Back from the very edge of death: How Chris Blowes survived a great white shark’s fury
Chris Blowes has defied all odds after a horrific shark attack convinced him his life was over. He didn’t just survive, he thrived.
Lifestyle
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Right Point looks deep and dark, but it’s actually a user-friendly wave.
The rock-bottomed point break on the southern edge of Fishery Bay, half an hour out of Port Lincoln, is the go-to break for the region’s surfers.
It has a way of organising the unruly swells whipped up by the frequent south-westerly gales into groomed lines that march along the base of the high cliff.
It was here, at this most familiar of spots on Anzac Day, 2015, that Chris Blowes was trading a few waves with his mates. And it was here where his life would change forever.
“We’d been surfing for about an hour,” Mr Blowes, 31, says at the kitchen table of his Adelaide home.
“I’d decided to get one more wave and go in, and I was paddling back out and was at Suck Rock when it felt like I’d been hit by car. I realised it was a white pointer, and a big one.”
The great white, which has a bite that scientists have measured at an astounding 1.8 tonnes of force, clamped down on the 26-year-old surfer’s left flank.
Then it let go and, for a few seconds, gave Chris the hope that it may have thought better of biting a bony human sitting on a hard surfboard. It wasn’t to be. After swimming away a short distance the apex predator made a 90 degree turn and came back at Chris with tremendous force and speed, taking his left leg in its mouth and pulling him below the surface.
“It dragged me underwater and then … it just pulled my leg off above the knee,” Blowes says in his matter-of-fact manner.
“When it first hit me, the sheer force and strength of it, I thought, ‘Shit, this is it. This is the end of my life’.”
A surfer’s paradise
Chris, now 31, grew up in the Adelaide Hills, a long drive from the nearest rideable waves.
Family holidays, however, were spent at Port Elliot and it was at the idyllic seaside town that he caught the surfing bug.
At first, like most kids, he started out on bodyboards, but by his teenage years he’d graduated to a surfboard.
“The first time I stood up I was hooked,” Chris says. “I never looked back.”
When the love of his life Chloe landed a teaching job on the Eyre Peninsula, carpenter Chris immediately started looking at ways of relocating.
For Chloe, of course, but also for the waves that break along the peninsula’s western and southern coastline. After a couple of visits to see Chloe, Chris made the move permanently and was soon working as a carpenter with a local builder.
“On the Eyre Peninsula I was working all up and down the coast – Coffin Bay, Streaky Bay – and surfing heaps,” Chris recalls. “Especially at Streaky, I think we were surfing pretty much every day.”
That fateful day
An April 25, 2015, Chris and mates Nick Thompson and Brock Will attended the Anzac Day Dawn Service. Nick’s father had served in the Vietnam War, so there was a personal connection for the young men.
It was a typically cold and wet Port Lincoln autumn morning, with a southwest wind, and the lads knew that once the Anzac Day formalities were over there was the chance of wave or two at Right Point.
“It was only two or three foot on the sets (about head high in surfers’ speak), and there were long wait between sets,” Chris says.
“So a pretty average day, but you take what you get and we decided to go for a surf. We were probably in the water by eight o’clock, maybe a little earlier.”
When the great white hit, the call of SHARK! and Chris’ bloodcurdling scream sent the few surfers who were out that morning scrambling for the nearby rocks.
Nick and Brock were among those bumping across the boulders to safety, but when they saw it was their mate who’d been hit they bravely jumped back into the water and began paddling towards him (both later received bravery awards). They were almost there, about to grab Chris’ outstretched hand, when the shark struck again and took his leg.
Overcoming perhaps the most primal of human fears – that of being eaten by a wild animal – the pair set about rescuing their horrifically injured friend.
Laying him on a board they brought him through the surf to an area in front of the cave. It’s one of the spots where surfers exit the water at Right Point, but the rocks and round and slippery and it can be treacherous at the best of times.
Another surfer rushed into the water and tied a leg-rope around the stump where Chris’ left leg was just minutes earlier – a move doctors told him probably saved his life – and a makeshift evacuation crew carried set about getting the bleeding man up the cliff, using the board as a stretcher.
At the top of the cliff they threw him into the back of Nick’s Landcruiser and his mate hit the gas while three others jumped in the back and tried desperately to keep Chris awake. At least that’s what he’s been told – he has no memory between succumbing to the warm feeling that engulfed him while he was being carried up the cliff and waking up from his induced coma ten days later.
An ambulance met Nick’s Landcruiser somewhere on the dirt road back to town, and when they opened up the back the paramedics immediately assumed they were too late.
“I was as white as that wall,” says, pointing at the kitchen plasterwork.
With no discernible pulse, the ambulance officers started administering CPR – and they refused to stop.
“They continued CPR all the way to Port Lincoln Hospital,” Chris says.
“And once I was in there they continued CPR for up to 75 minutes. From when they started until they stopped was a period of 75 minutes.”
A race against time
The local footy match – the season opener between Tasmans and Mallee Park – was interrupted so the evacuation helicopter could be landed on Port Lincoln’s Centenary Oval to transport Chris to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
And in a ghoulish twist, his leg was actually on board.
