Three-time world champion surfer Mick Fanning had to answer that question at a competition event in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa on Sunday.
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The final round of the competition, the sixth stop on the Samsung Galaxy World Surf League Championship Tour, had just begun when Fanning was knocked off of his board and landed in open water.
Fanning emerged unscathed from his encounter with the shark which approached him while he was swimming in on his board during the J-Bay Open in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.
The dramatic footage shows Mick sitting on his board in the water when suddenly a fin, believed to belong to a great white shark, appears.
The World Surf League promptly stopped the competition after the Australian surfer was attacked by the shark.
“[The shark] came up and went for the tail of my board”.
It will be interesting now to see the reaction to the incident (I feel uncomfortable referring to it as an “attack”).
But he said on Instagram that: “Jbay is an incredible place and I will go back one day”, referring to Jeffreys Bay. And like I said, I was just so panicked that I wasn’t getting there in time for him.
The World Surf League cancelled the remainder of the event and Fanning will split the prize money with fellow Australian surfer Julian Wilson, who was also in the water when the attack happened. “And it just kept coming at my board”, Fanning said, once safe on the rescue boat.
Fanning added, “I felt like [the shark] kicked me off. It was dragging me. You just have this sudden instinct to start paddling, which I did, but I wasn’t happy about it because the waves were so good”.
“It’s got me through the hardest times in my life”. “I just saw the fin, I didn’t see the teeth. Like, the thing was so powerful and was, yeah, just moved so fast and I was just trying to manoeuvre my way around it”. “It doesn’t surprise me, he is a real fighter and I know what he was like at school”.
Fanning recalled the moment he thought he would die.
“I turned around to make sure it wasn’t following me”, he said.
The camera that captured the incident was unsighted by a wave for the second part of the attack and Fanning tried to fill in the gaps.
He said he was incredibly thankful to his friend and world title rival Julian Wilson, who fearlessly swam towards him in the midst of the shark attack.
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“It’s something that I don’t think we’ll ever see again, hopefully, in this sport”, Perrow said.
