Shark Attack survivor says he’ll never surf again

Surfer Craig Ison, who fought of a shark at Evans Head last week, has just woken from an induced coma at Gold Coast University Hospital. And, he says he’ll never go in the water again.

“There’s no way I’m getting back in the water, no way in the world,” the 51-year-old told the Daily Telegraph. “I managed to beat a white ­pointer. That’ll do me. It was personal. He was saying to me ‘don’t even bother thinking you’re going to get out of this one mate, you’re fucked, I’ve got you no worries’. But I said to the shark, ‘fuck you, I’ll fight dirty too.’ His jaws were just ripping and tearing and I’m there just looking at it, I thought ‘I better do something’ so I went bang, bang, bang, bang and punched him four times and he let go.”

Craig still has fragments of shark teeth in his leg, where the shark bit literally millimetres from his femoral artery – if it’d hit that, he’d be dead.

While never surfing again is a hard thing to fathom, Stab can’t say we blame Craig for being done with the brine, having looked into the cold, dead eyes of a prehistoric predator as it gnawed at one of his limbs. That’s even harder to fathom.