"The most brutal conclusion imaginable wrapped inside an ocean monster six metres long, weighing two tonnes, with an open mouth that is red, the colour of blood, and white, the colour of teeth."

It’s a quirk of fate that Mick Fanning, three-time world champion, will be remembered, forever, as the surfer who was almost cleaved in two, live, by a fifteen-foot White at Jeffreys Bay in 2015.

In a profile in today’s The Weekend Australian, the decorated journalist and author Trent Dalton works his lyrical alchemy, wrapping the attack around the death of two brothers, a divorce and a new documentary Fanning stars in called Save This Shark.

Five years on, Fanning tells his interlocutor that he still dreams about the hit.

And then he wakes and he realises he’s still alive. Still in one piece. Same ol’ unassuming, uncomplaining, knockabout, sun-bleached Gold Coast surfing genius Mick Fanning, flat on his back and sucking deep breaths in the darkness of early morning, sweaty head full of dreaming, ­beating heart too full of muscle remembering.

The most brutal conclusion imaginable wrapped inside an ocean monster six metres long, weighing two tonnes, with an open mouth that is red, the colour of blood, and white, the colour of teeth.

“I mean, it’s like I’m in the actual position I was in,” Fanning says. “It’s a reality dream. You sort of learn your body can do so many things to make things real and not real and I just had to learn, ‘OK, that moment’s been done. It’s not real. These dreams are just coming back’.”

He shakes his head in the cool winter air of Coolangatta, shivers with his hands in the pockets of a black winter coat, seated at a cafe table beside the footpath of a bustling post-morning-surf ­dining precinct. “I still have this PTSD where, if people splash behind me, it freaks me out,” he says. He chuckles when he says this. It’s not the laugh of a man trying to put on a brave face. It’s the laugh of a man trying to make sense of the absurd; a man grappling with a trauma that he realises he avoided confronting for close to five years.

Most of The Weekend Australian’s stories are shackled by a paywall.

This ain’t.

Read here.

I live in Australia where you can roll into a hospital, limbless after a Great White attack, and walk out with sparkling new prosthetics, all for free. Rehab and boiled chicken dinners included. Ain’t quite the same in the US.

There’s very little to be gained by diving into the political quagmire that is the American healthcare system.

Where Australia, Canada, the UK, Scandinavia and various European countries exist, reasonably happily, with a quasi-socialised system, the United States splits, electorally, on the concept that good healthcare should be available whatever your means.

Whichever way you swing, the bottom line is this:

Don’t get a board in the head in the US.

Because you gonna be slugged thousands before your health insurance, if you’ve got it, kicks in.

I live in Australia where you can roll into a hospital, limbless after a Great White attack, and walk out with sparkling new prosthetics, all for free.

Rehab and boiled chicken dinners included.

Ain’t quite the same in the US.

But, a start-up called Spot, which sponsors surfer Anthony Walsh and snowboarder Travis Rice, has exposed a loophole in the system and cut a deal with the world’s largest insurance companies to back a twenty-five-dollars-a-month, accident-only insurance policy that will cover the first twenty gees of your visit to a doc.

Each time you get injured. No limits.

Bust a leg. Twenty. Break a nose. Twenty. Guts ripped out by VAL. Twenty.

Y’see, if you strip cancer treatment and other catastrophic long-term illness out of the health insurance policy costs drop dramatically.

Matt Randall, a thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur, was turned onto the idea of by his wife’s pal Maria Miller who worked in the insurance biz.

Randall’s wife said he might wanna jump on Maria’s idea of an affordable injury-only insurance.

“It was massive. I said, ‘Why hasn’t this been done?’” he says.

It’s a no-brainer for Americans, I suggest to Randall. Three hundred bucks a year or thereabouts and you’ll never have to cop for the first twenty gees for injury-related surgery.

“Well, it’s an amazing concept if you live in America; if you live in a place where there’s universal healthcare it’s a terrible concept,” he says.

So far, forty-three of the fifty American states allow Spot to offer coverage, although you’ll be covered 24/7 whatever state, or country, you get busted in.

Randall says the Texas-based company’s biggest challenge is proving to people they’re legit.

“We could’ve charged more but we’re going for the volume play,” he says.

Gotta be a catch, no?

Exclusions?

“If immediate failure is death, we don’t cover it,” says Matt. “If you fail at base jumping there’s no option but death. On Everest, if you fail, you can survive. We cover that. Skydiving, you fall, you die. Most people aren’t getting injured skydiving.”

The company doesn’t just cover boards in the head or fins in the guts, either.

“One of our ambassadors, a top skier in the world, a guy called Julian Carr who does two-hundred foot jumps off clips, had never filed a claim. Two weeks ago, he was walking his dog, the leash wrapped around his little finger and broke it. Two thousand bucks. We cover that.”

Travel overseas and you’re covered.

Roll your car off a cliff, come out alive but torn to shreds.

Covered.

I can’t find holes in this thing, hence the ringing endorsement.

Am I wrong?

(Editor’s note: This is a sponsored post although some readers may find it useful.)