A scuba diver needed 20 stitches
but escaped with his life after a
head-on encounter with a great
white shark in 120 feet of water
near Albany in Western Australia
on November 10.
Keith Hulkes said the shark surprised him by taking his
three-foot-long bright yellow scooter in its jaws. The shark’s teeth gashed
his arm as it passed.
“There was this massive bump. I thought it was a seal or a dolphin,” the
42-year-old Hulkes said. “Then I saw it; it was almost as big as a school bus.”
When the great white started swimming back toward him, Hulkes
drove the scooter into the shark’s nose, then made for the surface. His
haste to get out of the water created the danger of decompression sickness,
so his diving partner, who was waiting in the boat, took him to another
location, where he spent 45 minutes in the water decompressing properly.
“I would have preferred the bends to getting back in the water in the
same spot as the shark,” Hulkes said.
On November 26, on the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast, a
spearfisherman free-diving off the charter vessel Kanimbla failed to
surface from a dive at Saumerez Reef, 180 nautical miles northeast of
Gladstone. Sharks are suspected.