Australia’s battle for the deep

Rolling from his surfboard, blood gushing from the wound where a shark had just ripped a big chunk of flesh from his thigh, Australian Glen Folkard had just one thought: “I'm alive.” Folkard, 44, was out beyond the breakers at Redhead Beach, north of Sydney, when a three-metre (9.8 feet) bull shark lunged for his board, knocking him to the water and dragging him beneath the surface locked in its powerful jaws.

“It was everything you'd think it would be, just sheer terror,” he told AFP, five weeks after the savage attack.

“He's hit me from underneath, he's grabbed me, he's turned me, took me under and then let go cos I think he had fibreglass in his mouth ... and that was my chance.” Scrambling to shore, the predator's dark shadow trailing his blood slick all the way, all Folkard could do was ride a wave in and collapse on the sand with a “big mass of yuck” where his thigh once was, but with his life intact.

“I just remember rolling off the surfboard onto my back, looking at the sky and just loving life instantly,” he said, despite having just lost two kilogrammes (4.4 pounds) of his leg to the ocean predator.

“I was laying on my back looking just at the blue sky, going 'I'm alive, I made it' because it was all but over. He was metres away from having a second go.” There were three fatal shark attacks on Australia's west coast in the months preceding Folkard's lucky escape, an unusually high number that prompted the local government to vow a crackdown on the marine predators.

And as recently as this week, a surfer on Australia's Gold Coast narrowly escaped death at the jaws of a bull shark, and like Folkard managed to scramble to shore in time.

But experts cautioned against knee-jerk reactions, stressing that the average number of attacks in Australia -- about 15 a year, with at least one being fatal -- increased in line with population growth and the popularity of water sports.

Sydney's Taronga Zoo shark specialist John West, who has catalogued every attack since the 1980s for the Australian Shark Attack File, said the jump in incidents from an average 6.5 in 1990-2000 said more about humans than sharks.

“Sharks have been around for 400 million years and humans have only been around about 400,000 years,” he said, adding that swimming had only been legalised in Australia in the last century.

Surfer numbers had increased “dramatically” since the 1950s, with some three million surfers now estimated to enter Australian waters every year, he said.

Advances in wetsuit technology meant people were going into the water all year round and staying out in the surf for longer periods, increasing the odds of an attack.

Activities such as snorkeling, fishing and diving had also grown in popularity, and Australians were living, swimming and surfing in greater numbers along previously deserted and still unpatrolled areas of the coast.

West said he opposed the hunting and killing of a shark after a fatal attack because it was highly likely the predator in question had left the area and an innocent animal could end up being slaughtered instead.

AFP