Menu

Ireland's sailing, boating & maritime magazine

Displaying items by tag: Sunshine Coast

#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

About Commander Bill King, Solo Circumnavigator

William Donald Aelian King was the last surviving submarine commander in the Second World War - in charge of the British Navy's T-class Telemachus that sank a Japanese sub in the Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Sumatra, in 1944.

Decorated many times for his service by the end of the war, King became a trailblazing solo sailor.

At the age of 58, he was the oldest participant in The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race sailing Galway Blazer II, a junk-rigged schooner he designed himself.

After a number of abortive attempts, including an incident with "a large sea creature", he finally completed his solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1973.

Beyond his aquatic escapades, King settled with his wife Anita (who died in 1984, aged 70) at Oranmore Castle outside Galway after the war, where he later developed a pioneering organic farm and garden to help tackle his wife's asthma.

The round-the-world sailor and Galway native Bill King died on Friday, 21 September, 2012, aged 102.