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Displaying items by tag: Sunshine Coast

21st January 2013

Man Saves Children from Shark Attack

#MarineWildlife - The video below from the Guardian captures the moment when a brave Welsh tourist wrestled a shark away from a beach crowded with children in Australia.

As BBC News reports, 62-year-old Paul Marshallsea took charge of the situation by grabbing the two-metre-long dusky shark by the tail and dragging it away from the shallows at the beach on Queensland's Sunshine Coast - narrowly missing being bitten in the process.

"My instincts took over and I just grabbed the shark by the tail," said Marshallsea, who added that the ocean predator "nearly took my leg off in a split second - it was that quick."

Though few attacks by dusky sharks have been recorded, the species is regarded as "potentially dangerous" to humans due to their large size.

Published in Marine Wildlife

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William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago