Bondi today. One surfer, one Westpac helicopter, and one paranoid surfing population. Two attacks in two days. Photo: Lucy Matthews
Shark attack at Stab's local
Stab magazine's web technician James McIntosh was paddling back out after catching a wave at Bondi late yesterday when his mate Will screamed, "Go the fuck in!" Moments earlier, a shark had bumped Will's board, then leapt and grabbed another nearby surfer, 33-year-old Dover Heights man, Glen Orgias.
Local professional surfer Mick Marjonovich also watched the scene unfold from a few metres away."[The victim] was five meteres in front of me. It came from behind on a 45 degree angle while his arm was underwater and just latched onto it and tried to pull him under. The back fin and tail were just thrashing, trying to rip his arm off."
"Then the shark let him go. He got his board and tried to get it between him and the shark.There was water going all around which lasted about three seconds. When he realised he got bitten he freaked, just screaming 'shark!' and everyone went in."
Mick caught a wave to shore. Once there, he looked back toward the water and saw about seven other surfers on the same wave. The wave was red.
James also caught the next wave in, and arrived on the sand at the same time as the seriously wounded Orgias. The scene was horrifying.
Marjonovich says, "his hand was dangling down on a piece of skin and he was holding his bicep together that was ripped apart. He was looking towards me and all I could see was the bone of his forearm, and his hand just hanging off. There was no movement in his hand whatsoever."
James says there were others who could have got to the victim faster than him, but they ran the opposite way. James saw the man's left hand was hanging by a thread of skin and his forearm badly mauled.
"He thought he was going to die," James says. “He said to me, ‘tell my wife Lisa I love her. She’s six months pregnant’. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. His hand was stuck by a bit of skin, but not connected any more. I grabbed his legrope, pulled it off his leg and wrapped it around his arm. He was trying to walk, but I told him to stop. I pulled his legrope off and … I was just numb to what I was seeing.”
James says Will described the attack as “ferocious” and the shark was a "decent size".
Marjonovich put the shark at between two and three meters in length. And although he couldn't confirm the breed, was certain it wasn't a Tiger shark due to its dark colour.
The day before Glenn Orgias was attacked, at roughly the same time and in the exact same spot on the beach, local Bondi surfer Owen Werner was bumped by a shark while paddling out.
“I’d duckdived a wave and come up at the back of it,” he recalled. “I’d taken two or three strokes when something hit me from the side. It felt like another surfer had been riding the wave and just fell on top of me.
“I didn’t see it coming. It was the last thing I expected, man. It just came out of nowhere. It was moving so fast. I t just hit me – boof! I was like, fuck! I looked around and saw it go under me. I just absolutely freaked. I turned around and went straight in.” Werner told the others at that section of the beach to go to shore quickly. One of his mates stayed out, which he said was “a bit crazy”.
When he got in, Werner found he had been bruised on the hip by the impact. He believes it was the skark’s snout that made the impact, and counts the fact that his arm was out of the water that precluded the shark from “taking a nibble”.
When he heard about Thursday’s attack, he felt “happy that it wasn’t me, but I felt for the poor bloke that actually got bitten”.
Werner’s mate Chris Jones, who was surfing with him, said he’d been fishing the area for 15 years, and had noticed a lot of salmon in the area. “Definitely this summer there has been that much salmon around,” he said. “”I don’t remember them being this prolific when I was a kid.”
Another factor that may have attracted the marine life is the water temperature. Three days of northerly winds dropped the temperature to 16C on Sunday. By Wednesday, with southerlies blowing, it had risen to 21C. Hence the sudden abundance of marine life.
The incident comes one day after a navy diver was attacked inside Sydney harbour while taking part in a counter-terrorism exercise. By our count the tally of attacks now stands at seven in the past two and a half months, one of which was fatal, with sightings also reported to be on the increase. In the absence of any quantifiable data on shark numbers, the sheer multitude of sightings and attacks suggests numbers are increasing. - Fred Pawle and Jed Smith
So have shark numbers got out of control? Should we be hauling these meaty beasts out of the water and into our fish markets, like we do with far less harmful and possibly even less tasty species? Click this link to join our debate.
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Reply #8 on : Thu February 19, 2009, 16:38:20