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Five weeks after being bitten by a shark, an Invercargill teen on Saturday dived with her attacker’s larger cousins – the great white.

Lydia Ward, 14, gained international media attention last month when she fought off a shark – believed to be a broadnose sevengill shark – with her body-board after it latched on to her right thigh at Oreti Beach.

On Saturday, Lydia again came face to face with a predator at the top of the ocean’s food chain – albeit from the safety of a 2m-high dive cage.

Lydia, her father Tim and brother Alex, 10, flew from Invercargill to Stewart Island early on Saturday to be treated to an all-expenses-paid expedition courtesy of shark-dive operation Great White Southern Dive.

Lydia yesterday said a 3m-long great white had come within 1m of her soon after she got in the cage.

She said she didn’t have any flashbacks of the Oreti Beach shark attack, but had been a bit wary of the great white.

“I was just staring at it … and it looked like it was staring right at me. It had a lot of scars all over it.”

The experience had been “really cool”, Lydia said.

Mr Ward said his daughter had “hesitated very slightly” before getting into the cage, but she was fine once inside.

Though she had not swum at Oreti Beach since being attacked, Lydia believed she would be able to get back into the water, adding she had been coping just fine.

Her father agreed: “From the day after (the shark attack), when she realised she was at the wrong place at the wrong time and there was no man-eater cruising around looking for lunch, she was quite composed,” Mr Ward said.

Great White Southern Dive operator Peter Scott said he had offered the cage experience after seeing how much attention Lydia’s story had attracted.

“I didn’t want people getting the wrong impression (of sharks),” he said. “There can’t have been much else happening in the world.”

Two or three great whites had been in the water near the cage throughout the day-long expedition for the Ward family, Mr Scott said.

“They just come – they’re curious.”

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The not-so-good news for swimmers: shark attacks worldwide rose marginally in 2009. But the brighter news for those splashing into American waters is that attacks off U.S. shores plummeted more than 30 percent.

In 2009, there were 61 total shark attacks worldwide, five of them fatal. That’s up slightly from 60 attacks and four deaths in 2008.

“The big story is that the number of attacks in the United States dropped dramatically from 41 in 2008 to 28 in 2009,” he said George Burgess Director of the University of Florida Program for Shark Research and the annual report’s author.

More than half the attacks involved surfers, though the majority are relatively minor and the overall chances of being killed by a shark attack are “infinitesimal,” according to Burgess. In fact, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a person is nearly 20 times more likely to be killed by lightning.

In 2009, there were 61 total shark attacks, five of them fatal, including a 38 year old kiteboarder killed off the Florida coast last month, according to the University of Florida’s annual Shark Attack Report.

(Getty Images)

More easily quantifiable, is the most dangerous place to swim. Florida’s Volusia county, with eight shark attacks in 2009. Volusia’s strip of coastline was the site of 13 percent of all the shark attacks last year, reinforcing its dubious title of shark-bite capital of the world.

But the deadliest place to surf or swim was South Africa’s coast, where white sharks congregate in cooler waters and surfers go to hunt big waves. According to the Shark Attack Report, the six attacks off the roughly 1,500 miles of South African coastline last year included four of the five fatalities worldwide.

Volusia County, by contrast, saw no fatalities resulting from its eight attacks.

While shark attacks have risen steadily over the past century — in lockstep with world’s population growth, Burgess noted — the fatality rate has steadily declined, from about 60 percent at the turn of the 20th century to about 7 percent today.

Burgess credits vastly improved trauma care, the increasing professionalism of lifeguards and greater public awareness, for the change.

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A 19-YEAR-OLD surfer suffered multiple lacerations on his right leg yesterday when he was bitten by a shark at Yellow Sands Point along the east coast.

Michal du Plessis and four friends were surfing near the Kwelera River Mouth when the shark bit him, injuring his upper thigh and just below the right knee.

Logan Philpott, one of the group surfing with Du Plessis, said they had been in the water for 1½ hours when he heard his friend shout: “Shark! Shark!”.

“I thought he was joking at first, but then everyone else started shouting.

“When I looked, I saw this thing, a tail and a fin, shaking itself against my friend,” he said.

