A seven gill shark is believed to be what bit Grant. Photo: Shutterstock
Remember when Shaun Harrington of the Mad Huey’s gave that shark a tickle with a bird cage a few weeks ago? This is much better than that.
A shark bit James Grant, a New Zealand man, while he was spearfishing. Instead of screaming, wetting himself, and turning into a babbling, incoherent mess, he stabbed the shark with his dive-knife, calmly sewed himself up, and proceeded to the pub for a beer.
James Grant, shark stabber, self-stitcher, beer drinker, pig hunter. Photo: Fairfax NZ/SMH.com
Grant thinks it was a seven-gill shark that bit his leg in the murky water near Colac Bay on the South Island. Initially, he told Radio New Zealand, he thought it was a friend playing a trick on him.
“I looked behind to see who it was and got a bit of a shock,” he said. Once he realized it wasn’t a friend, but a shark instead, he turned and stabbed it.
“I thought, ‘Bugger,’ now I have to get this thing off my leg.”
While he’s not sure exactly how much damage he did with his knife, it was enough to get the shark to let go. After making it back to shore, he pulled off his 7 mm wetsuit and saw the bites – which would probably have been much worse without the thickness of the suit.
Grant tried to tell his friends who were still in the water, but they didn’t believe him. “I thought, there’s no way he has been bitten,” Mackley Lindsay said to the Sydney Morning Herald. “He’s got to be taking the piss.”
While his friends continued fishing, Grant stitched his wounds together with a needle and thread from a first aid kit he carried for his pig-hunting dogs. When his friends got out of the water, they went to the Colac Bay Tavern, where he was given a bandage, not because he was bitten by a shark, but because he was getting blood on the floor.
Afterwards, the stitching was finished up at the local hospital. Grant said he’ll be back in the water as soon as the stitches are out.
