‘It immediately started attacking me:’ Otter leaves Lake Tahoe swimmer bleeding – East Bay Occasions

Swimming trainer Lynette Bellin had been swimming for three-quarters of a mile alongside Lake Tahoe’s picturesque rocky northern shoreline this week when one thing that felt like a pair of fingers grabbed her leg and yanked her underwater.

“I thought it was human,” Bellin stated. “It was so strong.”

But her assailant had paws, not fingers.

“I turned around and that’s when I saw the otter, and it immediately started attacking me,” Bellin recalled after the river otter incident Sunday close to Incline Village.

As she tried to swim to security, the animal clawed her legs.

“When it approached my torso, I would try to push it away to deflect it, but every push seemed to make it attack more viciously,” stated Bellin, of Reno, who teaches swimming security to youngsters.

Scrambling to flee the “relentless” assault, Bellin tried to climb out of the water onto some rocks, however she slipped off. She swam towards one other rock, “and the otter continued to attack my legs as I tried to flee,” she stated.

After she managed to rise up on a rock, “the otter climbed up and started attacking me on the rock as well,” she stated.

The animal solely retreated when she reached about 10 ft above the lake. But it stored circling, she stated.

Bleeding from her legs, face and fingers, Bellin contemplated her route out. “There was no way I was getting back into the water,” she stated.

She climbed granite boulders to achieve a motorcycle path, and walked again to the seaside the place she’d left her belongings.

“I have been swimming in Tahoe for over two decades and have never seen anything besides minnows and crawdads,” she stated.

At the hospital, Bellin obtained 38 stitches and a number of rabies pictures.

River otters are widespread in lots of U.S. waters, because of decades-old conservation measures together with the federal Clean Water Act, stated Megan Isadore, govt director of the Marin-based River Otter Ecology Project.

But assaults, Isadore stated, are “very unusual.”

Such incidents seem to happen when river otters really feel threatened, or imagine their younger are at risk, Isadore stated.