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New Zealand man James Grant didn’t panic when attacked by a shark while fishing on Saturday. Instead, he fought off the mammal, stitched his own wounds onshore and went for a pint before attending hospital.
Grant, a 24-year old junior doctor, was spearfishing with friends on Saturday on the South Island when he was attacked by what appeared to be a sevengill shark.
“(I thought) bugger, now I have to try and get this thing off my leg,” he told Radio New Zealand.
Grant, 24, said he didn’t get a good look at the shark but the nature of several wounds suggested it was a sevengill shark and about 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) across at the jaw. Full-grown sevengills can measure up to 3.0 meters (10 feet) in length.
“I sort of just fought the shark off. The shark got a few stabs. The knife wasn’t long enough though,” he later told Fairfax Media.
After getting rid of the shark, Grant swam ashore and stitched his cuts using a first aid kit he kept in his vehicle for when his pig-hunting dogs were injured.
He and his friends then abandoned their fishing expedition and went to a nearby tavern where he was given a beer for himself and a bandage for the wound to stop blood dripping on the floor.
“It would have been great if I had killed it because there was a fishing competition on at the Colac Bay Tavern,” Grant said.
Agencies/Canadajournal
Mammal? That’s a great white… (which, by the way, is a cartilaginous fish)