GWS attack at Gray Whale cove

http://www.norcalkayakanglers.com/index.php?topic=92486.msg1044305#msg1044305

I now pack two, thx to all the prior pointers. 

Many puncture wounds arranged in a neat radius on the guy's leg.  Amazing he was able to walk himself to seek aid

The guy gave an interview to one of the news outlets. He said he was freediving for crabs and it was a quick, almost gentle bite.  And he described it as an exploratory bite, not an attack.

He definitely lost a lot of blood though. He tried to improvise a tourniquet which didn't hold. A fisherman tried to assist with another improvised tourniquet limited results. 

There are simple rules for applying tourniquets:
-Never around the neck 
-Avoid joints
-If your casualty is crying and begging you to loosen the tourniquet, keep cranking on it until they fight you. Then give it a couple more turns before you tie it off. 

Something to think about adding to your ditch bag.  If you happen to see a City/County Medic, you might ask them for a free tourniquet... all they can do is say No. 

I have a one handed one issued to me when I went to the sandbox.  You can buy these, take them out the packaging and get familiar with them.   I know there is the CAT model and the Rapid stop, there are more, but I am not familiar with those.  You can go old school bandana and a stick, but I try to avoid that.  Another option, and available at REI is using a blood stopper.  It is a bandage with a clotting agent in it, that will aid in clotting. The combination of a  tourniquet first, and a blood stopper second, has amazing results.  It is often possible to remove a the tourniquet later (done by a professional, of witch the majority of us are not one of them, so don't even think about it). The blood stopper if I recall was $50 (maybe).  Not cheap, but what is your kids leg worth?

The CAT is similar in practice to what you were issued in the sandbox.  It's just a bit improved for general use.  Clotting bandages have come down in price drastically over the years.  A 4 foot QuikClot gauze bandage is $30 and a 2 foot version is $16.  Israeli bandages are also really handy and can be self-administered with practice.  I buy these ones off Amazon.

Whether it's a shark attack or you galf yourself in the femoral artery or find your bait knife sticking out of your thigh pulsing as a heart rate indicator... we have the opportunity for severe lacerations and puncture wounds without any help immediately available.  Be prepared to keep yourself alive until that helicopter shows up.

It's worth mentioning that there are a ton of counterfeit CATs on the market, particularly on Amazon. Not sure why that's a thing, but there have even been reports of them making their way into military supply chains. When you fully tighten a TQ it's under a lot of force, and you want to make sure you have a legit one so it doesn't break when you need it most. Which is all to say, buy direct if you can and resist the urge to grab a cheaper model just because it looks the same. The Committee on Combat Casualty Care (TCCC or ToCCC depending on who you ask) has a published list of TQs approved for combat use. The CAT is on there, as is the SOFTT-Wide and a few others. I prefer the SOFTT-W for diving as it's a little easier to apply to your own leg with big freediving blades and gloves on. The CAT is a little easier to apply one-handed. I usually have a SOFTT-W on my person and a CAT on my kayak or dive board, along with some QuikClot gauze.

And while we're on the QuikClot thread--the instructions generally say something to the effect of "for exterior use only." I'm not a doctor by any stretch of the imagination, but all the resources I've seen say hemostatic gauze works best when it's packed into a junctional wound. And if you're going to be packing, you'll use a lot of it. So grab one of the 4m / 12ft rolls (they're smaller than a deck of cards when vacuum sealed). But the general consensus among people with much more training and experience than me seems to be that regular gauze packed into a wound works almost as well. And that stuff is like $2-$3 per 4m roll, so it doesn't hurt to have a lot of it on hand.