Rather than fear the ocean, a shark attack survivor keeps going on more ambitious dive missions.

Monterey County has experienced as many great white shark-related deaths as any area in the world. On average, Monterey County experiences one shark attack every four-and-a-half years, according to the Global Shark Attack File, a list maintained by the Shark Research Institute. With two attacks taking place in 2017, we are statistically due for another soon.

Marco Flagg is one of the lucky ones. In 1995, Flagg was bitten by a shark while diving at Point Lobos. What was to be a routine dive, while testing a dive tracker of his own design, turned into a fight for survival. Flagg was descending to the ocean floor when, as he looked to his right, he saw a tail fin as tall as he was. It was a great white shark, swimming just out of view in the murky water. Turning around to swim back toward the dive boat, Flagg says his first thought was, “That’s kind of cool I got to see a great white shark, because they’re fascinating animals.”

Then, as Flagg looked down, he saw the shark again. This time, its mouth was open and getting closer. “I just thought ‘Oh shit!’ I turned toward it and next thing I know, it just clamped around me and I blacked out. And when I came to, the shark was gone.”

Injured but alive, with pain in his abdomen and his leg, Flagg checked to see if his leg was attached. Realizing it was, he resumed the swim back to the boat, where he started the engine and revved it to summon his dive partners.

Doctors determined Flagg had been sandwiched between his oxygen tank and his dive tracker. These two devices took the brunt of the attack, saving him. He escaped with three cuts, 18 stitches and a bruise on his chest from the tracker.

“The danger, that’s part of it. Just like somebody climbing a mountain, there’s a chance you may not make it.”

The near-death experience didn’t keep Flagg out of the ocean. “It makes the diving more real, a bit more exciting,” he says. “The danger, that’s part of it. Just like somebody climbing a mountain, there’s a chance you may not make it.”

Three years later, in 1998, Flagg was part of an expedition in search of a Japanese cargo submarine, the I-52, about 1,000 miles southeast of Barbados. The goal was to claim the gold that was rumored to have been on board. Treasure hunters brought Flagg along to operate his proprietary navigation equipment and guide them to the downed submarine.

“This was a very high-profile expedition, National Geographic was shooting an IMAX movie, and a rather well known author was writing a book about it,” he says, referring to Battleground Atlantic by Richard N. Billings.

During the expedition, Flagg was tapped to go in a mini-submarine with two Russian counterparts about 17,000 feet below the surface to find the I-52. Sinking for hours into the depths in a tiny submarine, the Russian-made vessel broke down – twice.

Flagg remembers them trying to turn the sub’s motor on. “Nothing happens. And then the captain just says one word, he says ‘problem.’ I said, ‘OK, so it wasn’t the shark that was going to kill me. It’s a submarine.’”

Eventually, they did return to the surface. Even that scare didn’t stop Flagg from making one final trip to the bottom and helping to find critical information about the downed I-52, and other underwater journeys. In 2011, for instance, he dove with tiger sharks at Tiger Beach in the Bahamas, in order to help researchers tag the predators.

As much as Flagg’s life sounds like an aquatic Indiana Jones movie, it’s not all shark attacks and treasure hunting. What he and his Marina-based company Desert Star Systems are really known for is developing underwater technologies that change the way everyday things are done. Ropeless fishing, a promising new form of crab and lobster fishing designed to reduce entanglements with whales, is one of several technologies DSS is working on. They sell fish tracking tags, navigation systems, dive trackers and more.

Flagg holds no animosity for the animal that bit him all those years ago. “They are not fuzzy Disney things, and they are not Jaws, they do what sharks do, and sometimes they just take a bite, that’s how it goes.”