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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/shark-attacks-teenager-paddling-off-australian-coast-180981009/

Nineteen-year-old Nat Drummond was competing in a kayak-like surf ski race off the coast of Adelaide, Australia, when a shark bit a hole through his vessel, tossing him into the ocean.

“My ski just kind of lifted above the water, and the next thing I knew, I was in the air,” Drummond tells Richard Wood of 9News. “And then I was in the water. I saw this figure just fall back into the water. It was a big shark.”

Drummond, a “surf life saver” water safety volunteer since he was six years old, quickly disconnected himself from the leg rope that tethered him to his surf ski. He swam toward his competitors, who raced to help.

“All the paddlers in this event are surf life savers,” Craig Burton, the South Australian Ocean and Surf Ski Paddlers race director, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Imogen Hayne. “When something like this happens, they turn into rescue mode, and it was fantastic the way they got him onto their surf skis and safely returned him to shore.”

Drummond was unharmed, though he tells reporters he was lucky—the shark had bitten the ski right where his legs were, writes the Washington Post’s Jonathan Edwards. Officials don’t yet know the size and species of shark, though they suspect it was a great white. They sent off samples of tooth and flesh collected from the surf ski for analysis.