[chris]

A spearfishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico off Anna Maria Island turned into a race to shore on Sept. 24, 2011, after a bull shark tore a 14-inch wound in the left thigh of Charles "C.J." Wickersham, a 21-year-old from Longboat Key, Florida.

Wickersham was surfacing from a free dive around 3 p.m. when the shark, estimated at nine to 11 feet, struck, according to accounts in The Anna Maria Islander and Your Observer. He was diving with a group of friends off the Manatee County island. His companions pulled him aboard their boat, improvised a tourniquet from an anchor line and packed the wound with towels to slow the bleeding.

"C.J. never lost consciousness," Max Gazzo, one of the friends aboard, told The Anna Maria Island Sun. "We used an anchor line as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding and held it all with towels. It was a 14-inch gash and it was to the bone."

One of the group, Kiera Dunn, called 911 and reached Amy Todd, a dispatcher at the Manatee County Emergency Communications Center, as the boat sped toward the Rod and Reel Pier. On the roughly 10-minute recording, Todd relays the boat's status and estimated arrival to responding crews and, after learning the injured man had grown drowsy, tells his friends to keep him awake.

"He told his friends about feeling drowsy. I told them to make sure he stayed awake," Todd later recounted to a journal for emergency dispatchers that reviewed the call. Rather than instruct the callers to loosen the anchor-line tourniquet, a step outside her standard pre-arrival script, Todd left it in place. "Amy kept the caller calm. She did a really good job of managing the incident," communications manager Jim Lanier said.

Wickersham was met at the pier and flown by a Bayflite medical helicopter to the trauma center at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, where surgeons operated that evening and again two days later. The Anna Maria Islander reported that doctors closed the wound with roughly 800 stitches while preserving the thigh muscle, and that he was released on Sept. 30 after tests for infection came back negative.

The rescue and the 911 recording drew national attention, with Wickersham and his friends recounting the attack on ABC's "Good Morning America" and NBC's "Today." Dispatch trainers later cited the Manatee County call as an example of an operator adapting to an injury that fell outside her scripted instructions.