"I watched them circle twice around Bill… and on the third loop, they were literally hanging out the side of it pointing at the shark!"

Two good Samaritans have been forced to crash-land their bird after flying low to warn a surfer he was being stalked by a twenty-foot Great White on a remote stretch of coastline in NSW’s far south. 

Bill Ballard was surfing a joint called Wallagoot when he was buzzed by the little plane.

“I looked up at both of the people in the aircraft and they were almost hanging over the side screaming at me, ‘shark, shark!’ and pointing at a big shadow in the water 20 metres away,” Bill told The Examiner’s on the ground reporter Amandine Ahrens.  

“I looked up at both of the people in the aircraft and they were almost hanging over the side screaming at me, ‘shark, shark!’ and pointing at a big shadow in the water 20 metres away. At first, I thought they must have mistaken it for a dolphin and I kept asking if they were sure it wasn’t, but the pilot said, ‘no, I’ve been flying for years and I know exactly what a shark looks like.” 

Billy’s mama Janine saw the drama unfold. 

“I watched them circle twice around Bill, and I hadn’t realised they were trying to contact him, and on the third loop, they were literally hanging out the side of it pointing at the shark… I watched it thinking, they’re trying to get to the beach, but they’re not going to make it, because they kept falling and then it just went bang into the water.” 

Beachgoers helped pull the bird out of the water and drove the pilots back to their car, reports The Examiner.

Weird thing about the episode is no photos of the event nor a description of the bird involved as if this was some sorta alt-universe where no one carries a well-thumbed telephone.

Y’ever seen a beachgoer not locked into their telephone?

Mysterious.

Update: The lil bird was a gyro-copter! Photo below!

"In the final scene, the commandos rush up the beach with assault rifles in hand."

Mainland China and its pretty little offshoot Taiwan have been poised on the brink since ol’ Chiang Kai-Shek and his Chinese Nationalists (the Kuomintang) fled the mainland in 1949, roundly defeated by Mao Zedong’s Commie bastards following that country’s twenty-two year civil war. 

Both of ‘em were bastards, as it were, the Nationalists declaring martial law in Taiwan and not lifting the jackboot from the people’s neck until 1987, the island’s sand reddened by the blood of 140,000 of its citizens. 

Anyway, mainland China was, is, always gonna come for Taiwan. 

And, as revealed today, the People Liberation Army, has turned to jet-powered surfboards to get its commandos onto Taiwan’s beaches. 

Military enthusiast Louis Cheung tweeted a 24-second clip, ripped from a China Youth Daily vid posted on Weibo,  showing PLA commandoes on the revolutionary craft. 

PLA’s new equipment for individual landing operations pic.twitter.com/5gSTs1W9x0

— 彩云香江 (@louischeung_hk) September 27, 2022

Taiwan News reports, 

In the video, soldiers in black wetsuits can be seen carrying large, waterproof rucksacks and they lie prone on surfboards. The tiny craft are only large enough to hold one man and are self-propelled. One rider can be seen wearing goggles, and the face of another can be seen in another shot as he peers over the board.

After focusing on individual riders, the camera pans out to show a full squad of 12 men who can be seen riding the surfboards in tight formation. Towards the end of the video, the frogmen can be seen landing on a beach and discarding their boards as they are guided in by a man waving red flags.

In the final scene, the commandos rush up the beach with assault rifles in hand.

The obvious question is, should the West muzzle the Commies and save Taiwan or let the remnants of the Kuomintang fall on its sword.

The sensible money would be to give China its prize and hope we all get along although I believe that once the Reds’ nostrils quiver in the stink of victory they won’t stop until the Pacific is theirs.

Therefore, affix your bayonets boys, we going over the top!

Banzai! Etc.

Or no?

Anytime she thinks about the attack “I’m hit with low grade nausea and panic. And that just comes at me day after day, after day."

Twenty twenty was a helluva year for Great White attacks in Australia, east coast, west coast, they were everywhere. 

By August of that year, there had been five fatals, including two on surfers: fifteen-year-old Mani Hart-Deville at Wooli, two hours north of Port Macquarie, and sixty-year-old Rob Pedretti at Kingscliff, another couple of hours north.

Over at Bunker Bay in Western Australia, twenty-eight-year-old surfer Phil Mummert was hit by a “freakishly large” Great White.

“The White came out the water and inhaled the board pretty much,” said a witness. 

In Tasmania, a ten-year-old kid was snatched from the deck of a fishing boat by a Great White, only to be dragged back on board by his dad. 

A psycho year that was confirmed at the end of August when  thirty-five-year-old surfer Chantelle Doyle was hit by a ten-foot Great White at Shelly Beach in Port Macquarie, a pretty fishing town on Australia’s mid-North Coast.

It was only an act of impossible bravery by her husband, belting the White in the face until it released its grip on his wife’s leg, that saved the woman, 

“This fella paddle over and jumped off his board onto the shark and hit it to get it to release her…pretty full-on, really heroic,” said Surf Life Saving NSW chief executive Steven Pearce.

Wild, yes? 

Two years on, Chantelle has shifted to boxing following severe nerve damage to her bitten leg, which means she’s gotta wear a brace on her left foot and lower leg.

“My leg is still partially paralysed,” she told ABC News. “And I had expected a lot more and I was just really sick of feeling like I couldn’t function the way I ever used to function. So I started boxing.”

Anytime she thinks about the attack “I’m hit with low grade nausea and panic. And that just comes at me day after day, after day.”

Of the attack,

“It grabbed me and I grabbed the board and it readjusted … There were three distinct readjustments of the jaws. I was holding on to the nose of my board… It was like being bitten by a dog – it’s painful but it’s more this intense pressure and squeezing and crushing.”

Not that she holds any grudges against Great Whites.

Her six-minute bout on October 29 will be leveraged to raise money for the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

“I have this crazy vision that Australia could be a global role model for biodiversity and living with nature and I really think we can be,” she says.

 

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