A 20-year-old Australian fisherman suffered deep lacerations to his right calf after being bittern by a 3-metre Mako shark. The incident happened after the shark was reeled aboard a tuna boat, some 100 nautical miles off Coolangatta, Australia.
The 90kg shark whipped around and bit him on the right calf when he stepped on its tail, according to media reports.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted a spokesman for RACQ CareFlight, which was called to airlift the man hospital, as saying: “There’s a few hands on the deck and they could not release the shark from the leg at all until they had cut the shark’s head off.”
“It was locked on. The bite has gone down to the bone.
“I've seen a photo of the wound and it's pretty messy.”
The man (not named) was reported in a stable condition and due to undergo emergency surgery in The Gold Coast Hospital at the time of this blog.
Paramedic Darrin Hatchman said the victim was lucky to be alive because the bite narrowly missed major blood vessels and arteries at the back of the knee.
“If it had have been a couple of millimetres either way, and a little bit more of a voracious bite, it would've been a real mercy dash to stop him from bleeding out,” Hatchman told ABC Radio.
Sources:
Sydney Morning Herald
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The Shark Attack Monitor logs news of shark attacks around the world. All attacks that are reported since June 2005 - whether minor brushes or fatal - will be logged on this blog.
