On September 14, Mel Ismail paddled out at Glenfield Beach on the west coast of Australia. The firefighter expected just another fun session, but instead, he found himself in the jaws of a shark. Now, for the first time, he’s spoken out about the attack that cost him his leg.
According to his interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Ismail was sitting out the back waiting for a wave. A pod of dolphins swam close by as he waited. Then, out of nowhere, he felt something hit his leg.
“I thought I got hit by a dolphin, initially,” Ismail recounted. “And suddenly — bang — something grabbed me and dragged me down into the water. And I knew it was a shark.”
Fighting down panic, Ismail knew he had to do something, and do it quickly.
“I saw its eye,” he remembered. “A big black eye, but it was winking back at me. I was trying to get my fingers in its eye and just pushing its eye as I was being dragged.”
Although the species of shark that attacked Ismail isn’t known for certain, many sharks — great whites included — roll their eyes back when biting. That exposes a harder bit of cartilage that protects the eye itself. That’s likely what Ismail mistook for blinking, since most sharks don’t have real eyelids.
When the shark let him go, Ismail knew he was in a bad way. Bleeding profusely, he managed to catch a wave that got him a bit closer to shore, but not quite there. He was rapidly losing strength when another surfer named Shannan Dunn walked over the dunes backing the beach and spotted Ismail. Dunn charged into the water, got Ismail onto a surfboard and got him onto the sand. Once there, one bystander made a tourniquet from a leash while another called for help. Ismail was loaded into Dunn’s vehicle before being driven down the beach to meet the arriving ambulance.
“I had a heap of people laughing, keeping me alive, keeping me positive in the back,” Ismail said. “I gave a few knuckles to the people there, because I was feeling good. I started to feel like I was going to make it.”
It’s been a particularly sharky year in Australia, with five fatal attacks so far. Ismail knows how lucky he is to have survived, although he did lose his leg from the knee down. That’s not going to keep him out of the water, though. He plans on bodyboarding as soon as he’s able.