Philpott said Du Plessis was fighting it off, trying to get away from it. He paddled towards his friend and the shark disappeared.

Du Plessis got back onto his surfboard and caught a wave back to shore along with his four friends.

“Then there was blood, a lot of it, covering the rocks.

“So we tied a (surf board) leash around his leg to stop it while others ran to get a car,” Philpott said.

Du Plessis’s friends put him into the back of a van and they sped off to a Crossways Pharmacy, where he was treated and bandaged and then taken to hospital by ambulance.

“When he arrived here he was in a lot of pain and had very deep wounds,” the pharmacy manager said.

He said they had given him medication to ease the pain, bandaged his wounds and handed him over to the Aldersons Ambulance paramedics who arrived soon thereafter.

Du Plessis’ wounds were very deep and it appeared he had been bitten to the bone, Aldersons Ambulance operations manager Alan Leicester said.

“We had to stabilise him and deal with the pain and we also gave him fluids since he had lost a lot of blood.”

The teenager was then rushed to Life St Dominic’s Hospital in East London. Leicester said Du Plessis would be going for X-rays to determine whether there was any damage to the bone.

Du Plessis was also expected to undergo surgery for his wounds.

“I have seen sharks close, but seeing it nibble at my friend was very scary,” Philpott said.

It was not clear what kind of shark had bitten him. — Daily Dispatch

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A woman savaged by a shark in the Whitsundays yestereday had made a sea change from Sydney to Airlie Beach with her husband only months ago.

The 60-year-old woman was snorkelling only 300 metres off the coastline near Dent Island with her husband and five other people when she was dragged under the water by the two-metre shark.

An RACQ-CQ rescue helicopter spokesman said the woman, suffering severe lacerations to her thigh and buttocks, was transported to Hamilton Island and treated by a local medical team before being airlifted to Mackay Base Hospital, where she is now listed as being in a stable condition.

“She lost several litres of blood and is undergoing emergency surgery,” the spokesman said.

He said the woman and her husband had moved to Airlie Beach only a couple of months ago and were on holiday, staying at the exclusive Paradise Bay Resort at Long Island.

She told Channel 7 today she was determined to live during the attack and punched the shark on the nose.

“I thought, this shark is not going to get the better of me,” she said.

“I started punching it on the nose, punching, punching, punching, and then it got me under the water – not much – because I started kicking it on its neck.”

“I came back up again and I punched him in the nose, punching, punching, punching.”

The CQ spokesman said an attack of this nature was “extremely unusual”.

“There hasn’t been an attack in this region for a very, very long time. Although there are sharks in the area, they’re normally well fed and no problem.

“I’d say this was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

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STUART, Fla. —  Employees of a Stuart hospital are being investigated for photos taken of a patient being treated for a shark bite who later died.

In a statement released Friday, officials said Martin Memorial Health Systems has launched an internal investigation regarding photos taken while Stephen Schafer was being treated in the emergency center on Feb. 3. The Stuart man was later pronounced dead.

Hospital spokesman Miguel Coty said “it appears photographs were taken of the patient’s injuries.” The investigation will focus on whether employees e-mailed those photos to other people.

The investigation was launched immediately after the hospital learned that employees may have violated patient privacy laws.

Coty said Schafer

s family was notified of the investigation.

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BRISBANE, Australia — A 60-year-old woman is in serious condition after being bitten by a shark off northeastern Australia and losing several pints (liters) of blood.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Community Services says the woman has severe lacerations to her buttocks from the Saturday afternoon attack.

She was being transported by dive boat from Dent Island in the Whitsunday Islands of Queensland state to the Australia mainland where she will be airlifted to a hospital, the spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to the media.

No other information was immediately available.

It is the second shark attack in Australia this week. On Thursday, a man was bitten in the leg at a Sydney beach and was treated for minor injuries.

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Authorities are investigating a surfer’s claim that he was attacked by a shark on Sydney’s Northern Beaches this morning.

Paul Welsh, 46, told a newspaper he had to cling to a rock to fight off a shark that he said had latched itself onto his leg.

Mr Welsh allegedly emerged from the water with a gash to his left leg around 8:00am (AEDT) at the Mona Vale Basin.

