VENTURA : Shark Attack Leads to Toothy Souvenir

Instead of the usual T-shirt or key chain souvenir from the Monterey Peninsula, Eloise Tavares of Santa Paula brought home a shark’s tooth that a surgeon dug out of her leg.

“I don’t know what I’ll do with the tooth; maybe put it on a necklace or something,” Tavares said just a few days after she was attacked by a 12- to 15-foot great white off the Carmel Highlands coast.

The 30-year-old Tavares, a research programmer for the Ventura County Community College District, went with a Ventura College scuba diving class on a field trip to Monastery Beach last Saturday.

She and a diving buddy were on the surface, about 150 yards offshore, when she felt something clamp down on her leg.

“I thought I was stuck in some trap or something, so I turned around to see what it was,” she said. “And as I turned, the shark came out of the water and we were eye to eye. He wasn’t even an arm’s length away.”

The shark swam away, and Tavares was quickly helped out of the water by other divers and taken to the hospital. There, the doctors pulled out the chip of the shark’s tooth that was lodged in her left calf and stitched up the 4-inch gash.

The specialists at the hospital agreed that the shark was 12 to 15 feet long, judging from the wounds. But they could not agree why it bit Tavares and then left her alone.

Some told her that perhaps the shark wasn’t hungry, she said. Others told her that maybe it didn’t like the taste of her wet suit.

Tavares is already looking forward to her next dive.

“I’m scared, but I have to go back in so I get over the fear,” she said. “I’ve always loved the ocean and I can’t give it up now. I love diving. And I love underwater life--I just don’t like it to bite me.”