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Fierce fish scars a life

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published April 18, 2007

Sharon Touchton nurses her wounds at her St. Petersburg home: fingers and tongue reattached and a tooth lost.
	[Times photo: Martha Rial]

ADVERTISEMENT [AP Photo (2006)] Sturgeons at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota display the features that make them so dangerous: sharp-edged bony plates. Related content Fear the fish (8/26/06) View photos of flying sturgeons

ST. PETERSBURG - Sharon Touchton lay in her hospital bed. The doctors had sewn her tongue and three fingers back on. Her spleen was ruptured. She had lost her left pinkie finger and one tooth.

What did this to you, her husband asked.

And she told him:

A fish.

On March 31, Sharon, 50, was riding the Suwannee River with her husband, Nick, their 3-year-old granddaughter, Jasmine, and other members of their Jet Ski club.

Before they left their camp site, Nick Touchton said, they had heard warnings about the spawning sturgeon. But they didn't give it much thought.

"People had said, 'Be careful of the jumping sturgeon,' " Nick Touchton recalled on Tuesday. "And we said, 'Yeah, be careful of winning the lottery, too.' "

As they cruised along the river, Sharon Touchton pulled ahead.

She remembers a huge silver shape rising out of the water. She turned away. Then it struck her, about 200 pounds of fish, covered in sharp-edged bony plates like armor.

She fell, hitting her head.

All of it happened in the time it took for her husband to turn his head and check on friends farther back on the river. When he looked again, his wife's craft was empty. She was floating facedown in the water. He didn't know what had happened.

"I thought she was dead," he said.

He remembers dragging her out of the water. She wasn't breathing. Then she coughed and spit out blood, and he could see that she had bitten clean through her tongue. It was swelling, choking her.

Nick Touchton flagged down a pontoon boat. She remembers waking up there. Someone raised her arm, and she saw her own hand.

"I had no fingers," she said. "I had nothing. The bones were sticking out of my fingers."

She added, "I dream of it every night."

Her fingers had been sheared off by the sharp edge of the sturgeon's bony plate. They were hanging by a strip of flesh.

Later, when Nick Touchton inspected her personal water craft, he saw the long scratch leading to the handlebar where her hand had been.

She was taken by helicopter to Shands at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where surgeons did their best to mend her broken teeth and hand.

In the hospital, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission investigator Kenneth Holmes interviewed her. He has seen this kind of thing before. Every year, he said, people are injured in collisions with sturgeons during the spawning season.

Last year, eight people were injured. Holmes said there have even been fatalities.

"You got to understand, these fish are 200-plus pounds, and they're very territorial," he said. "They'll jump out of the water to basically show other sturgeon who's the man."

The wildlife commission has put up warning signs, but not everyone takes them seriously, Holmes said. As he interviewed Sharon Touchton in the hospital, Holmes said, she kept asking him: How could a fish do this to me?

Even now, at home in St. Petersburg, she wonders.

Friends have been joking with her. "They say they're eating more sturgeon caviar than they have in their lives," she said.

She has to joke, she said. What happened was so horrible. "I have to live with it," she said.

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 813 310 1243 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 18, 2007, 03:04:43]