I thought my dad grabbed hold of my ankle for fun ...then the shark pulled me under
Paige Winter was enjoying her favourite day out to unwind from exam revision – splashing around at the beach with her family and friends.
The 17-year-old grabbed the hands of her elder sister, Anais, and best friend, Kale, and raced laughing into the sea, joined by her dad, Charlie.
Charlie had also brought his girlfriend and her seven-year-old son on the day out to Fort Macon beach in North Carolina in June 2019.
But what came next changed Paige’s life forever.
She relives the horror in a documentary for this month’s National Geographic’s Sharkfest series and also spoke to the Mirror.
Paige says: “We all decided to get back into the water. We went quite a way out but it was shallow, I never go out further than I can touch the floor.
“We were pretending we were mermaids, throwing ourselves backwards and the seven-year-old was so excited. At that point we turned around and saw Dad trying to sneak up on us and we were laughing.
“I jumped backwards in the water again and felt something grab my ankle. I was like, ‘Real funny, Dad’. My dad and I have always done that, swam under the water to grab each
other’s legs. Then I’m like, ‘Ow, that kinda hurts’. I looked over to my left and saw that everybody I’d came to the beach with was there and thought, ‘Is this a stranger?’.
“Then I got pulled underwater and I was like, ‘OK, this isn’t right’.
“It took me a second to realise, ‘Oh Jesus, it’s a shark.’ I just remember being completely dragged.
“Then he started thrashing about, like when a dog is playing with a rope and shakes it from side to side, the shark was doing that to my leg.
“It was trying to pull me out to deeper waters. After a split second my whole body just went numb.”
She tried to prise its jaws open and the shark let go – then bit down again, this time injuring her fingers too.
Paige says: “My head was going a mile a minute, it was crazy.
“I didn’t see my past flash in front of me, but I did see my future, all of my dreams and the things I wanted to be. For a second I had kind of resigned myself to that being the end, but after that I was like, ‘I can’t not be around. I need to survive’.”
By now Charlie, a former Marine turned firefighter, had rushed to help his daughter and was trying to wrestle her away from the shark’s grip.
He remembers: “I ran to where the pink water was and I dived under and grabbed Paige with my left arm and brought her up, but there was resistance, and there was this huge shark thrashing about. It was pulling me and I had to anchor my feet in the sand to stop me from moving out. I just started to hit it. I hit it and hit it so hard, so many times. One of the hits I gave it must have been good enough and it let go.”
Back at the beach, as paramedics rushed to her aid, Paige remembers looking at her mangled leg and thinking “That’s gross”.
She adds: “It was pretty much like it had gone through a paper shredder.”
After a five-hour operation, Paige woke up to discover her leg and two of her fingers had been amputated.
She had nerve damage in both hands. Paige says: “I was sad for a second. The first thing I did was call my boyfriend and I was like, ‘Hey, do you still like me?’. He said yes so it was cool.
“Sometimes I get frustrated because I couldn’t do certain stuff – can’t put my own hair up – but I haven’t allowed it to stop me from doing the things I want to do. My dream was to study cosmetology at college, which I’m already doing.”
Dr Mike Heithaus, a marine ecologist on the documentary, says Paige’s attacker was almost certainly a bull shark, probably lurking in waters turned murky by heavy rain. He adds: “They are one of the few shark species that will attack prey near their own body size. Paige was very unlucky, at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Paige, now 19 and whose Instagram bio reads “Shark
bait”, says she still has no hard feelings against the predator and even collects shark merchandise.
She has a salt and pepper shaker “where the salt is a leg and the pepper is a shark”. Paige says: “I’m not mad at the shark. I think that shark had kind of a bad day too, to be honest.”
But recalling her next trip to the seaside, she says: “I got back in for half a second, but when I felt the sea on my ankle I was like, no. I prefer pools now.”
Shark Attack Investigation: The Paige Winter Story is on tonight at 8pm on National Geographic WILD.