A teenage surfer bitten by a shark at a South Australian beach has described how he \u201cflicked it off\u201d and \u201clegged it back to shore\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oliver Tokic-Bensley, 16, was bitten on his foot while surfing on Good Friday near his family beach house at Middleton, 80km south of Adelaide.<\/p>\n
The year 11 student, who has been surfing his \u201cwhole life\u201d, had been in the water for about 10 minutes, 100 metres from shore, when the shark tugged him off his surfboard.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt came from behind me,\u201d Oliver said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI flicked it off, almost the same that you do when a crab bites your foot \u2026 and then I don\u2019t know if that really did anything, but it let go and I just legged it back to shore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n He turned to see the shark\u2019s fin then paddled at speed, holding his board, until a wave formed and he could catch it in to shore to check his wounds.<\/p>\n \u201cI just started taking photos to show my mates \u2026 it wasn\u2019t that bad, I had no pain or nothing, I was just like, I\u2019ve got to get a photo of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were shocked as well, because I\u2019ve surfed down there with most of them and again nothing like that\u2019s happened.\u201d<\/p>\n Oliver\u2019s father drove him to hospital in a hurry where his wounds were washed and disinfected, X-rayed and bandaged<\/p>\n The teen said he was bitten at about 4.30pm and his sister called his parents before his father, Andrew Bensley, drove him to Victor Harbor hospital in a hurry.<\/p>\n Oliver said his wounds were washed and disinfected, X-rayed and bandaged. He has been taking antibiotics and avoiding putting weight on the foot but hoped to return to the water soon.<\/p>\n \u201cIt should only be like two weeks maybe, it shouldn\u2019t be that long,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Oliver believed a bronze whaler shark had bitten him after seeing only its fin.<\/p>\n Middleton beach surfers spotted a bronze whaler two weeks beforehand and had been bumped by the sharks in recent years but bites were \u201cincredibly rare\u201d, according to citizen science group Shark Watch South Australia.<\/p>\n The beach\u2019s last recorded shark bite in the Australian Shark Incident Database<\/a> was in June 2014, when a white shark bit a 15-year-old boy on the leg.<\/p>\n South Australia has accounted for just 36 of Australia\u2019s 560 shark bite reports in the database from 2000 to 2025, of which four occurred in the month of April.<\/p>\n Most of the state\u2019s bites involved white sharks, with bronze whalers involved in just two. A surfer was also involved in one of those, in October 2025 near Kangaroo Island, about 150km from Middleton.<\/p>\n Concerns about shark attacks rose in January when New South Wales saw four bites in 48 hours, leaving one 12-year-old boy dead<\/a>. Experts warned heavy rain and murky waters had brought small fish into shore, attracting sharks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Oliver said a windy day at Middleton had churned up the water, making it more difficult to see.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was in the evening, it was sort of a stormy, choppy day, it was really murky and stuff, so I\u2019ll probably avoid that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve gone out a couple of times when it\u2019s been like that and nothing happened, so I just didn\u2019t really think anything of it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teenage surfer bitten by a shark at a South Australian beach has described how he \u201cflicked it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":588963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-588962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588962","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=588962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}