Diving doctor attacked by shark stitched up own wound then went to pub before going to hospital

A medical degree came in handy for a junior doctor in New Zealand after he was attacked by a shark while fishing. James Grant, 24, fought the shark, and stitched himself up before his mates took him to hospital - via the local pub. Grant had just entered the water at Garden Bay near Cosy Nook in Southland on Saturday when the next thing he knew a shark was wrapping its jaws around his leg. "It was pretty well latched on, I was just trying to get it off."

But Grant gave as good as he got - stabbing what he believed was a type of seven-gill shark, with his diving knife as he tried to get it to unlatch. "I sort of just fought the shark off. The shark got a few stabs. The knife wasn't long enough though," he said. When Grant managed to get rid of the shark he tried to get the attention of his three friends, who were spearfishing just around the bay. But his mates did not take him seriously.



"I thought surely he hasn't been bitten, there's no way he has been bitten, he's got to be taking the p...," Mackley Lindsay said. But he wasn't, instead he sat on the shore stitching his own leg. His friends carried on fishing while Grant tacked the wounds together with a needle and thread from his first-aid kit for his pig-hunting dogs. "I'm pretty happy I had such a thick wet suit on too," he said. Friend Jim Robins downplayed the event at the time. "He was walking so it couldn't have been that bad," he said.

However, his friends did do him a favour - taking him to the tavern in Colac Bay before the hospital. The pub served him a beer alongside a few bandages to stop his leg from dripping blood on the carpet. "We gave him a pint of beer and his mates were kicking around, laughing," says Colac Bay Tavern co-owner Warren Bevin. "Then we brought out the big first-aid kit and got a little bandage out. There were a couple of good holes on both sides of his leg." His colleagues at Southland Hospital later gave his leg a proper stitch-up.

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