Man in shark-infested waters signalled for help with watch

A NEW Zealander who was stranded in shark-infested waters for nearly 24 hours was saved after using the reflection from his watch to signal for help.

Will Fransen, 61, was on a solo fishing trip off the eastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island on Tuesday when he fell overboard after hooking a marlin.

Unable to catch his boat as it drifted out of reach, he endured a cold night in the ocean after a failed attempt to swim to the Alderman Islands.

During his time in the water, Mr Fransen was confronted by a shark which he said came to “have a sniff ” before heading away.

After resorting to treading water and trying to attract the attention of passing boats, his ordeal was eventually ended when three fishermen spotted an unusual glimmer on the water.

Upon motoring over to it, Max White, James Mcdonnell and Tyler Taffs found a “super cold, severely dehydrated” man bobbing in the sea.

“Glad to see you,” Mr Fransen told the trio, who rushed him away to hospital.

The fisherman had set off on his trip on Jan 2, with plans to return the following day. But he ran into difficulty after reeling in a Marlin from his 12m boat. As he prepared to release the fish back into the waters, “everything went horribly wrong” and it pulled him in too. “I grabbed the [fishing] line with the marlin attached and started pulling the line out,” he told the New Zealand Herald from his hospital bed yesterday.

“I tried pulling my way towards the boat only to have the line slip out of my hand, which is pretty gutting, because next thing my boat’s idling over the horizon and I’m treading water.”

Mr Fransen then attempted to swim to the Aldermans but was dragged away by strong currents. Without any food or fresh water on him, he was stranded.

“I gave up and just treaded water and watched the beautiful sunset overhead,” he recalled, adding that he reflected on his life, family and friends.

At one point, Mr Fransen saw a fin appear on the surface of the water. The shark approached him, but eventually “decided it wasn’t interested”.

“It would have been a good couple of metres so it could have easily dealt to me,” he said.

Thinking he would die at sea, the veteran fisherman regularly hoisted his harness into the air to drain water from it in the hope that it would be buoyant enough to keep his corpse afloat so that his children could cash in his life insurance policy.

He described hallucinating, often seeing boats where there were none. “I imagined plenty of them,” he said.