“It was like a puppy chewing on your finger.”
Here’s a piece of footage, old as the hills, just got spat out on Discovery’s Shark Week again recently, but, god, it’s wild.
American Heather Boswell is nineteen and on a six-month tour working in the galley of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship Discoverer.
Three hundred miles east of Easter Island, Boswell and pals take a day off to swim and snorkel.
Boswell is stalked and hit by a sixteen-foot Great White.
It grabs her leg (“It didn’t hurt at all, it was kind of like a puppy chewing on your finger,” she’ll recall later) as she tries to swim away.
Crew members hold out a broom to pull her in.
“When they were playing tug of war with the shark they reached down and grabbed my arms and pulled me but the shark still had a hold of my left leg,” Boswell would tell Oprah. “There was tug of war and I felt a pop. I thought ‘I hope my leg dislocated because if it didn’t it would be gone’ and I looked down and my leg was gone.”
On the home video we hear screams and as limb separates,
“Oh my God… It took Heather’s leg off.”
Boswell describes the event as “really really rough” and that she “felt like a ragged doll. And then when he brought me back up, I didn’t feel pain then either, all I felt was a pop. The shark bit most of my leg.”
After she was dragged aboard Discoverer the White went after another swimmer who was hanging off a ladder.
A few shots fired by a crew member sent the fish back to whence it came.