“It was such a confronting incident. It could have been anyone. The worst part was there was a 13 year old out there and he witnessed everything."

The surfer hit and killed by a Great White shark on a crowded day at Walkers Rocks yesterday has been named as popular Elliston teacher Simon Baccanello, a brave soul who warned others to split as the shark started swimming towards him. 

The forty-six-year-old science and sports teacher who’d only moved to the coastal town known for its epic waves as well as its dark history of shark attacks, in January was surfing the lefthander with a dozen others in the water, including kids. 

When the White appeared, Baccanello told the terrified kids, “Don’t worry, get yourself to shore”.

Jaiden Millar, a twenty two year old, saw the whole damn thing.

“It was such a confronting incident. It could have been anyone. The worst part was there was a 13-year-old out there and he witnessed everything,” Millar told Adelaide Now. “There was a bloke on the beach tooting his horn and as I turned around I saw everyone paddling in. I saw his board tombstoning, which means he’s underwater and his board’s getting dragged under … trying to fight his way back up to the surface… He was gone. (We) saw the shark just thrashing around out the back. The shark’s obviously let go and come back and got him for a third time”.

No body recovered yet, unlikely, although his board was found. 

“That was picked up pretty quickly,” Streaky Bay SES unit manager Trevlyn Smith told 7NEWS. “It had just one bite in the middle,” he said.

The attack has echoes of last year’s Great White hit on a swimmer at Sydney’s Malabar beach where rock fishermen watched as the swimmer was mauled and disappeared.

The small surf town of Elliston, six hundred clicks west of Adelaide, is in mourning tonight after a popular local surfer was killed in front of horrified onlookers at around ten am today.

The man, who was forty-six, was surfing Walkers Rocks, an intermediate sorta lefthander on the inside of the bay that’s also the home to Blackfellas, the wildly hollow left slab that is a favourite of Craig Anderson, Chippa Wilson and co and which has featured in innumerable surf movies.

According to reports, after the initial hit, the Great White continued to attack for five minutes before disappearing with the body which is unlikely to be recovered.

The attack has echoes of last year’s Great White hit on a swimmer at Sydney’s Malabar beach, where rock fishermen watched as the swimmer was mauled and disappeared.

“I heard a scream and the shark was just chomping on his body and the body was in half just off the rocks here,” said one witness.

Three years ago in Esperance in Western Australia, along the same migratory route for Great Whites, the well-known local surfer Andrew Sharpe was also killed and disappeared by a fifteen-foot White, his body never recovered.

A witness there said the dorsal fin and tail fin of the White were so big his initial thought was there were two sharks.

“I’ve never seen a dorsal fin that big before, not even in media footage,” he said.

"All experienced surfers, particularly people who surf on the West Coast of South Australia, must be aware of the risk.”

A surfer in his forties is either missing or being treated for life-threatning injuries, depending on which news report y’read, after being mauled by a Great White shark while surfing at Elliston, a town of less than four hundred souls four hundred miles west of Adelaide and home to one of Australia’s best waves.

Details real light so far, authorities saying the attack happened around ten-fifteen this morning.

Hits by Great Whites around Elliston aren’t new.

In 2014, after being belted by a fifteen-foot White, local surfer Andrew McLeod called for an immediate cull.

“Just felt a massive force, like a car crash and I got thrown off my board,” he said. “It is an absolute fluke that I didn’t get killed because if it had taken any of my flesh, I think it would have come back for more. It is ridiculous that they’re classified as endangered and they should be harvested like every other resource.”

Another surfer Sam Board backed him up.

“Something needs to be done, there’s an imbalance. We don’t hesitate to take every other fish out of the ocean, but we leave the biggest ones.”

In 2000, two Great White attacks in two days shone a spotlight on the area’s shark population.

On September 24, New Zealand surfer Cameron Bayes was killed by a White at Cactus a few hours east of Elliston and the following day, seventeen-year-old surfer, Jevon Wright, was killed by a White while surfing around Elliston.

As the coroner later said,

“All experienced surfers, particularly people who surf on the West Coast of South Australia, must be aware of the risk.”

Elliston, y’might know, has a nasty history, and not just locals who weren’t afraid to light you up with shotgun pellets.

In 1839, on the sandstone cliffs above Elliston’s best wave Blackfellas, two hundred and fifty indigenous men, women and kids were pushed to their deaths in retribution for the death of the local magistrate.

As Hawaiian surfer Albee Layer said in 2015, “It feels like you’re tiptoeing around a sleeping beast and at any point you could be gone forever without a trace.”