A 16-year-old surfer from Hawaii narrowly escaped the gnashing teeth of a shark after he hit the water at around sunset on Sunday, as the ocean hunter bit a huge chunk off his board.
Max Keliikipi, a junior lifeguard, was surfing about a hundred yards offshore of Makaha Beach when he saw what he thought was a turtle’s fin in the water, reported.
When the animal was right beside him, Keliikipi realized it was, in fact, a shark of about 12 feet in length.
As the shark dove down into the water beneath him, Keliikipi put his feet up on the board and kept watch for it.
Suddenly, the shark attacked him from beneath, the force of which knocked the teen into the water as it munched his surfboard.
“It’s bigger than my head. I didn’t really recognize how big this shark bite was until right now,” Keliikipi said as he held up the damaged board on KHON2.
“It was literally—I’m not exaggerating this at all—it was literally an inch or two away from my feet.”
Keliikipi said he felt the “fear factor” and that instinct kicked in.
“It was the fight or flight thing,” he told the station. “And for me it was just, it was flight.
“As soon as I hit the water I just started swimming. I didn’t really think about where the shark was. I just had to get in.”
The boy added: “Next time, I’m just going to go in the daytime and with my friends.”
In May, a 65-year-old man from California died in a horrific shark attack at Hawaii’s Maui beach as he swam in the water. Witnesses described the severity of his injuries.
“They pulled the man up. He looked unconscious when they transferred him to the gurney. And we could see that they were trying to do CPR on him,” Allison Keller told Hawaii News Now.
“As we got closer, I saw some blood on his stomach and then I got looking a little bit more and his wrist, it looked like the skin on his wrist was just torn off.”
She continued: “I got looking closer and his entire left leg from his knee down was just missing. There was no blood or anything.”
Back in February, Hawaii’s Hanalei Bay was closed to swimmers after a tiger shark bit an off-duty firefighter who was surfing.
The man was in a spot known as “the bowl” on Kauai’s north shore when he was bitten by the 13-foot shark. He suffered multiple lacerations to his leg.
The unnamed bite victim was calm and put a tourniquet on himself, witnesses said.
One of the biggest great white sharks ever recorded was spotted off the Hawaiian coast in January.
Divers spotted the creature, known as Deep Blue and estimated to be up to 21 feet long, feeding off a dead sperm whale off Oahu.
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