MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A 3.5-meter (11-foot) shark critically injured a woman off a popular Sydney beach on Saturday, and she managed to grab onto a lifeguard’s paddleboard before they made it to shore.The 35-year-old suffered serious leg and arm injuries in the attack at 11:15 a.m. off Coogee Beach, a police statement said.“I saw the shark come out of the water and just the size of it shocked me,” lifeguard Charlie Verco told Sydney’s The Sunday Telegraph newspaper. He was in the area on his 5.5-meter (18-foot) paddleboard and was the first rescuer to the scene.“I kept paddling towards her and the shark took her underwater and I was going, ‘What do I do now?’ A couple of seconds later, she popped up again,” Verco said.He said the woman was too weak to climb onto the board, but he managed to grab her by an arm and they headed toward the beach. Other bystanders reached the pair and helped them back to shore.
An off-duty hospital doctor Ian Ferguson was spending the morning at the beach with his young family when he said he heard screaming and saw a “big cloud of blood in the water.”
Ferguson and others applied tourniquets to her wounds after she reached the beach. She had a 30-centimeter (12-inch) wide bite on her thigh, the flesh had been removed and bone was exposed, Ferguson told the newspaper. She had a similar wound to her arm, he said.The victim was taken to a rugby field near the beach, from where she was flown by helicopter to a hospital. Police described her condition as critical.
