A MAN WHO was bitten by a shark on board a boat off the coast of Waterford on Tuesday has said he did not think he would make it to shore alive.<\/p>\n
Sebastian Achim, a fishing enthusiast from Romania, said that he had been tagging blue sharks on board the boat for research purposes when he and his companions pulled one on board.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, we managed to take out the hook easily,\u201d he told RT\u00c9.<\/p>\n
\u201cI stayed actually a safe distance. I was like at least half a meter away from his tail, and I was just admiring, you know, the fish itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it just jumped in a millisecond. He just jumped and just grabbed into my calf.<\/p>\n
\u201cI cannot say if it\u2019s a deliberate attack, or it\u2019s not a deliberate attack. Anyway, the fish is in the right.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe took it out of the water. The fish was in his survival instinct. And we just threw him back in the water. We didn\u2019t manage to tag him. We just didn\u2019t want the fish to be more panicked than that, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Achim said that, at first, they didn\u2019t realise what had happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, when he saw how bad the injury was, he grabbed a rope and tied it round his leg to stem the bleeding.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said his crewmates called the emergency services for help when they saw how bad the injury was.<\/p>\n
After 10 minutes or so, Achim lost consciousness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was still trying somehow to stop my bleeding, and I just passed out. I was just bleeding so much, constantly.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was thinking that the guys were just going to drive to the shore, and it was like three hours away.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, yeah, I was just thinking that I\u2019m not going to make it. But then I woke up again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI passed out from the blood loss, and I woke up when the helicopter was above the boat.\u201d<\/p>\n
He does not think he would have made it back to shore alive if it were not for the helicopter.<\/p>\n
Achim said he felt no pain until he got to the hospital, after the adrenaline had worn off.<\/p>\n
While in the hospital, he said he was more concerned for his loved ones than his own well-being.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just thinking about my girlfriend, trying to hold myself strong so I don\u2019t scare the crew as well, you know.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was trying to keep myself awake so I don\u2019t make anybody panic as well, because it doesn\u2019t matter the gravity of the problem, as it matters for me that the people around don\u2019t suffer because of my accident, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Achim will need reconstructive surgery to mend his leg.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey told me that they need to have a look what they need to rebuild. I\u2019m missing some tissue. Some of the tissue, the shark managed to keep with him.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome skin and some tissue he managed to bite, and he kept the bite.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr Nicholas Payne, a marine biologist and associate professor at the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, said that incidents like these are \u201cvery uncommon\u201d but that there are a lot of blue sharks in Irish waters around this time of year.<\/p>\n
While blue sharks are not aggressive, Payne said they are a relatively common creature for anglers to encounter and that people should be \u201cvery careful\u201d if they pull one up onto a boat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re a big animal with big teeth and you need to be very, very careful how you handle them and you also need to have experience in doing it, otherwise it can be a potentially dangerous situation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A MAN WHO was bitten by a shark on board a boat off the coast of Waterford on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[213408,170144,9,10,1877,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,148738,7,8,5049],"class_list":["post-634751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-ardmore","tag-blue-shark","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-cork","tag-eire","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-shark-bite","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-waterford"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117087508291878410","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}