‘A shark ate my arm and leg – I wouldn’t change a thing’

February 11, 2009, began as an average day for Paul de Gelder. He was conducting a military operation in Sydney Harbour as part of the navy, but while in the water he felt a whack on the back of his leg – it was the jaws of a bull shark.

‘I thought the guys on the boat got too close to me but I looked down and there’s a massive shark’s head attached to my leg.’ Paul tells Metro.

‘I’m thinking, “I’ve seen Shark Week, I’ll jab it in the eye but I can’t move my arm. I look down and my hand is trapped in the shark’s mouth as well as my leg. I grab it by the nose, try to push it off me but it decides that I’m breakfast, thrashes me around, takes me underwater and the pain is so all encompassing it takes the fight out of me. I was drowning in agony, being eaten alive and I realised there was nothing I could do, so I gave up.’

As Paul conceded defeat, the shark’s teeth ripped off his hamstring and hand. His wetsuit made him buoyant and to his shock, he floated back to the surface and realised, by some miracle, he was still alive.

‘My medical training kicked in. I kept the wound above my head and swam back with one hand and one functioning leg through a massive pool of my own blood.’

Hours later Paul woke up in hospital, relieved to see his leg was still attached. ‘But I only had the leg for a week. I had my leg removed and the medication couldn’t manage my pain so I went through 20 hours of agonising torture, wishing I would die.’

The attack was captured on film – and if you’re so inclined, is available to watch on YouTube. The entire attack lasts for eight seconds – eight seconds that would completely change the course of Paul’s life.

It’s a living nightmare few of us could ever imagine, but 16 years later, Paul’s life is quite astonishing. Unbelievably, he’s now one of the world’s leading shark conservationists, devoting his whole life to protecting the animal that almost killed him.

Paul’s determination to give sharks a rebrand combined with his personal relationship with the apex predator has taken him all over the world. But the turning point came when Australia’s 60 Seconds, the biggest televised interview Down Under, called with a question: ‘Would you be willing to face bull sharks again?’

Paul agreed to confront his fears, flying to Fiji to swim with bull sharks. ‘They wanted tears but I gave them excitement and ended up feeding the bulls.’

Now, he’s just finished filming a new show for Shark Week, How To Survive A Shark Attack, where he flippantly tells me: ‘I had to be attacked by sharks several times’ and he’s worked with A-list stars like Will Smith and Mike Tyson.

He also helped British celebrities including Sir Lenny Henry and Countdown’s Rachel Riley build up the courage to swim with one of the world’s largest and deadliest species of sharks, the Tiger shark as part of ITV’s Sharks! Celebrity Infested Waters, an alarming new reality TV series marking the 50th anniversary of Jaws.

Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 horror is without a doubt the reason I’ll suddenly panic swimming lengths in a swimming pool – the sea is completely out of bounds. My irrational fear of being eaten alive by a shark in the sea, a lake or even the bath is shared by millions, even if there are rarely more than 10 fatal shark attacks around the world every year.

Call The Midwife’s Helen George is in the same boat as me, and until filming the series had been too afraid to even put her head under water for 20 years, let alone free dive with one of the ocean’s largest man-eating predators.

On paper, it sounds like I’m A Celebrity on steroids, but it’s a surprisingly moving watch.

‘The show is really touching’ says Paul. ‘It has all the emotions – fear, anxiety, happiness. Every spectrum of human emotion is there but it has an underlying message too. It’s about the plight of sharks.

‘People are out there killing sharks for fun every day and by doing so it’s bringing us closer to extinction. If the sharks die, the ocean dies and we die. We’re trying to get celebrities and the viewers to fall in love with sharks – which, granted, is hard because they keep biting people.’

Chucking British national treasures into shark infested waters is another unexpected adventure for Paul, one more turn he didn’t expect his life to take when his limbs were torn from his body.

Few will ever know how they’d respond to the trauma of a shark attack, particularly one quite so cataclysmic.

I’ve rarely met someone with so much self-assurance, so much peace. Paul says coming close to death gave him freedom in life. ‘It really just opened my mindset to becoming even more unlimited in what I want to in this world and with my life,’ he says.

I wonder if he imagines what his life would look like without the attack?

‘I do to a very small degree. I wouldn’t change it – there’s no reason for me to change it. I don’t know who that guy is because my life went this way and I love my life. I live in America. Arnold Schwarzenegger says hello to me at the gym in the morning. I’ve got great friends, I get paid to travel the world, have adventures and inspire people. What’s not to love about that?’

Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters is available to stream on ITVX.

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