another.

Early on she did some river and reservoir swimming and then signed up for a race at Newport Dunes, a man-made lagoon filled with inflatable slides off Newport Bay that opened in 1958. She couldn’t do the bike part of the race but she aced the swim.

Next, she enlisted friends to swim with her in Pirate’s Cove, a beach along the Newport Harbor channel where religious leaders have been known to conduct full-immersion baptisms over the years, lured no doubt by the benign current.

But that normally placid location generated fearful moments for Maria early on. One time a dark shape in the water triggered her: “I turned around, and I saw this big dark shape, and I… friggin’ freaked out,” she recalls. “I jumped up. My heart was pounding.”

Luckily, it turned out to be kelp. On another swim she heard a splash that frightened her. It was just a father and his kid playing.

Her therapist helped her understand that she was suffering from PTSD, and she continued to plan swims: always with friends in ocean-adjacent environments less likely to harbor large sharks, such as Bayshore Beach in Long Beach.

But a race was calling.

Maria is the daughter of an ultramarathoner, and she, like her dad, has “race brain.” She wanted to swim a triathlon in San Diego by October, which would be only five months after the attack. She talked to her therapist and they agreed that the conditions of the race made this a safe opportunity: she would be accompanied by swim buddies who included her son, and there would be people in boats and on surfboards along the way.

Race day came.

She arrived at the Mission Bay Triathlon and needed to join a wave, which is a group of swimmers of a similar age who enter the water together. Waves allow for staggered starts to reduce crowding in the water. She joined a group of mostly women cancer survivors, wondering if they’d accept her into the fold. When she told them what she’d survived, they welcomed her enthusiastically: “You definitely belong in this wave,” they said. The race went well, and she got out of the water with a smile on her face, telling her son, “Great swim!”

The scene of the crime

On the anniversary of her swim in 2019, she returned to the site of her attack at Corona Del Mar, swimming out to the buoy line accompanied in the water by her original lifeguards, two fellow victims of shark bites in Southern California, OC Register reporter Laylan Connelly and a photographer.

On the beach were a hospital representative, a shark attack survivor who wasn’t up for the swim, and Maria’s son and husband.

“I was a little nervous at first,” she says, “but once I got in and started swim it was exhilarating.”

In addition to local beach aficionados, another community came to Maria’s aid. This was the Bite Club group on Facebook, whose 560 members have suffered attacks from sharks but also alligators, hippos, lions, wolves, dingoes and others.

“Bite Club offers a safe place for people to communicate their problems and receive support,” explains club founder and shark attack survivor David Pearson. “We also have access to trauma counseling and a psychologist.”

Pearson says that it’s not uncommon for shark attack victims to become conservation advocates, as Maria did. At the same time, he knows other victims who support shark culls and shark fishing. He focuses on the person, not their stance, lauding Maria’s resilience.

“Maria’s response comes from the fighting spirit within, the ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger attitude’ that some humans have,” Pearson says.

Dealing with Risk

For some, the ocean is a never-ending source of wonder – not a place you gaze at from a seaside restaurant but a realm you actually get in and inhabit – where you become a kind of citizen of the sea – if only for a while. Get in the open water enough times, and you start to feel like it’s gotten into you.

This past summer, Maria went on a shark dive trip in Fiji, perhaps the ultimate measure of her skills in fear management.

She started her trip with a scare on the night before the first dive. A fellow diver at dinner started passing around a video on his phone of a shark getting alarmingly close to a diver.

“I said, ‘I can’t look at that,’” she recalls, and her dive master pulled the guy with the video aside and explained that some divers had special issues when it came to sharks.

The next day brought her first test.

Maria didn’t get in the water without some trepidation. How was this going to go? Preparing to dive, “I was breathing too much, a little bit nervous,” she says.

In she went.

The divers descended past a coral reef at 40 feet and down to about 65 feet at the bottom, also called “the pit,” where the sharks gathered, lured by fish scraps provided by the guides. Divers lined up behind a rock wall to observe as tiger, lemon and bull sharks circled majestically – a real-life aquarium – some as large as 15 feet. For safety sake, guides also wielded six-foot long poles to deter any sharks that posed a hazard, though none did.

She soon succumbed to the beauty of the gliding creatures, members of a species who go back 400 million years, predating dinosaurs and even trees.

“There were three tigers, 10 bulls and 10 lemons,” Maria remembers. “The bullies look you in the eye and come straight up and turn away. Lemons were on the floor. This one tiger was circling above our heads. We had to duck.”

The proximity to sharks didn’t scare her, which seems counterintuitive but actually makes a lot of sense. Diving had allowed her to invert the paradigm of who was observing whom, and from what position.

“When you’re swimming, you’re at the top. If you have a shark from the bottom looking up then you’re more like prey.”

But underneath was a different story. Instead of them spying on her, she got to gaze on them: admire them, study them, know exactly where they are. To see them holistically, in their environment and in all their many dimensions

Amy DePaul has taught reporting to undergraduates at UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton. Her own reporting has appeared in Nature, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, The Wall Street Journal, Voice of OC, Los Angeles Times, The Orange County Register, OC Weekly, Guernica, and other outlets. Author photo: Maison Tran.