Surfers had watched his board travel erratically across Fishery Bay to the Left Point on the bay’s northern side. What they may not have realised was the board was still attached to the shark via its leg-rope, acting like a giant fishing float. When the shark realised it had no hope of swallowing the whole thing it spat Chris’ leg out, and when it the board was retrieved the leg was still attached. They rushed it into town.
“It ended up in the chopper, but in reality they were never going to be able to reattach it,” Chris says.
Beating the odds
At the RAH doctors worked to sew up the wounds from the shark’s first bite, but Chris was too unstable to even consider sewing up the stump so they applied a vac dressing and started considering other, potentially even more serious, complications.
Due to the massive blood loss and length of time without a pulse the medical experts believed it was almost certain the young surfer would have permanent organ damage and, more worryingly, serious brain damage. “They told Chloe there was a ten per cent chance of surviving with brain damage and a zero per cent chance of surviving without brain damage,” Chris says.
“I was always optimistic and I always held on to hope,” Chloe says. “But when he was in the ICU and we were getting the statistics on brain damage and the like I did feel him slipping away a bit. And I felt all this slipping away too (Chloe gestures to their baby Eddie and house).
“Family is important to us, and it was something we envisaged having one day, so there were a few dark moments where it felt like we were losing everything.
“I guess you take things for granted until something like this happens.”
A few days after Chris emerged from his 10-day induced coma it became clear that he had, somehow, avoided predicted brain damage. His first question after learning he’d lost his leg, Chloe says, is, ‘how am I going to surf’.
But while shades of his cheeky self were obvious, Chris still had a long road ahead. Even ketamine and fentanyl weren’t enough to numb the agonising pain of the dressing changes on the raw stump, and even when it was finally closed things were only marginally better.
“I was going on dialysis to flush my organs out, but that would flush the drugs out and I’d be in extreme pain again,” Chris recalls.
Eventually he was discharged from hospital and the rehab effort began.
Rebuilding a life
Fast forward to 2018, and Chris is recovered enough to consider asking Chloe – the woman who never left his side – to marry him. “I proposed to Chloe at one of our favourite beaches – Greenly Beach – in 2018,” he says. “A year later we got married, then a year later we got Eddie.”
Chris continues to work as a carpenter on building sites and he’s even back in the water.
“I wasn’t that keen on surfing for the first 12 months, but then I started to miss it and began to think about how I could do it again,” he says.
“I came up with the idea of having a socket with and angled adaptor that would create the bent position I needed. I started on a really long board, and then progressed to smaller boards. It wasn’t easy.”
Chris even tackled the biggest swell seen in years that hit the Maldives while he and Chloe were on their honeymoon. He says he does, however, think more about the conditions before he paddles out now, and he’s yet to surf Fishery Bay again.
He’s also joined a club most would be happy to never be a member of, the Bite Club. Made up of three to four hundred attack survivors, witnesses and families, Chris says talking it out with others who have been through similar ordeals has been helpful in his mental recovery. He’s even been able to offer some solace to grieving family members of those who’ve lost their lives.
“Me just being able to tell them that I felt no pain during my attack, you can see the relief on their face,” he says.
“I’ve got on with it pretty well. I have a positive attitude. Getting back into surfing has been a big part of my mental recovery.”
Shark politics
Chris understands that shark attacks bring out raw emotions, but he does have one plea for the keyboard warriors – think before you post.
“I think people need to be a little more sensitive when shark attacks happen,” he says.
“Straight after an attack is not really the time to be expressing your opinion on things – you have to think that there’s a grieving family. It really doesn’t help the people involved.
“I was unconscious and the doctors were telling my family that I was probably going to die, and then there’s all these people online saying all kinds of s …. It’s not necessary.”
Chris says he bears no ill will toward the shark that robbed him of his leg.
“I’ve never wanted to kill sharks or anything like that,” he says.
“But I do wish that there was some sort of fail-proof shark deterrent on the market so we could enjoy the water and not have to worry about each other. But no, I’ve never felt any anger towards the shark. It’s part of the risk.”
Putting pen to paper
Chris is an author now, penning a book with the help of Dr Michelle Cresp, one of the doctors who helped save his life during that critical early time at Port Lincoln Hospital.
Called Caught Inside – a surfing term where you become stranded between the breaking waves and the shoreline – the book tells the story of the attack but also deals with trauma recovery.
“The book is about everyone that was involved, and I think it was a story that had to be told,” Chris says.
“There’s a lot in there about post-trauma growth and how we’ll all suffer some trauma at some stage and a lot depends on how we choose to deal with that. At the end of the day I think the whole thing has made me a better person. I don’t take things for granted any more, that’s for sure.”
And as for little Eddie, almost one, the boy who’s only ever known his dad as having one leg. Will he be a surfer too?
“I’ll be stoked if Eddie wants to surf,” Chris says.” He already loves the water.”
CAUGHT INSIDE by Chris Blowes, RRP $25 is available now at chrisblowes.com.au and as an e-book at amazon.com.au. One dollar from every sale goes to mental health charity Mentally Fit EP.
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