Hoyos says he held the shark’s gaze as it swam away – but then, suddenly, out of nowhere, it lunged at him.<\/p>\n
“I lowered my head, and what I felt was its lower jaw digging into my cheek and its upper jaw into my head. I was there, I imagine for a second, no more, inside its jaw, and then it simply opened it again.”<\/p>\n
“When it closed it, I felt the pressure of the bite, and then it just let me go,” he marvels.<\/p>\n
The Galapagos shark’s 29 serrated teeth not only left Hoyos with deep wounds to his face and head, but also severed the air line of his diving apparatus.<\/p>\n
He had survived the shark attack but was still in mortal danger.<\/p>\n
In addition, one of the teeth had torn his diving mask, and the blood-tinged water was further blurring his already limited visibility.<\/p>\n
“When I realised that no air was coming out of the hose, I grabbed a second one we have, which we call an octopus, that is used to give air to someone else if they need it,” he tells BBC Mundo. <\/p>\n
“But then I realised that the regulator wasn’t working and was blowing air instead of regulating it, so I had to remember my training and start regulating it with my lips.”<\/p>\n
Bleeding, blinded, and with the air escaping, Hoyos calculated that he had less than a minute to reach the surface.<\/p>\n
“Since I couldn’t see anything, what I did was look for the light that I knew was the surface. I started swimming upwards, in a very coordinated manner, because I wanted to avoid erratic movements that would attract the shark.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hoyos says he held the shark’s gaze as it swam away – but then, suddenly, out of nowhere,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-257161","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}