Circled by a 13ft miracle escape
him,” Mr McLean said. “He would have been through a fair state of panic and that was evident in his voice when he was talking on the radio.”
Fellow lifesaver Jacob Thomson said they had difficulty finding him. “He was quite a significant distance out to sea. I was on the headland with some binoculars and directed our jet skis as best we could.” A spokesman for Surf Life Saving Queensland praised its members for performing “an amazing and dramatic rescue”. Mr Roberts told The Courier Mail that conditions had been relatively calm and there was “zero warning” when the attack happened at 6.30am.
It follows a series of attacks at different locations. On Sunday, champion bodyboarder Noah Symmans fought off a shark that bit him as he surfed at Mandurah, south of Perth in Western Australia. Earlier this month, Melbourne urologist Daniel Christidis, 33, died after being mauled at Cid Harbour, Whitsunday Island, on a yachting holiday.
It was the third serious attack at the beauty spot off the Queensland coast in two months. Justine Barwick, 46, and Hannah Papps, 12, suffered serious injuries within 24 hours of each other.
After the attack on Mr Christidis one Queensland MP called for a shark cull.
“I’ve had local fishos telling me the sharks are in plague proportion. They are an apex predator and we should thin them out,” he said. But state fisheries minister Mark Furner said: “That’s way over the top. There’s no science or reason behind that.”