Tragic set of circumstances’
But Wilson reported his friend had stopped bleeding and had died beside him.
‘‘The shark appeared to me to be a white pointer.
‘‘It was similar to one we had netted last year . . . That is about 14 feet, six inches in length,’’ Wilson told the coroner.
Just four days after the death, Coroner Thomas Ross found Graeme Hitt had bled to death after his arteries in his left leg ‘‘were severed in an attack by a white shark’’.
He knew personally the toll they could take on a family. One of his best friends was Maurice, the brother of Les Jordan, who was killed by a shark at St Clair in 1964.
‘‘We were in the same class at school, and we used to hang out.’’
Maurice, known to his friends as ‘‘Mo’’, later died of leukaemia.
Both boys shared a bond over the tragic death of their brothers. ‘‘We talked about it at times.’’ After his brother’s death he found out a fishing company was regularly dumping fish waste into the sea near where the incident unfolded. ‘‘That attracted the shark.’’ He believed the Dunedin attacks was the work of one shark.
‘‘He has his pattern, his own wee circuit that he goes to around the world, and that would be one of the places he would call in because there was free food there.’’
Errol Hitt was there when a plaque was unveiled to the memory of those taken in shark attacks off Dunedin’s coast.
Survivor Barry Watkins arranged the plaque, with the family of Les Jordan and Bill Black also attending.
The Dunedin attacks curtailed previous interest in swimming in the sea as ‘‘I’m silly, not stupid’’. ‘‘I couldn’t trust the sea.’’ With the passing years that had changed, ‘‘it doesn’t really worry me.’’
‘‘But I’m old enough not to go swimming in sea.’’