Mauled Australian swimmer recollects punching shark

Leah Stewart, a main college trainer, was positioned in an induced coma and had a part of her left arm amputated after the June 13 assault at Sydney’s Coogee Beach.

Stewart determined to go for a late morning swim within the “crystal clear” sea, unknowingly sharing the water with a shark described by witnesses as an amazing white measuring as much as 4 metres (13 toes) lengthy.

The trainer mentioned she was ending her swim and approaching the sand when she heard a woman scream.

“I turned, and there was a huge, huge fin behind her. It was massive, and at first I thought, ‘Oh, it’s a dolphin’,” she instructed Nine Network tv’s 60 Minutes in a program aired on Sunday.

“I looked at the size of it and I realised, that’s not a dolphin. And so we just start screaming at the top of our lungs, just like ‘shark, shark, shark’.”

She swam a number of extra strokes, then felt one thing within the water, and rotated to see it slowly approaching.

“Its face was horrific. I’ll never forget its face, it was huge. And its teeth, and its mouth was massive, and its eyes, it’s just black little beady eyes. We were looking face to face,” Stewart mentioned.

Fearing it will chunk her face, she determined she needed to punch it.

“I thought, well, which limb am I willing to lose? I’m right-handed, so I decided let’s do a left hook,” she recounted.

“I just kind of throw my left arm, and it just grabs onto my forearm and rips, rips away my skin, my muscle, everything.”

‘Like combating a dinosaur’

Stewart mentioned she was in shock as she appeared down and noticed her personal injured hand.

“The next moment, I feel it grab onto my left thigh, and it rips me underwater.”

As the animal pulled her down, Stewart took an enormous breath, pondering to herself that she needed to survive for her younger daughter, August.

“I twisted myself around, and I just started punching it over and over and over again, just punch, punch, punch, and it was like fighting a dinosaur,” she added.

“It was so big; it was like punching a brick wall. And I think I must have got a really good one in. And so it let me go, and I just kind of popped back up.”

Stewart, in her mid-30s, was helped ashore by Charlie Verco, an elite paddleboarder who occurred to be within the water close by. Medics handled her on the seaside earlier than she was taken to hospital.

About 10 days after the assault, docs diminished her sedation and he or she emerged from her coma.

Australian scientists imagine rising ocean temperatures are shifting sharks’ migratory patterns, which can be contributing to an uptick in assaults.

A 12-year-old boy died after he was bitten by a shark whereas swimming in Sydney Harbour in January.

Three divers have been fatally mauled in separate incidents between May and June — two in Western Australia and the third in Queensland.

There have been almost 1,300 shark incidents round Australia since 1791, of which greater than 260 resulted in loss of life, in response to a database of shark encounters with people.

© 2026 AFP