By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
As he neared the end of an ocean swim last week, Dean Orbison felt a pain in his foot and thought he’d kicked a rock. But when the pain recurred, he stopped to look around and was startled by what he saw. A river otter was in hot pursuit and biting at his feet.
“I was about 50 yards from the boat on my way back and I felt something bite at my foot and I turned around and thought, ‘That was weird.’ But I didn’t see anything. I thought I must have just kicked a rock, because I was in a really shallow rocky place… And I swam two more strokes and then I got another bite and I thought, ‘Ow, that’s a bite. Something’s biting me,’” Orbison remembered. “And so I swam a little faster. And the third bite grabbed my foot enough where I kicked to throw it off my foot. And when I kicked it up into the air, I could see, ‘Jeez, that’s an otter!’”
Orbison, of Sitka, is an experienced open water swimmer, and had taken advantage of Friday’s good weather to motor across Sitka Sound to swim in Leesoffskaia Bay. Then the otter attacked.
Dean Orbison stands on a boat swim deck in Leesoffskaia Bay recently. (Photo by Maureen O’Hanlon)
“All the time this was going on I was screaming at it, and then I swam more to get to the boat and he bit me a fourth time,” Orbison told the Sentinel. “A boat that was in the bay there heard me screaming and so they came by to see what was going on and that, I think, scared the otter away.”
In all his years in the water, Orbison had never had an issue with otters or sea lions, but suspects that this time he swam too close to the animal’s den.
“If a sea lion wanted to eat me alive, they could do it anytime they want,” he said. “But fortunately they don’t want to, and so the otter situation was surprising to me. I figured that, you know, an otter would be curious, but I didn’t think anything would ever attack me. But this otter genuinely attacked me… I suspect that I likely swam right next to the otter den and it was a mother and she said, ‘I’m going to protect my young,’ and so she attacked me. That’s all I can figure that happened there. And so in the future, I just won’t swim quite so close to shore.”
After the incident, he climbed back aboard his boat and initially believed the animal had done no damage.
That changed when he took his wetsuit booties off and found them full of blood.
“When I got back to town, I thought I really ought to go get this checked out because I might have rabies or something,” he said. As a precaution he was started on rabies the vaccine, which is a series of shots over 14 days,
Orbison said he is not worried about future otter attacks.
“It’s really rare and I’m not at all concerned about it ever happening again,” he said. “The solution is not to not swim, but don’t go quite so close to shore. I mean, I was right on the shore. And I was in really shallow rocks.”
He said it hurt to walk in the days just after the otter bites, but he’s recovering well and expects to swim again soon.
An online search indicates that otter attacks on people are uncommon. The National Library of Medicine, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, states on its website: “The North American river otter tends to avoid areas of dense population and human interaction; thus, aggressive human–otter encounters are exceptional. Only 44 cases of otter attacks have been published worldwide since 1875. Such encounters are often the consequence of human encroachment upon otter territory, and the resulting injuries may be quite severe, because river otters have sharp canines and carnassials. Although uncommon, rabies in these aquatic mammals has been described. Untreated rabies is invariably fatal.”
The study cited on the page was conducted in 2011, but additional incidents of otter bites have been documented since then.
Last September the Alaska Department of Fish and Game asked Anchorage residents to exercise caution after otters bit a young boy and a woman in two separate incidents. Otters have also attacked dogs in the Anchorage area, and the BBC reported that a man was bitten by otters in Singapore last year.
Orbison said he doesn’t want his experience to discourage people from swimming in ocean waters.
“It was a freak accident,” he said.
But the Leesoffskaia otter may have met its match.
“I know the spot, and so I’m going to go back and see if I can trap it this winter,” Orbison said.
