The 34-year-old surfer appeared at a news conference in Sydney before heading home to the Gold Coast.
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But it seems that he might as well not have anxious, since a top marine biologist says that the shark was only being curious.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing”, she said. He also seemed to have escaped the shark unscathed.
Flanagan hit the shark around its snout, which forced the shark to leave him.
Cliff said of the surfing competition encounter: “It looked like an investigating incident rather than the shark wanting to eat the surfer”. A YouTube clip of the attack has had nearly 13.5 million views and even Hollywood stars such as Charlize Theron and Russell Crowe have been following the action on Twitter. “We nearly just watched our friend get eaten by a shark and I’m just blown away that there’s no damage at all”, he said.
“I felt something grab, get stuck in my leg rope and instantly jump away”.
“To walk away from a shark attack with not a scratch on you is a miracle really”. “To wander absent from that, I’m just so stoked”.
“I was like “I’ve got a board; if I can get there, I can stab it or whatever”, Wilson said in an interview after the event”. It was Marshall Flanagan, a surfing enthusiast, who suffered a shark attack in 1976.
“The video is very full on, I’m sure he got a fair scare and it’s just lucky the rescue boat acted quickly”, he said.
“I’ll never forget the time last Christmas in Tasmania when I saw the fin of a great white shark right near my board”.
Three-time World Champion Fanning was bumped off his board and forced to fight the shark off during the attack.
“All of [a] sudden, I just had this instinct that something was behind me”, Fanning, aged 34, told the World Surf League website.
Fanning recalled the moment he thought he would die.
“I don’t know why it didn’t bite or whatever”.
Fanning said he was far from a “superhero” and coming face to face with a shark had been a “humbling” experience. We are in their domain. “You just put your head down and paddle like hell”.
“It will probably take – I don’t know – a couple of weeks, months (to come to terms with it)…”
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At the finals of the World Surfing League’s J-Bay Open on Sunday, a life-or-death battle played out on the South African beach, and it was all captured live on TV. “And then it was like ‘Oh yeah, they kind of want to talk to us.’ I had the producer in my ear telling me talk to him talk to him”.
