Evans Head shark attack survivor Craig Olsen has declared he will never surf again after waking from a coma at Gold Coast University Hospital.
Mr Olsen fought off a great white shark by punching it several times in the head while paddling out for a dawn surf last Friday. The attack left a tooth in his thigh with the shark’s teeth coming within a millimetre of hitting his femoral artery.
“There’s no way I’m getting back in the water, no way in the world,” Mr Ison 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.”
“The survival skills come in, they reckon punching them between the eyes stuns them a little bit, they don’t like any resistance they just like to injure you first and then finish you off, he would have just kept going fucking at my leg until my leg dropped off if I didn’t punch him.”
After the increased number of shark attacks and sighting on the north coast in recent months Mr Olsen says he had a feeling there would be an attack at Evans Head and had spoken to his friends about what they would do in an attack.
“There are that many sharks in places, it’s ridiculous; it’s all about numbers, and when you have a protected species like killer white sharks for 15 years, what do you think is going to happen?,” he said.
“The numbers are going to grow and they’re going to attack. There’s no way I’m getting back in the water, no way in the world; I managed to beat a white pointer, that’ll do me.”
Mr Olsen added that he was forever grateful to his friends that helped him to shore and applied a tourniquet that saved his life.
