"I could feel my life slipping away, and I just kept going deeper and deeper away, everything was leaving my body and I was going somewhere."
One of the newer trends online is drone photographers posting videos of Great Whites swimming perilously close to surfers but always veering away at the last second, proof many claim that the fish is benign and misunderstood.
(Read, Happy Great White “Stalks” Surfers at Dreamy Beachbreak here.)
Attacks, however, when they’re filmed are heavily pixelated or removed from the public eye, deemed too gruesome for the average eye. Think: Nick Slater at Greenmount, Kai Mckenzie at Port and, a couple of months back, mammy of one, Leah Stewart, who was swimming thirty yards off a Sydney beach when she was hit by a fifteen-foot Great White.
But what Leah Stewart does have is…words.
She is one of the few humans in Australia to’ve found ’emselves been torn apart by a Great White and lived, as they say, to tell the tale unlike, and this is the list since 2012, Peter Kurmann, Ben Linden, Chris Boyd, Sam Kellett, Jay Muscat, the unnamed Tasmanian diver, Ben Gerring, Doreen Collyer, Laeticia Brouwer, Andrew Sharpe, Paul Millachip, Mark Sanguinetti, Simon Nellist, Simon Baccanello, Tod Gendle, Khai Cowley, Lance Appleby, Steven Payne, Mercury Psillakis, Steven Mattaboni and Daniel Turpin.
Leah describes the event thus:
Realizing the shark was there
“I was finishing up my swim and I was very close to getting back to the sand, and then all of a sudden I heard a girl behind me go a scream, kind of like a shrill shriek, and I turned and there was a huge, huge fin behind her. It’s massive. And at first I thought, oh, it’s a dolphin. But I looked at the size of it and I realized that’s not a dolphin. And so we just start screaming at the top of our lungs, shark, shark, shark. I’ve never screamed that loud and that crazy in my life. Shark. And we could just watch the fin sort of going back and forth between the two girls behind us. And I’m just thinking, surely the lifeguards will hear us screaming, a jet ski is going to come out any second and scare it away. But a minute went by and it was still there and no one had come to save me, which I was like, surely this can’t happen. This isn’t real.”
Face to face
“I did about four strokes and something told me stop. I stopped and I could feel movement in the water and I turned around and it was right there. I saw it from two metres away, and it just was getting closer and closer and closer. Slowly. Its mouth was as big as my thigh. Its face was horrific. I’ll never forget its face. It was huge, and its teeth, and its mouth was massive, and its eyes, just its black little beady eyes. We were looking face to face, and it got to the point where it was about 30 centimetres from my face, and it started opening its mouth, and I’m like, it’s going to get my face. It’s going to bite my face. I’ve got to try and punch it. I’ve got to try and push it away or else it’s going to bite my head off. And in that moment I thought, well, which limb am I willing to lose? I’m right-handed. So I decided, let’s do a left hook.”
The bite
“So it’s about here, it’s opening its mouth, and I just throw my left arm and it grabs onto my forearm and rips away my skin, my muscle, everything. And I can just see my hand with the skin there, and then there’s a big gap between my forearm and the hand. There was a lot of thrashing. And that was around the time I actually saw the shark come out of the water, and that was when I saw the size of it. It wasn’t that it was really a long shark, I’ve seen bigger sharks which have definitely given me a fright, but what was so shocking about this one was just the size, the volume of it. I was on a board out of the water and when it surfaced it felt like I was looking up at its dorsal fin and its tail. And that was the moment I realized this thing’s actually just not going to be scared of me. After that I turned to the lifeguards, started doing signals to get the shark alarm to go off, to clear the water, and just make sure they knew what was happening, because I felt pretty helpless at that point. It’s a big cross, which is basically the one you use when everything’s going wrong, which I think was actually technically the wrong signal, but I think because of how dire the situation was, it was definitely effective in that moment. Absolutely, yeah, I was terrified. It was a pretty full-on situation.”
Dragged under
“I just looked down, my hand appeared to be floating and I was kind of in shock, and the next moment I feel it grab onto my left thigh and it rips me under water. I was above water at this point when it took my arm, so I had my breath, and then I just feel it pull me down, and as it’s pulling me down I take a huge breath. I don’t know how, but survival kicked in, and it was like it was in slow motion when it pulled me under and it was grabbing onto my leg. I had the thought, this is it, this is how I die. That’s this, right now. It was holding on to my leg and I thought, this is my moment. Then I just thought of August, and I thought, she’s not going to have a mom. She’s going to grow up without a mom. I couldn’t handle that. I didn’t want her not to have a mom. So I just thought, I’ve got to fight it. I’m going to do everything I can to be here.”
Fighting back
“I could feel it shaking me, and somehow I managed to twist my body around, and I knew I had to punch its snout as hard as I could. I twisted my body kind of awkwardly and I’m trying to see where its snout is. And I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear, but I just thought, you’re allowed to swear. In my head I was like, you ugly, you are not taking me away from my daughter. And I twisted myself around and I just started punching it over and over and over again. Just punch, punch, punch. It was like fighting a dinosaur. It was so big. It was like punching a brick wall. And I think I must have got a really good one in, and so they let me go and I just popped back up. And in the distance, about, I don’t know, 20 metres away, I can see Charlie. I can see Charlie.”
Trying to reach the board
“By that point, obviously my left arm has been taken, the muscles and everything ripped off. And as I was punching the shark, I’ve caused really severe tendon damage, ruptured my tendons, sliced open all of my right hand. So I’m trying to hold on to the board, but as I’m holding on to it, my hand just keeps slipping. It’s not working. My hand thinking, why can’t I hold on to this board? It just keeps slipping off, slipping off. Not something else. No, please. Just get me out of here. Like, please.”
Slipping away
“I could feel my life slipping away, and I just kept going deeper and deeper away, and it just felt like everything was leaving my body and I was going somewhere. And I just, as I was about to reach the end of the tunnel, I just got a vision of August. And I just knew I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t leave her. So I just willed myself, and I said, I can’t die right now. I can’t. I know it sounds strange, but I sort of pulled myself back, and I opened my eyes and I could see everyone around me at that point.”
Who among us has been close to this sorta action?
And, how do y’think you’ll react if, when, the day comes?