⚡️MINI: I Got Eaten Alive By A Shark (I Shouldn't Be Alive)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
My Heart podcasts, hear More kids podcasts, playlists and listen.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Live on the Free. I had a Paul, you shouldn't
be alive my friend. Why?

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Probably for many many reasons, but the main one that
sticks out is because I was eaten alive by a
ten foot bull shark in Sydney Harbor.

Speaker 4 (00:36):
Wooahly. WHOA way at work?

Speaker 2 (00:43):
So what was work for you back then, Paul?

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Back then I had transferred from Army Airborne into the
Navy Clearance diving branch.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Okay, So how many days have you been working in
the Navy before this happened.

Speaker 4 (00:57):
I've been there a few years, Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Okay, So had a few years in the Navy jumping out.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
Of planes and being dirty and smelly, and the Australian
bush got a little old. So I thought I'd go
for a dip in the ocean. And you know that's
how that's how things turn out.

Speaker 4 (01:12):
Okay, So decisions.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Let's go to that day. So why are you in
the water. What are you doing in the water on
this particular day, Paul.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Job of sleerance divers is quite broad and quite complex.
We do many many things, everything to do with the ocean, bombs, welding,
cutting all.

Speaker 4 (01:29):
Types of stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
And that day all I was doing was pretending to
be an attack swimmer, and the R and D Department
of the Military were testing unmanned video and sonar so
that they could see if it would work basically, and
they could take that equipment all around the world, put
it on a wharf, put it on a ship, turn
it on walk away, and the unmanned video would detect

(01:50):
attack swimmers, and the unmanned sonar would detect attack divers.
And so there was a three part testing. We were
going to have attack swimmers, then we're going to have
attack divers on scuba, and then we're going to have
attack divers on O two rebreathers, so no bubbles.

Speaker 4 (02:05):
We didn't really even get to phase two.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
I had my new guy Lockie in the water for
the first half an hour. And you know, this is Frary,
February eleventh, two thousand and nine, early morning. We've been up,
we've been at work since four thirty. It's about six
thirty now, overcast, early morning, murky water, Sydney Harbor. You
can see the Harbor Bridge, you can see Fort Dennison.

(02:28):
We're right alongside all the warships there, and I pulled
him out, pull the new guy out of the water
to give him a break, and I roll over the
side in my black wet suit pair of black fins,
and I'm just swimming from point A to point B
and I got his massive whack in my leg, and
I was looking in the other direction to make sure
I was headed towards the bow of one of the warships.
I thought, it's massive whack in my leg and I

(02:50):
was like, whoa, what's that? And so maybe the guys
in the boat got a little bit too close and
I turned around and a massive shark's head was attached
to me.

Speaker 4 (02:59):
Oh, and I was pretty I was pretty scared.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
So still it was it was on you. It was
it was latched onto your leg.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Yeah. Yeah. It grabbed me by the back of my
right hand string.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
But because I had my hand by my side, and
it also captured my right hand, and so I'm thinking.

Speaker 4 (03:19):
Okay, I've got to jab it in the eyeball to
get it off me.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
But I couldn't fight back because it had my hand,
and so I tried with my left hand.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
I couldn't reach the eyeball. I tried to push it
off me.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
Then I thought I got to punch it in the nose,
but by the time I got around to there, the
shark had decided I was food and just started thrashing
me and took me underwater. I was ripping out my
handstring and ripping off my hand and I'm just thinking
to myself, I'm so dead.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
I'm not going home today.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
I'm going to actually die right now.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
So okay, so you're getting threshed around. This shark is
pulling you underwater. I mean, like, how the hell.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Am I talking to you today, Paul, Like, how did
you eventually get away?

