Shark surprises Aussie with leap into boat

In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway’s protagonist battles for three days to pull in his prized catch. For Terry Selwood, it came a little more suddenly.

Selwood, 73, was less than a mile offshore near the town of Evans Head, New South Wales, in Australia when a great white shark jumped into his boat.

He had been fishing for snapper with hand lines on a calm sea when the far bigger catch appeared without warning.

“I just caught a blur coming in the corner of me eye,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “Just out of instinct I threw my right arm up, and this thing hit me in the forearm and spun me around and knocked me off my feet, and I fell on the floor on my hands and knees.”

“I looked over and said, ‘Oh, a bloody shark,’” he added.

Selwood thought the shark had broken his arm, but it turned out that he had instead suffered a severe abrasion from its skin. He wasn’t bitten, though.

He jumped up onto the side of his 15-foot-long boat to prevent the shark from causing him further harm.

“I didn’t want to give it a chance to look in my eye,” he told ABC. “I wanted to get on top of the gunwale because it was thrashing around madly.”

Selwood radioed the Marine Rescue Unit, who he said initially did not believe his tale. But after the team reached Selwood and saw his boat, the shark and the state of his injuries, they brought him to a hospital, then returned for the boat and recovered the deceased shark.

Asked whether his story was a fish tale, and whether perhaps he had caught the shark and then pulled it into his boat, Selwood told ABC that doing so would have been impossible with such a giant. The shark weighed 440 pounds and was nearly 9 feet long.

“That’s too big for me to pull in on a hand line,” he said.

Encounters between sharks and humans are a long-standing issue in Australia, with 14 people killed since the beginning of 2012. The country has experimented with a range of measures to reduce attacks, including culls, shark-detecting sonar and electromagnetic devices to repel the animals.

This latest story has received international attention, but Selwood says he is unfazed and simply wants to get back out on the water.

“Still just a mundane story as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

Lance Fountain via AP The great white shark that jumped into Terry Selwood’s boat was nearly 9 feet long. Selwood said his arm was hit by the airborne shark as it landed.