Wakeboarder wipes out and is badly attacked by great white shark

[ricki]

This is about a year old but I just learned of it while searching for something else on the Internet. I hope the lady has rehab'd well after her ordeal. She had been out wakeboarding and wiped out in Nelson Bay in northeastern Australia. As she was waiting for the boat to return she was attacked twice by a 3 to 4 m long Great White Shark suffering cuts to her face, arm and torso. Her arm was almost amputated by surgeons in the aftermath.

"For those living in a coastal town, the sight of a pretty, young surfer girl splashing around in the ocean’s shallows is nothing out of the ordinary.

But when the girl is Lisa Mondy, the 24-year-old who almost died three times after her face and arm were ripped apart by a great white shark just 12 weeks ago, those tentative first steps back into the ocean were nothing short of heroic.
Pulling on her wetsuit for the first time since the horrific attack just off Jimmy’s Beach at Port Stephens on the NSW north coast, it’s clear Lisa has not let the near four-metre predator that almost took her life affect her love of the ocean."





"‘The water is a place that I love and I’ve spent so much time in it, on it and under it – it’s my work and my play so nothing is going to keep me out,’ she tells New Idea exclusively. ‘Getting back in gave me butterflies in my heart – not from fear but from excitement. As surprising as it is, I don’t view the ocean with any fear. It’s a place where I’ve spent so much time, a place I love and it’s where I feel comfortable. If [the shark] wanted to eat me, it would have but it didn’t.’

Lisa’s positive attitude is all the more incredible given only three months ago she underwent a lifesaving 16-hour operation during which doctors came frighteningly close to amputating her arm.

On that fateful day, she and her workmates Rowan Cutbush and Mark Green – from Port Stephens Parasailing – decided to go wakeboarding between clients. It was a beautiful day and the water in the bay was crystal clear. ‘I’d done a jump over the wake and came off,’ says Lisa. ‘The board came off my foot and I started swimming back to it.

‘I’d only taken one or two strokes when the shark came straight up from underneath. I remember a shape when it was right there in my face. ‘I must have been knocked out for a minute because the next thing I remember is feeling like I’d been hit by a train.’

Lisa’s horrified friends witnessed the attack, with Mark later telling her he’d seen the creature throw her half a metre into the air. ‘I actually thought the boys were mucking with me at first somehow,’ she says.

‘Then I looked down and saw all the blood and that’s when I realised what had happened.
I couldn’t see through the water because of all the blood.’"

Continued at:
http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/new-id...urvival-story/



A photo of Lisa last month, apparently healing well, keep up the great job Lisa!




A photo of Lisa in hospital about a year ago after extensive surgery to reattach and save her arm. Photos from http://www.portnews.com.au/news/loca...s/2444015.aspx

She defends sharks in the article at the link above.