ORMOND BEACH, Fla. -- She was fleeing in terror from the screams behind her, fighting against the choppy Atlantic, when the shark brushed her leg with its sandpaper hide.
'I kept stroking, but I kept thinking about death,' said Tamara Ennis, one of the survivors of a shark attack that took the life of a 19-year-old woman.
Miss Ennis, 21, a hotel restaurant waitress at Daytona Beach, recalled Wednesday night the horror that struck after she and three companions were dumped into the ocean, 3 miles off Ormond Beach, when their 16-foot catamaran capsized Sunday night.
One of her companions, Randall Cohen, 26, remained hospitalized for treatment of exhaustion and exposure.
Miss Ennis and her boyfriend, Daniel Perrin, 21, owner of the sailboat, were resting from their ordeal.
Christi Wapniarski, 19, of Chicago, who had been working as a secretary at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University during the summer to earn her tuition for the fall term, did not come back.
Volusia County sheriff's deputies searched the ocean in small boats Wednesday in a fruitless effort to find Miss Wapniarski's body. Sheriff's investigator Bill Ferguson theorized that she bled to death almost instantly from a 6-inch bite ripped from her leg.
Miss Ennis said after their boat capsized and partially sank, the four clung to the single pontoon left afloat until Monday morning. But they found they were being swept farther from shore by the current and a storm appeared to be building, so they decided to swim for the beach.
Miss Ennis, a swimmer on her high school team at Mentone, Ind., was in the lead. 'Christi was 100 yards behind. Randy and Daniel were bringing up the rear,' she recalled. 'I looked back and saw Christi bobbing up and down. She started yelling.
'She was calling to Randy. 'I've been bitten! Come here, Randy! Swim to me. I think I'm going to die!'
'I heard Randy say, 'Tammy, I think she's drowning.'
'I told them to stay away from her because I was afraid the blood would draw more sharks. I said, 'Randy, don't go.'
'But Randy swam to her.
'I didn't know what to do. I saw Daniel and Randy with her. I just turned around. I was too scared,' Miss Ennis said.
'I kept swimming alone. Then something brushed against my leg and my toes. It was a shark. It must have been 5 feet long. It was as big as I am. But it didn't attack me,' she said.
'I kept stroking, but I kept thinking about death.'
Nine hours after they started swimming, she saw people on the shore and a lifeguard in a tower. She whistled and he came into the water and helped her ashore.
'I couldn't believe it. I can't believe it. I made it,' she said.
Cohen told the sheriff's investigator that the shark tore a gash on the inside of Miss Wapniarski's right thigh. All he saw of the shark, however, was a 'dark image like a blimp' beneath the surface.
Perrin could find no pulse in Miss Wapniarski and no sign of respiration, Ferguson said.
Neither he nor Cohen saw any sign of blood. But Ferguson said, 'From the time she started screaming to the time he got there was about three minutes, and she could have been bled out.'
Cohen spent a quarter of an hour trying to pull his girlfriend's body toward shore, but finally had to let her go, Ferguson said.
Dennis Elster, assistant general manager of the Miami Seaquarium, said the the account of the incident 'does sound like a typical shark attack.' He said when a shark selected a victim, it rarely pays any attention to any other potential victim.