A New South Wales Health spokesman says the man had already sold his story to Channel Nine News by the time his wife had driven him to hospital.

He says doctors at Mona Vale Hospital found a fragment of tooth in Mr Welsh’s leg and released him around midday.

An expert from the Primary Industries Department is due to examine the fragment this afternoon.

The beach remains closed and a helicopter was sent to the area to look for the alleged shark, but there was no sign of it.

NSW Primary Industries Minister Steve Whan says efforts are being made to confirm the surfer’s story.

“We do need to confirm and see what type of shark it was or confirm that a shark was actually involved in the attack and if so, what type of shark it was,” he said.

“And that gives us a better opportunity to identify what might be around.”

The Manly Daily newspaper reported that it spoke to Mr Welsh minutes after the incident.

“I was pushing my son onto waves and it just belted me from behind,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

“I grabbed on to the pinnacle of a rock and held on as it tried to drag me out… and I won.”

Mr Welsh is now refusing to speak to any media except Channel Nine.

Police are helping the Primary Industries Department with its investigation. They initially told the media the man had been attacked by a four-foot shark.

Shark spotter Michael Brown earlier told the ABC he was in the water with his 13-year-old son when he saw “a whole lot of thrashing”.

“It’s launched straight up into him, knocked him out of the water and then latched onto his leg, and luckily, he had a chance to grab onto a rock and the shark’s actually thrashing, trying to drag him back into the water,” he said.

“He’s managed to release himself from the shark and crawl up onto the rocks and just had a big bite mark in his leg and blood just streaming out of it.”

Mr Brown said he believed the animal was a two-metre-long great white shark.

As the director of SurfWatch Australia, an organisation that patrols for sharks and charges people for helicopter joyrides, Mr Brown has been agitating against the State Government for greater protections against sharks.

After three attacks in Sydney last year, he accused the Government of ignoring an email that had warned of a sharp increase in shark numbers.

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…Like “getting caught in a washer machine with a shark.” Great quote. So, both a rip current and a shark at the same time. That’s just bad luck.

DEAN Everson was back surfing his favourite break yesterday, just days after using his bodyboard to fight off what he believes was a 2.5 metre white pointer shark at Yamba’s Turners Beach.

Under overcast skies, the 18-year-old Yamba man was taking advantage of big swells in dirty water at the popular surfing beach on Saturday afternoon and was about 20 metres from the rocks when he got the shock of his life.

“The shark threw itself out of the wave at me,” Dean said.

“I was in shock.”

He said the potential killer was so close he got a good view of its teeth.

“All I could think to do was throw the board at it,” he said yesterday.

The board made contact with the shark and probably distracted it, but the ordeal was not over.

Dean was trying desperately to swim back to shore and was struggling against the waves, getting caught in the same rip that almost claimed the life of a young boy a few days earlier.

“It was like being in a washing machine with an eight foot shark,” he said.

It took him about 10 minutes to get out of the water and onto the rocks.

“The set was big and I was probably under water for about 45 seconds at one time,” Dean said.

“The waves kept coming and I was being pulled by the rip and pushed by the waves.

“I was ready for it. I thought I was done for.

“I yelled at the other surfers to let them know.”

When he finally scrambled onto the rocks, horrified onlookers told Dean he was lucky to be alive.

“One guy said that he had been watching the shark move around and he thought it was following me,” he said.

With shaking hands and an amazing story to tell, Dean immediately warned others of the threat.

“I went to see Shane Henwood at the Yamba Backpackers straight after,” he said.

“I wanted to warn them not to go out.”

Dean, the son of a fourth generation professional fisherman with 35 years’ experience, works at the Yamba Fish Market and also the fish co-op in Maclean.

He said the shape of the shark’s tail indicated it was a white pointer.

“The tail is large and has a distinct shape … it gives it away,” he said.

When Dean told his parents, he said his mum was ‘pretty freaked’.

His father, Steve Everson, said Dean came home fairly shaken, but calmed down after a while.

“There’s no shortage of sharks in the area,” Steve said.

“There are probably many more near misses that we don’t hear about.

“I’m just happy everything has turned out all right.”

For most people, a close encounter of this kind would deter them from the water, probably for good.

