As he neared the end of an ocean swim just south of Sitka earlier this month, 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. … 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.
“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 said. “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.
“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.”
He figures that he “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.
“I know the spot, and so I’m going to go back and see if I can trap it this winter,” Orbison said.
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