'My friend said, "Jack, I think there's been a shark attack" and I looked out to the ocean and I could see a pool of blood.'"
The endangered Great White shark sure do get around considering its numbers are so fragile anyone found killing one can get seven years in the can and fined one hundred and fifty gees.
On Monday, a few hundred clicks north of Perth in a town called Geraldton, an off-duty fire fighter was surfing fifty yards off the beach when a suspected Great White tore his foot off.
One mad dog, surfer Shannan Dunn, swam out into the bloody water to save ol Mel.
“He basically said, ‘A shark’s got me, it’s taken my leg’”.
“When I chucked him in the back of the ute – it’s an old Navara – I told all the boys in the back and the lady, I said, ’This isn’t going to be a smooth ride, ’cause I’m gonna be gunning it and this car is pretty rough so just hang on’,” Dunn said.
If you want irony, Mel was photographed with Mick Fanning in 2015, shortly before Mick had his own dance with a Great White.
And, earlier today, Sorrento Beach, a mostly waveless beach north of Trigg on Perth’s northern beaches, was shut after two men went swimming and only one returned.
Witness Jacqui Rapaic told the state broadcaster.
My friend said, “Jack, I think there’s been a shark attack” and I looked out to the ocean and I could see a pool of blood,” she told the ABC. “I hugged onto my friend… [we] felt rather traumatised at that point,” she said. “It happened so quickly.”
Another told 9,
“I’m a nurse, so I mean I obviously see a lot of gruesome stuff, but to see somebody being mauled to death in the water in front of me is pretty hard to clock.” The nurse said the shark threw the man around “like a fish.”
“I only live just down the road, and I swim every day. I mean, there’s no way I’m going to be getting in that water again.”
The attack marks the twenty-fourth shark attack fatality in Western Australia since 2000.
Great White sharks have been protected in WA waters since 1997 and since 1999 Australia-wide.
In the previous one hundred years there were five, one, Bobby Bartle in 1967 inspiring the classic Goons of Doom song, The Great Shark of Jurien Bay.
“The amount of Great Whites is incredible. People are gonna hide from it and say it’s not. It is.”