But Dean felt he needed to get back into the surf, which he did on Monday and again yesterday at the same location.

“He left it for a day or so, but you’ve got to get over these things,” Steve said.

“As a parent you are always worried about your kid, but you can’t stop them from doing what they love.

“It’s just one of those things. It’s a life experience he will never forget.”

Allan Bodycote, a commercial fisherman with more than 30 years’ experience, catches sharks in the estuary and the ocean for a living.

“There are plenty of sharks out there,” he said.

“The place is full of sharks. It’s their territory.

“People shouldn’t worry about it. You have more chance of being hit by a bus than being taken by a shark. We are not their natural food.”

He said last year was a record year for shark catches locally and there were more and more reports from around the world.

Mr Bodycote says bronze whalers and bull sharks are the most common large fish he catches, and that while he hadn’t seen a white pointer in the area, they were around.

“They have a distinctive shaped, fin, colour, eye and head.”

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It appears the experts have backed off the theory that he was killed by a number of sharks.

STUART — A shark attack that killed a kiteboarder on Wednesday was the rarest and most frightening kind of strike, a case of a powerful 9-foot predator likely meaning to kill and eat its human prey, a leading shark expert said Friday.

“There’s a big difference between the normal hit-and-run bites that we see on the coast of Florida and what we’re unfortunately experiencing here this week,” said George Burgess, keeper of the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File. “This thing here was closer to our preconception about what a shark attack is.”

That preconception, stoked by books and movies, doesn’t hold for the vast majority of shark bites, which occur when sharks snap at humans while going after fish. But in rare instances, a shark will come across a human bobbing in the waves and attack with intent.

That’s what happened to Stephen Schafer, 38, in the water south of Stuart Beach on Wednesday, Burgess said.

“This was the real thing,” Burgess said. “This was a bigger shark apparently seeing a human as an appropriately sized item worth pursuing.”

About 4:15 p.m., Schafer was a quarter-mile offshore when at least one large shark, probably a bull or tiger, attacked and mortally wounded him, according to Burgess and autopsy results. The Stuart man died of blood loss despite a Martin County lifeguard’s efforts to save him, said Dr. Linda O’Neil, who examined Schafer’s body Thursday night.

O’Neil said Schafer was bitten twice, once on the buttocks and once on the right thigh. She said the bites, which were 9 to 10 inches in diameter, likely came from the same shark.

Schafer had a set of puncture wounds on each buttock, “like it bit across his bottom,” O’Neil said. “The upper jaw got one side and the lower jaw got the other side.”

The shark delivered a fatal, tearing bite to Schafer’s right thigh, a wound so deep that one tooth struck his femur, O’Neil said.

“The femoral artery was intact but all the smaller arteries that lead to the femoral in the region of the right thigh were severed,” O’Neil said, which led Schafer to bleed out while lifeguard Daniel Lund, 46, fought wind and waves to drag him to safety.

Schafer probably lost more than 2.5 liters of blood, or half the blood in his body, O’Neil said.

The doctor said Schafer also had a bite wound to his right hand. He probably got it trying to fend off the shark as it bit his thigh, she said.

The autopsy couldn’t determine how long Schafer had been bleeding before he was dragged in, but O’Neil said it likely was a matter of minutes before the lifeguard got to him.

Burgess also examined Schafer’s body Thursday night and agreed with O’Neil’s findings. He said the size of the bite marks and the manner of attack indicated the shark likely was 8 or 9 feet long.

Bull and tiger sharks roam the Florida coast year-round. A bull shark was responsible for the state’s last fatal attack in 2005 in the Panhandle, which Burgess said was “very similar” to Wednesday’s incident.

This was the first fatal shark attack ever recorded in Martin County.

Some scientists have theorized that bull sharks are more aggressive because their bodies produce more testosterone, a hypothesis yet to be proven.

About four fatal shark attacks are recorded worldwide each year.

As Burgess studied Wednesday’s attack, he offered these words of warning to surfers and swimmers: “To reduce risks, it’s recommended people stick together in groups and stay close to shore.”

Teague Taylor, a close friend of Schafer’s, said Schafer always stressed to him the importance of the buddy system.