Speaker 4 (04:04):
It removed my handstring and removed my.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Hand because it wasn't attached to me anymore while it
was swimming away and swallowing and hopefully choking to death.
I've hopped back to the surface because my wet suit
made me buoyant, and I see my safety boat. I
got to get out of here before it comes back.
You know, I'm thinking bull shark swimming packs and they
can smell a drop of blood in ten thousand leagues

(04:29):
of it. I'm probably bleeding a lot right now. So
I'm like, I can see my safety boat. They're coming
towards me. So I start swimming towards them, but I
can see my hand is gone. Oh. So one of
the reasons that I'm still alive is because of the
great training that I had in the Defense Force, in
the Army and the Navy, and so I knew that

(04:51):
I needed to hit that wound above my heart to
try and stem the bleeding. So I'm swimming one hand
out of the water above my head, trying to stop
the bleeding, not knowing while I'm swimming back to my boat,
I've got an arterial bleed out of my leg, and
I'm swimming through.

Speaker 4 (05:05):
A pool of my own blood.

Speaker 5 (05:09):
You've got one in your hand and one in your leg.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I don't really remember blood coming out of my hand,
it probably was, but just the main arterial bleed in
my leg. The guys in the safety boat said that
when they got in close, the blood.

Speaker 4 (05:24):
Was so thick they could taste it in the air,
and by the.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Time by the time we got to the wharf, the
boat was an inch deep in my blood.

Speaker 4 (05:32):
One of the guys, actually the new guy again lucky.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
He had to stick his hand inside my leg and
pinch closed an artery with his feels. The surgeon said
that if he hadn't done that, I would have led
out and died within thirty seconds.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Is my sounding an obvious Christian Paul? But so, what's like?
Are you just in shock at this point?

Speaker 1 (05:53):
You're looking you don't have a hand, you've got it,
You're in an inch of your own blood. You've got
a guy sticking his hand in your leg, pinching.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
I was cracking jokes because I didn't want the guys
to feel so too stressed out.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Really, is that a joke? Please tell me you were
cracking those jokes.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
So they pulled me into the boat, and I just,
out of sheer relief of being not eaten anymore, I relaxed,
my eyes rolled back in my head, and I passed out.
My buddy Tomo springs into action. He pummels me in
the chest, thinking I'm going into cardiac arrests. So it's
got to stimulate my heart and wake me back up.
And so that works. I wake up and I look
over and my hand's gone freshly ripped off by a shark.

(06:33):
And I look up and Tomo's beating the crap out
of me, and I just think today sucks. And so
I looked at Tomo and I said, mate, and you
make sure someone looks after my motorbike.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
I don't think I'm going to be riding home this afternoon.
And he's like, shut up. I'm pretty much consciously this
whole thing.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
They get me to the wharf and that's when the
pain kicks in and I don't really remember. I think
it was kind of the thing like your brain cancels
out memories of the really bad trauma. Yeah, but there
are people that turned up to that site, medic from
the base and stuff that have PTSD from seeing me
like that. Wow. Yes, in absolute agony, waiting for the

(07:17):
paramedics to get there, no paying drugs, just barely holding on.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
I ended up having to take a path of my leg.
What the surgeon did was he cut off my foot
and then he sliced open the back of my leg
from the shark bite at my knee near the hamstring
all the way down to my ankle, feld all that
flesh off the bone and took out the tib fib,
took out my knee joint, cut the condiles off the

(07:44):
end of my femur, and then took all that calf
muscle and folded it into where my hamstring used to be. Wow,
the weird part about that when I get an itchy foot,
I've got to scratch my bomb.

Speaker 5 (07:56):
A very weird.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Hey, Paul, it is Shark Week.

Speaker 5 (08:05):
You guys can stream watch Shark Week from Sunday tenth
of seven on Discovery in HBO. Max, I'm really interested
to know your relationship with sharks.

Speaker 4 (08:14):
Now, yeah, it's vastly different. I used to hate sharks.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
My two biggest fears in life were sharks and public speaking,
and now I am a shark diving public speaker, which
just makes me think. You know, after my attack, I
never blamed the shark. It could have been any number
of dangerous things that I did in my job, in
my life. At least that way, I got a cool
story about it. And it was just a shark out

(08:41):
there doing sharky stuff. It wasn't its fault. And so,
you know, every time there was another shark byer attack
across the share, the media would come to me for
an opinion, well, why did the shark attack this? Like, apparently,
now that I've been bitten, I'm the shark expert, so
I wanted to give an educated opinion instead of just
an opinion, and make myself look stupid. Say, you know,

(09:01):
there's an old adage knowledge to spells fear. And so
the more I read and learned about sharks, the more
I realized how little we actually do have to fear
from them, but how much they have to fear from us.
And so, you know, everyone we love the underdog as
Ossie's and we've got all these dangerous animals. We do
take pride in them, but I feel like we've given

(09:22):
them a bit of a rough trot. We've got the
shark nets out there, we've got the drum lines out there.
Let's protect the sharks instead of killing them just because
they're sharks.

