Mr Souter said his family had embarked on an hours-long walk around the clifftop “and hadn’t actually seen a single other human being” until returning to “The Sewer”.<\/p>\n
He had his phone out and was taking photos of the scenery when the shark appeared.<\/p>\n
“My brother-in-law \u2026 was ahead of me, about 100 metres or so, and he was watching and just called out that he’d seen a shark,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I just started then filming to try and capture the shark, before I realised there were also surfers right there too.<\/p>\n
“It was pretty hard to tell because I was quite a long way away, but I saw the tail thrash out, and that was when I realised there was a shark in close proximity to the surfers.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A bite imprint left in a surfboard by a shark after an attack offshore Kangaroo Island. (Supplied: Jon Souter)<\/p>\n
Surfers ‘fairly calm’ after attack<\/p>\n
Mr Souter said his family met the surfers \u2014 one of whom was a doctor \u2014 down at the shoreline as they exited the water and helped them back to the car park area.<\/p>\n
The family had a first aid kit with them, and with the assistance of another surfer who had also been in the water previously, helped “bound up” Lee’s leg.<\/p>\n
He noted they were both “fairly calm” as they exited the water and said Lee was “more worried about his surfboard” than his injuries.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lee’s injuries were bandaged up before he was driven to hospital. (Supplied: Jon Souter)<\/p>\n
“My daughter and my niece helped them with the boards and brought them up, and the location of his flippers, he was concerned about. They helped grab that,” Mr Souter said.<\/p>\n
“The guy he was surfing with, the doctor, was pretty comfortable it wasn’t a major artery and so we got the bandage out \u2026 and together we bound up his leg.<\/p>\n
“There was still a fair bit of blood coming through, but the doctor \u2026 wasn’t too concerned about it.<\/p>\n
“We gave him a drink, and then his surfing mate, the doctor, put him in the car and drove him to the hospital.”<\/p>\n
‘Always go surfing with a doctor’<\/p>\n
South Australia Police confirmed the surfer had managed to get himself to the local hospital in Kingscote, about 40 minutes from the surfing site, for treatment.<\/p>\n
Kangaroo Island local Craig Wickham, who is Lee’s employer, told ABC Radio Adelaide on Wednesday he was recovering well with a “flat white” coffee the morning after the attack.<\/p>\n
“He’s very grateful for the medical care he received,” Mr Wickham said.<\/p>\n
Michael Pengilly, the island’s mayor, said Lee “had a lucky escape” and was also relieved to hear he was OK.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The man was treated at Kingscote’s hospital. (ABC News: Alina Eacott)<\/p>\n
Mr Souter said in his almost 50 years of visiting the island, he had “pretty much never seen a shark” until that “extraordinary moment of timing” they came across the pair.<\/p>\n
“We’d been walking for several hours along the clifftop, there’s pretty much no land between you and Antarctica, there were no other people around,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It was amazingly peaceful, and then we just sort of walked down the hill, the only other two people were the surfers and suddenly this happened.”<\/p>\n
Jon Souter and his family were exploring the island when the incident happened. (Supplied: Jon Souter)<\/p>\n
Mr Souter said it all “went smoothly” in the end and when they had finished assisting the surfer, they continued their KI visit with a picnic and a trip to get some honey ice-cream.<\/p>\n
His key takeaway after the incident was to “always go surfing with a doctor”.<\/p>\n
“Certainly, go down there for the walk, because it’s an absolutely spectacular location for a walk \u2014 that might be a better option,” Mr Souter said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who witnessed the “extraordinary” moment a surfer was bitten by a shark chasing a seal offshore…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[64,63,125258,125259,125260,25160,125257,128,29338,2269,14322,1124,9750,338],"class_list":{"0":"post-200294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-bronze-whaler","11":"tag-destrees-bay","12":"tag-jon-souter","13":"tag-kangaroo-island","14":"tag-kingscote","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-seal","17":"tag-shark","18":"tag-shark-attack","19":"tag-south-australia","20":"tag-surfers","21":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}