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• Stretch of Maui beach closed after shark attack

"I'm just so lucky I'm all in one piece," said Peller Marion, a psychologist and author from Marin County in the Bay Area who survived a shark attack this week off the island of Maui.

In a telephone interview from Maui Memorial Medical Center in Wailuku, where she was recovering from injuries, Marion said she had been snorkeling in about 14 feet of water, peering at the underwater world through goggles, when she thought she felt a turtle tugging at her right fin. And then there was a sharp pain.

When the 63-year-old California woman looked back, she saw a big, gray "thing" and realized the turtle actually was a shark chomping on her leg.

"The energy was so ... I knew what it was," Marion said Tuesday, a day after she was attacked off Keawakapu Beach in Kihei, Maui.

After a moment of shock, she managed to swim 25 yards to shore, where she stumbled onto the sand. Her foot was bloody and ravaged.

"It sort of looked like a slab of steak cut to the bone. That's how it looked on the front and on the calf," Marion said.

Four miles of beaches, closed to swimmers after the attack, were reopened Tuesday after officials surveyed the area by air.

The attack was reported at 8:34 a.m. Monday by a bystander.

Earlier, at 7:30 a.m., a surfer had reported that his friend's surfboard was bumped by what appeared to be a tiger shark at Kamaole Beach Park II, prompting closure of that beach and a shark alert by the county.

Maui County spokeswoman Mahina Martin said when a shark is sighted, procedure requires that one mile of coastline be closed. Keawakapu is a mile and a half from where the shark was spotted, so it was not closed, and beachgoers were not warned.

Marion said that if she had been warned, she would not have entered the water.

After the attack, the closure was expanded to a four-mile stretch of south Maui beach.

Marion will spend several more days in the hospital because of the threat of infection. She will then resume her Hawaiian vacation before returning home.

She didn't seem too upset by her encounter with one of the most feared creatures in the sea.

"It's nature," she said. "I'm just surprised it was me. I would like my fin back. He took just one."