Dr Grant, 24, was spear fishing with friends off New Zealand’s South Island when he felt a tug on the leg - something he originally thought was one of his friends pulling a prank.

“I thought it was one of the boys who had come and grabbed my leg,” he told Radio New Zealand.

However, he soon realised a shark that there was a shark that had attached itself to his leg - probably after the fish he had just speared.

“To be honest it was a bit of an odd reaction. It wasn’t really fear or anything, it was just like: ‘F**k it, I’ve got to try and get this thing off my leg’,” he said.

“I’d just shot this fish, so I had my spear dagger out just trying to dispatch the flapping fish, because that’s what you don’t want - the flapping, bloody fish that attracted this shark in the first place.

"I was just trying to knock that off, and that’s when all this started happening. So it was quite a convenient time actually; I had a knife in my hand so I gave it a good few jabs to try get it off.”

“I was swimming away. I got to have a little bit of a look at the wetsuit, saw there was a hole in it and I could see a bit of blood leaking out from it, but it wasn’t until I’d taken the wetsuit off from the shore that I saw all the lacerations,” he said.

Dr Grant then made the most of his medical training by stitching up his own wounded leg before making a trip to the pub.

“I sort of tacked it together with a couple of stitches. I think it must have been adrenaline at the time because it wasn’t too bad putting them in - but I wouldn’t usually do that,” he said.

“We cleaned up the fish in the parlour that we’ve got out there and then headed to the Colac Bay pub and had a bit of a beer.”

I guess if you’re going to get bitten by a shark, that’s the way to do it! The moral of the story = beer fixes everything.

via ABC