A surfer has made a lucky escape after punching a great white shark in the head while alone and more than 100 metres from the shore.
Jack Frost was sitting on his board at at a break known as Boat Ramps in the Margaret River region, about three hours south of Perth, when the attack occurred last week.
In an interview with Swellnet, Mr Frost said the shark launched at him from beneath his surfboard.
“I’m thinking, ‘What the f*** was that?” Mr Frost, originally from Ballina in NSW, said.
The surfer said he grappled with the shark, which lay across him with his pectoral fin wedged against his groin, before he “started punching its head a few times”.
“That doesn’t really do much; it didn’t even flinch. But then I started punching it in the side in its gills and I must have got one punch in where it’s touch sensitive and it just f***ing shot down into the depths.”
Boat Ramps is a reef break located about three hundred metres from the shoreline of Gnarabup beach.
Frost, 24, had a long paddle back to the shoreline with a damaged board and a gushing wound on his leg.
“The only thought was, ‘F***, I need to get out of here.’”
“I was just saying to myself, ‘You‘re going to be all right. You’re going to survive.’ Just doing what I could to try and keep calm.”
“I knew that if I got really tired my heart was going to run quicker, and if I did have a good cut then I was probably going to lose a lot of blood.”
“So I was just trying to keep myself pretty calm but also head down, arse up on the way in.”
When he got the shoreline, an off-duty nurse at a nearby cafe along with some other good Samaritans drove Frost to Margaret River Hospital.
The wound, halfway across his thigh, has been stitched up and Frost is expected to make a full recovery.
The south west region of WA is well known for surfing, but it is also home to a large shark population.
Since 2000, there have been 20 fatal shark attacks in the state, five of which have occurred in the state’s south west.