Frenchman fights off crocodile in Australia

SYDNEY: A French deckhand yesterday admitted he was lucky to be alive after escaping with bite wounds when a crocodile latched onto his head in northern Australia.

Yoann Galeran, 29, had swum out from shore to retrieve a moored dinghy after dark at Nhulunbuy on Sunday when the two-metre saltwater croc attacked, grabbing him by the head and rolling him in the water.

“I just feel that I’ve been lucky and I just think if it was a bigger crocodile, I maybe wouldn’t have any head,” he told ABC radio.

“I was swimming, and maybe four or five metres from the boat, I just feel like rocks hitting on my head and something strong and I just realise (it was) a croc,” he added.

“I just had the feeling that if I want to fight for my life, I just need to move all my body as much as I can.

“He just hit me on the top, on the left side, and on top of my neck and tried to push me down in the water. I punched him anywhere.”

After fighting off the beast, he managed to scramble to safety aboard the dinghy and make it to shore where he was rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment to bite marks to his head, neck and shoulders.

A Northern Territory police spokeswoman said: “So very lucky that he managed to swim away. It could have been a lot more dire, the outcome.”

Saltwater crocodiles, which can grow up to seven metres long and weigh more than a tonne, are a common feature of Australia’s tropical north.

They have been protected since the 1970s and their numbers have increased steadily since, along with the number of human encounters. — AFP