“I grew up watching way too much Jaws,” Taylor said. “If there’s anybody who’s hesitant or, for lack of a better word, scared, it’s me.”

But, he added, he and other surfers were determined to get back in the water.

“It’ll be good for all of us,” he said. “We all need to get back out there. The more we prolong it, the more that fear kind of sets in .”

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My money’s on Bull Sharks. Those things are scary.

Related Stories

• Shark attack: Lifeguard hailed as a hero in rescue attempt
• Florida shark attack a Great White?

Scientists have not yet conclusively identified the species of shark responsible for a fatal attack on a kite surfer off a Stuart, Fla., beach, but they have ruled out any involvement by a great white shark.

Some media reports speculated that a group of white sharks might have attacked the kiteboarder on Wednesday. Florida-based shark experts say the reports were based on an apparent misquote and media hype.

“Our investigation definitively indicates it was not a great white shark,” George Burgess, director of shark research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said on Friday.

Instead, he said, an examination of the victim’s wounds suggests that the attacking shark was eight to nine feet long and was more than likely a bull shark or tiger shark.

He said that although the lifeguard who attempted to rescue the kiteboarder saw several sharks nearby, only one shark bit the man. According to officials, there was a very deep and fatal bite to his thigh, a second bite to his buttocks, and a defensive wound to his hand.

Most shark attacks are hit-and-run

Most Florida shark bites are quick nips, like a hit-and-run, experts say. This attack was different.

“The attacking shark really meant business. This was not likely to be a mistaken-identity situation,” Mr. Burgess said. “This was a shark that was attacking with some real meaning.”

Although Burgess was able to narrow the range of potential species involved in the attack, officials have made arrangements to consult a second shark-bite expert to help solve the mystery.

Grant Gilbert, a research scientist in Vero Beach, says he will meet on Monday with the Martin County medical examiner to try to match the victim’s wounds with an extensive inventory of shark jaws. It is a kind of forensic shark-bite version of “CSI.”

“Sharks can be identified by their dentition [teeth],” he says.

A tiger shark has saw-edged teeth on both its upper and lower jaws. In contrast, a bull shark has pointed teeth on its lower jaw and triangular, serrated teeth on the upper jaw.

The pointed teeth are designed to hold prey, while the upper teeth are built for cutting. According to Gilbert, puncture wounds produced by the lower jaw would be present in a bite from a bull shark, but not from a tiger shark.

Forensic evidence focuses on bite marks

But that may not end the inquiry, he says. Two other sharks, the dusky shark and the silky shark, share similar jaw configurations with the bull shark. At that point, Gilbert says, the sharks may be differentiated by the number of teeth in the upper and lower jaws. Much depends on the evidence from the bites, he says.

In 1998, a 9-year-old boy was killed by a shark near Vero Beach. Gilbert worked on that case as well. The two main suspects, he said, were a bull shark and a tiger shark.

The bite characteristics allowed officials to rule out the bull shark. They concluded the attack was caused by a tiger shark.

Tiger sharks prey on sea turtles, and their jaws are evolved to the task, Gilbert said. “It was a young tiger shark, and it thought it had a sea turtle,” he said, of the Vero Beach attack 12 years ago.

Migrating sharks not probably involved

Televised reports about the Stuart shark attack have included stock footage of sharks migrating up Florida’s east coast, Gilbert says. But those migrating sharks, the research scientist says, are probably too small and unlikely to be involved in an attack like the one Wednesday.

Gilbert says he suspects that the kite surfer plunged into the water at exactly the worst place. “It is possible that he actually fell on the shark,” he said. “If there were a number of sharks out there, it could be that he just fell at the wrong spot at the wrong time.” The researcher added, “We’ll never know.”

There have only been 28 recorded shark bites in Martin County since 1882, says Mark Perry, director of the Florida Oceanographic Society in Stuart. This week’s attack was the first fatality in the county.

The victim, Stephen Schafer, was well known in Stuart, said Mr. Perry, whose office is across the street from Stuart Beach, where the attack took place.

A memorial ceremony is set for Saturday at Stuart Beach, where Mr. Schafer’s friends will hold a barbecue and a “paddle out,” in which surfers paddle offshore and form a large circle in remembrance.