Girls’ shark encounter
Did it take a bite?
Damian Rowe
A 13-year-old girl believed to be bitten by a shark at Oreti Beach continued to surf for an hour before realising there was blood coming from her leg.
Glen Burdon, his daughter Ella and her friend Jordan King were surfing at the beach about 8.30pm on Thursday night when King felt something nibbling on the leg rope of her surfboard.
King said she it incident made her squeal and she jumped back onto her surfboard in fright. ‘‘I was kinda in shock after that.’’
Ella said her friend went blue in the face and they saw a tail fin about half a metre long, from what they believed was a shark, emerge from the water before it swam away. The trio paddled back to the shallow water to assess the situation and after not noticing any blood King continued to surf for another hour.
It was only when she got out of the water she noticed there was blood coming out of the wetsuit and the bite, King said.
King was not in pain until an hour after she got out of the water, she said. ‘‘It didn’t really feel like anything.’’
If she was not protected by the leash, the injury could have been worse, Glen said.
Glen’s wife, Belinda, was an emergency department nurse and was able to treat the shark bite without having to take King to a medical centre, he said.
Belinda had been practising her stitches at home with pork chops and there was a running joke that she now had a real person to practice on, Glen said.
After seeing the tail fin of the shark and assessing the teeth marks, Glen believed it was a broadnose sevengill shark.
Department of Conservation shark expert Clinton Duffy said it was common for sharks to be found close to shore in Southland, as elsewhere, at this time of year.
The most common large sharks found around the Otago and Southland coast, particularly in shallow water, were broadnose sevengill sharks, Duffy said.
Common thresher sharks and basking sharks were sometimes spotted in this area but neither were likely to bite a person, he said.
Broadnose sevengills were sometimes called ‘‘thrasher’’ or ‘‘thresher sharks’’ in the South Island but they were only distantly related to the common thresher shark, he said.