An Australian man was left with shark teeth embedded in his leg yesterday after fighting off a suspected great white while surfing with his 10-year-old son in Sydney.
Authorities temporarily closed Mona Vale beach, in the city’s north, after Paul Welsh, 46, was forced to grip a nearby rock as the 1.3m shark tried to pull him out to sea.
“I was pushing my son on to waves and it just belted me from behind,” Welsh told local media. “I grabbed on to the pinnacle of a rock and held on as it tried to drag me out ... and I won.”
Witness Michael Brown said he and his teenage son saw a “whole lot of thrashing in the water” before a shark emerged from the depths in an “unbelievable” scene.
“It launched straight up into him, knocked him out of the water and then latched onto his leg,” Brown told state radio.
“Luckily, he had a chance to grab onto a rock and the shark’s actually thrashing, trying to drag him back into the water. He’s managed to release himself from the shark and crawl up onto the rocks, and just had a big bite mark in his leg and blood just streaming out of it.”
Brown, who runs aerial shark patrols in the area, said there had been a number of great white sightings in the past month, including one that was 3m long.
Great white sharks are the world’s largest known predatory fish, and can grow up to 6m long and weigh 2,240kg.
There was a spate of shark attacks in Sydney last summer.
Record show that 194 people have been killed by sharks in Australia over the past two centuries, but researchers point out that more people die from bee stings and lightning strikes.
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