Thread: Close one for Mick Fanning - YIKES!

He wants to count his lucky stars, he was almost shark dinner!!

Julian Wilson is a pretty gutsy young bloke, took a fair bit of courage to paddle towards Mick Fanning when he was being attacked by a white pointer. In my opinion that's proper courage, I doubt it'll be recognised in the same way Caitlin Jenna is though!

Originally Posted by Ausfree

He wants to count his lucky stars, he was almost shark dinner!!

Don't get in the water with oceanic sharks. They don't usually window shop.Had it been far off shore and a Mako, Blue or Thresher and no more Mick.

He was, as most of us who swim surf or dive, lucky it was not a hungry big shark mostly. Very wrongly maligned fish I.M.O. It was Mick that punched the shark remember!

Sharks own the Ocean, big cats the African bush, crocodiles - well, anywhere they want, really. Go into their World, you play by their rules. No one should be surprised that the great white will frequent an area where seals live. I'm surprised there were not more eyes down & looking for just such a shark, although the great white is said to be an ambush predator, often surging up from deep, to grab a feed. I've seen what a large Tiger shark can do to a large turtle, biting thru its shell, no problem at all.


A mate of mine, Chris Murphy, is the brother of the fisherman who, when their boat sank, along with the deckie & the female cook, were stalked by a Tiger, for a couple of days, up here in Qld. Shark got the brothers leg, he swam away to try to draw the shark away, predictable result. The cook was taken next , the deckie was saved, just. That shark followed them, kept coming back. To his credit, Chris doesn't hate sharks. Just that one. Bob


The movie, the Reef, was based on this incident.


Townsville, July 1983

Shark attacks in north Queensland are rare, but in cases like this sharks are attracted to the dead and injured fish that get thrown out from commercial fishing boats.
The Australian movie The Reef is based on the true story where a tiger shark killed several crew of the fishingboat New Venture in July 1983.
There were three crew on the boat; Ray, Linda and Murphy.
Murphy's Law says; if anything can go wrong it will go wrong, in the worst possible place, and at the worst possible time, so maybe Murphy should not have gone out fishing that day...
They were 80 km off the coast of Townsville, north Queensland when the boat was hit by a big wave and sank.
Lots of debris was floating around that they lashed together to make a raft and they started making their way to nearby Lodestone Reef where they knew other fishing boats were working.
While they were paddling along Murphy got pulled under by a tiger shark, and when he resurfaced part of his leg was missing. He understood that now he was doomed, with the blood in the water the shark would not give up so Murphy said to his fishing buddies that they should swim away and Murphy himself swam to the shark in an attempt to save his mates and he was killed.
Ray and Linda swam away from the shark as fast as they could, and continued floating on the raft, but several hours later the shark was back again.
This time it took Linda and then disappeared for a few hours again.
Ray kept paddling like crazy on his piece of foam but just before he reached the reef the shark was back again, but fortunately fishermen on other boats working at the reef saw him and just in time came to his rescue, making Ray the sole survivor of this drama.