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Moments after a woman was pulled onto the sand of Coogee Beach with severe wounds to her left leg and arms, a three-metre shark was swimming languidly in the clear water metres from shore.
Stephen Denneny was sitting on Coogee Beach’s rainbow steps when a woman screamed: “Shark!”
His partner, sitting beside him, prayed aloud as the shark alarm blared and traumatised bystanders watched lifeguards and a critical care doctor work to stabilise the woman.
Denneny ran to his home nearby to collect his drone.
“I wanted to find the shark, to keep an eye on it and make sure we knew where it was heading,” Denneny said.
His drone captured the shark in the shallow water and dappled sunlight, as it slowly swam laps of the bay. The footage shows a patch of dark water that Denneny said was most likely blood, marking the location of the shark attack about 30 metres from shore.
As Denneny’s drone hovers over the shark, it captures the beach and a crowd of people at the water’s edge. Not a single swimmer is in the water on this warm, clear, winter afternoon.
The shark remained in Coogee Bay for 30 to 45 minutes before making its way north towards Gordons Bay and Clovelly, Denneny said.
“I’m still in shock … It’s very sad to see,” he said. “I was in the water five minutes before it happened.
“This poor family have to go through all of this. We are praying for the woman and her family.”
The woman, 35, is in critical condition at St Vincent’s Hospital.
Lawrence Chlebeck, a marine biologist with Humane World for Animals Australian, said the shark in Denneny’s video appears to be a great white.
Denneny, director of One Shot Creative, said he regularly flies his drone over Coogee and keeps in touch with the lifeguards.
On December 30, he alerted the lifeguards to a shark swimming nearby.
“They sounded the shark alarm and got everybody out of the water,” he said. “It was just a wobbegong, but you can never be too careful.”
Denneny urged policymakers to consider using drones to routinely patrol beaches for sharks, considering Saturday’s attack and a series of shark attacks in NSW last summer.
“We need to be doing something about this,” he said.
In December, the Minns government announced $2.5 million to boost beach safety, including more drones patrolling beaches, but only over the summer months.
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