Jimmy left fighting for life after conger eel attack

It’s a good job city businessman Jimmy Griffin is such a calm person. A freak encounter with a six foot conger eel during a day out scuba diving in Connemara last month took a huge chunk out of the side of his mouth and almost cost the award-winning baker his life.

A less experienced diver would have panicked, and probably drowned, after being bitten by such a huge creature 25 metres underwater. But his cool reaction after having the regulator knocked out of his mouth, allied to the quick thinking of support staff at Scubadive West, near Killary, averted a near certain tragedy.

The owner of Griffins Bakery on Shop Street had not been underwater for two years when staff at the North West Connemara centre invited him out for a free dive during a ‘try out’ day when three major suppliers were showcasing new equipment to experienced divers.

The weather was good, he brought his seven years-old daughter and Polish mother-in-law along for a day at the beach, and the 48-years-old – a Divemaster with more than 200 dives logged – was ‘buddied up’ with another experienced enthusiast for a boat dive at a place called Inis Bearna.

After jumping in off the boat, they had spent over 40 minutes underwater. A pod of dolphins had passed just before they got into the sea and, familiar with the site, he knew that there were plenty of conger eels in the area.

“All of a sudden I felt I got hit by a freight train. That’s the only way to describe it. I got hit by this thing, it had me by the face and I was being tossed around like a rag doll. It hit my head really hard. My regulator was knocked out of my mouth. I knew something was after hitting me and biting me, but I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t get my hands around it, it was so big. I managed to wrestle it off and the pain started to set in on my face.”

Calmly, drawing on his experience, Jimmy put the regulator back in his mouth. He watched the giant eel, which was at least six feet long, swim away as he signalled to his buddy that something was wrong and gestured that they should return to the surface.

For more on this story, see today’s Galway City Tribune