Lifesavers break year-long silence on fatal Great White attack at Snapper Rocks and describe sliding door moment that nearly put a group of kids at the exact spot, “It was like a bus was coming through the water and took him underwater.”

The scene was “chaos” as spectators came to look while “others ran away screaming.” 

Last September 7, Nick Slater, forty-six, just finished work for the day, was shredding the little warm-water runners from Snapper through to Rainbow on his Morning of the Earth twin when he was hit again and again by a fifteen-foot Great White.

The first fatal hit on a Gold Coast beach since shark nets were installed more than sixty years earlier.  

As Longtom (RIP) wrote at the time, 

“Shallow water, it would have been waist deep on the tide. Clear water. Can’t pin mistaken identity on the shark. It must have come in like a polaris missile from the amount of water it displaced. There was no delicacy in the attack. The footage shows clubbie skis, three or four of them heading his way, to the rescue, I thought. But they didn’t respond.Others seemed to not notice, or scatter.Despite the crowd, an utterly lonely way to die.”

Dead long before he was dragged onto the beach. 

Now, more than a year after the attack, the clubbies on the skis, Iain Rogers and Geoff Carlin, along with Kane Haley, who’d just beached his ski and who split to get an ATV with first aid supplies, have spoken about the hit.

The fourth clubbie, Jason Baker, the man who paddled into the maelstrom to try and rescue Slater, is still too rattled to talk about it. 

Haley says he’d just wrapped up a training sesh with the local junior lifesavers, nippers they call ‘em in Australia.

Most times they’d head back out for a surf but, instead, he told ‘em to shower and go home.

It’s a decision he’s thought about ever since. 

“We nearly always had a surf after training,” Haley told the Courier-Mail. “And that’s exactly where we would have paddled back out. It’s such a sliding doors moment because if something had happened to one of the kids who had put their trust in me, I don’t know what I would do.”

Carlin, Rogers and Baker were on their skis after a training run to North Kirra and back when they saw Slater paddle over a wave before being hit “by an underwater bus.” 

“It was so quick,” said Carlin. “It was like a bus was coming through the water and took him underwater.”

Baker went to Slater; the others went to the beach for help. 

The scene was “chaos” as spectators came to look while “others ran away screaming.” 

Haley, whose daughter was surfing at the time, says he took a few days away from the beach but has since returned with this kid. 

Still, 

“There’s not a day goes by that it’s not present,” he said.