Teenager fights off shark attack with body board

A quick-thinking New Zealand teenager managed to fight off a shark when she hit "the massive grey thing" on the head with her body board. Lydia Ward, 14, was bitten on the right hip during the attack near the southern city of Invercargill.
 
Ward was standing in chest-deep water at Oreti Beach when she noticed something odd underfoot. "At first, I wasn't quite sure what it was. I was trying to say to myself it was just a piece of driftwood."
 
It was only when the teenager turned to her younger brother Alex that she started to worry, she told the New Zealand Herald. "I just looked at my brother's face and he said 'Whoa!'. And I looked to my side and I just saw this massive grey thing twisting in the water."
 
The 1.5m-long shark then lunged at Ward, biting through her wetsuit into her hip. It also punctured her leg.
 
Thanks to the adrenaline coursing through her veins, Lydia did not feel her wounds. Instead she hit back, whacking the shark with the end of her boogie board. "That scared it away," she said.
 
But then she saw her own blood in the water and feared it would bring the shark back. The 20-metre wade back to the beach was nerve-wracking. "I couldn't run because I was in the water... I only realised it bit me when I hopped out of the water and saw the bite marks through my wetsuit."
 
While sightings of sharks are common in New Zealand during the summer months, attacks are rare. The last fatal attack was in 1976, and only 10 people have died from shark attacks since records began in 1852. ·