Florida Man Loses Finger To Leash In Nightmare Fuel Surf Saga

I can’t recall exactly which mag it was…

But for a while, one of the few that still existed had some sort of award for the goriest letter (and pics) to the editor. I believe there was even a prize for it. Or maybe just bragging rights. After typing that out, it sounds like it was probably Transworld (Hey, Cote!).

Earlier today, an email arrived from a man in Florida: Shelton Connor, a 26-year-old reader from Destin, a small town near Pensacola.

It read:

“Last Thursday, I was surfing a mellow shore break in Destin, Florida. In the freakiest incident, my finger got cinched by my leash and popped my knuckle clean off and shredded an artery. I was 90 seconds from bleeding out on shore. All stitched up and healing now, but that story is way too freaky and comical not to share.”

Shelton was surfing ankle-slappers at an outside sandbar that tripled up on the inside. “There were 3- to 4-foot faces on the inside shorebreak slab. I was coming in from the outside on an 11-foot, 30-pound paddleboard,” he told Stab. “I was trying to get through this whole section without wiping out but ended up in the whitewash, getting dragged by my board.”

Caught inside with his massive floating device, he pointed its nose toward the beach and its tail toward the sea. “I was holding the leash at the base by the leash plug, pulling the board through a slabby shorebreak set. The biggest wave (which wasn’t that big) broke over the nose of the board and launched the tail into the air.”

“My hand was wedged between the leash string,” he explained. “To avoid going over the falls with it, I tried to yank my hand free, and that’s when it cinched my knuckle off. I felt it and knew it happened as I tumbled through the whitewash.”

Shelton described it as “a knife and a cutting board scenario,” but couldn’t say for sure whether he’d been holding the board by the leash or the leash string. “It was just the freakiest thing.”

When he resurfaced, half his finger was gone, and blood was shooting two feet into the air. “Clean cut. It was fish food immediately.”

Fight mode kicked in. He tried to choke off blood flow by grabbing his left wrist with his right hand and holding both above his head as he stumbled back to shore. “The lifeguard on duty immediately wrapped my fingers together as tight as possible to form a makeshift tourniquet.” Within two minutes, they had stopped the bleeding, and EMS arrived.

As of today, his newly shortened finger “is doing a lot better,” he said. “They had to grind down excess bone in order to stitch over it, so it’ll be another week or so before I get the stitches out.” He added, “I just need to avoid using my finger and keep it wrapped up for about a month. I’ll probably only have some sore muscle pain. It’s going to be a good story for later down the road when I’m out in the water, that’s for sure.”

Stab already has a rule in place where if you’ve been attacked by a shark (and can prove it), you get a free Stab Premium membership. In that spirit, and as a continuation of the standards set by our physical mag predecessors, we’re happy to extend the same benefit to Shelton. That means he’ll be able to watch Stab High Japan presented by Monster Energy on May 24th and 25th.