A FATHER has saved his teenage daughter from a four-metre great white shark off Normanville, South Australia, declaring that if he’d taken 10 seconds longer, “I’d have one less child”.
According to an article on the Adelaide Now website, Chris Williams, 56, said his family was kayaking and squidding in the pristine waters of Lady Bay on Sunday.
The perfect afternoon quickly turned into a nightmare when Sarah, 15, alone in a double kayak, was suddenly flung into the air.
“The next thing I know, a shark was hitting my kayak from below,” she said. “It flipped my kayak … as soon as I hit the water, I saw the fin and the tail and I thought: ‘This is like the Jaws movie’.”
Sarah said her feet touched the shark’s body as she scrambled back into her kayak. “I basically used the body weight of the shark to get back up,” she said.
The attack left teeth marks on the underside of the kayak. Watching it unfold only metres away in a small aluminium tinny were Mr Williams, his son Mitchell, 22, and daughter Misty, 33.
“I started the motor quickly, did a U-turn to get back and I told Mitchell to get on his knees in the boat and lean over and grab Sarah and drag her in,” he said.
“I’ve hit the shark and the kayak … and Mitchell dragged her over the kayak to get her into the boat.”
Sarah was taken by ambulance to the South Coast District Hospital at Victor Harbor where she was treated for shock and minor cuts to her leg and foot. One cut was believed to be from climbing into the kayak but the other was unexplained and a scrape from a shark’s tooth had not been ruled out.
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