A Tasmanian woman has been bitten by a shark while swimming at a beach near Burnie.
Megan Stokes was in the water at Cooee Beach on Monday evening around 6:15pm when she noticed what she initially thought was seaweed approaching her.
“I turned around at one point and saw just like a dark shape behind me,” she told Pulse.
“And then it kept coming towards me and opened its mouth and that’s when I realised it was a shark.”
The sevengill shark, which she estimated to be about 1.7 metres long, bit her knee as she tried to defend herself.
“I brought my knee up to try and protect myself. I was just trying to kick out at it and try and get it to go away,” she said.
At least 10 people were in the water at the time, with others on the beach.
One woman on shore witnessed the attack, initially mistaking the shark for seaweed until she saw its fin.
“When I was calling out that it was a shark, she thought I was mistaken,” Stokes said.
“Then she’d sort of seen the fin and realised that it was for real”.
The woman was left with puncture wounds shaped like a horseshoe on her knee, similar in severity to a dog bite, along with minor scrapes on her other leg.
One area has bruised and she is now considering getting antibiotics after warnings about potential infections.
The attack left her shaken.
“I was absolutely terrified. I was concerned that possibly I was about to die,” she said.
“It could have been a lot worse if it got a child or something,” she said. “It just feels like having some sort of awareness, it’s probably a good thing.”
She said the experience has made her reconsider swimming at unpatrolled beaches.