Speaker 5 (09:29):
I think that's a great point, mate.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
I mean, you were the first.

Speaker 5 (09:32):
You were the first shark digg in Sydney Harbor in
sixty years.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Or something like that. And if you think about the number.

Speaker 5 (09:38):
Of bull sharks that actually in Sydney Harbor and the
amount of people that actually go in there all the time,
it's pretty amazing.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
I finally that this hasn't been any tracking of them
in quite a long time. DPI hasn't been tracking them
for probably six or seven years. And I went and
shot a documentary last year with Breakout Productions and Colin
throw up about bull sharks in Sydney Harbor and we.

Speaker 4 (10:00):
We couldn't find any of them. I can see a
photo of shme and we're fishing.

Speaker 5 (10:06):
They didn't come there everywhere looking I'm looking at a
photo of you with a shark at the moment, underwater,
petting a ball shark, So it feels like you've really
it's quite incredible.

Speaker 4 (10:16):
Man.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
Did it take a while to get there though, Paul, like,
surely was there a period there after the attack where
we're surely even going in the water was too scary.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
Now going in the water was fine as a clearance diver,
you know, I was out of the water for three
months and that's a long time for a diver. So
as soon as my stitches and staples were out, I
was down at Bondi with two of my mates trying
to surf on one leg. Didn't didn't really go that well,
but you know, prattle around.

Speaker 4 (10:45):
In a circle a little bit.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
But it was just so nice to me back, and like,
I think it's one of the most the most special
things that we can have in this world is to
be absolutely submerged and contained by nature in the ocean
and it has such a healing properties as I was
just straight back down there. But the shark thing came
way later. I didn't I didn't want anything to do

(11:06):
with them. I just wanted to try and keep my
career in the Navy, and so all my energy was
focused on that. But sixty minutes and my buddy Pete
over and comes along and.

Speaker 4 (11:15):
A Paul, let's do a show.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
And so all of a sudden, he's got me in
the He's got me in the Sydney Aquarium diving with
the gray nurse sharks, and I was much more comfortable
looking at their tail than their face. And two years later,
I'm back of work, I'm in the Navy and along
comes my body Peter over, and he goes, hey, Paul,
we want to go to Fiji and we want to
get you to dive with bull sharks.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
And I'm like, oh, free, trick to fig with you, Pete.
No dramas.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
And then on the very last day of the very
last dive, I've been watching these guys see the sharks,
and I looked at the guy running and I was.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
Like, what do you reckon? Any goes go through it,
and so I grabbed the fish head and I held
it out a.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
Massive bullshark like Fiji's bullsharks, the biggest sharks I've ever
seen in my life, biggest bull sharks. And so the
sharks coming in and I'm ready to go, and I
let go of it a little bit early, and the
current takes it and washes it straight into the lap
of the cameraman.

Speaker 4 (12:10):
It's pretty good. One more go, one more go, one
more go, and so I do it again and I
seed the bullshark. I'm just like after that, I was addicted.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
I was like, you can hand feed bullsharks with by
hand and not with a hand.

Speaker 4 (12:25):
That's such a nice change.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
That's great, mate, It's such a good attitude. It's an
extraordinary story. It's been such a treat mate.

Speaker 4 (12:33):
In your Paul, are you two guys?

Speaker 5 (12:36):
Thanks so much, Paul. That was absolutely, absolutely fascinating. As
I was saying. You can stream watch Shark Week Sunday,
tenth of August seven thirty on Discovery.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
And HBO Max Pull Together.

Speaker 5 (12:47):
Thanks for joining us here on Willim Woddy

Speaker 4 (12:50):
My pleasure fellows, have a good one.