It was October 31, Hallowe’en, but otherwise an ordinary day for Bethany Hamilton, who had just come second in the US under-18 surfing championships. She was lying, as she did most mornings, on her surfboard, waiting for the waves to pick up off the north shore of her home island of Kauai in Hawaii. As she dangled her left arm in the water, she felt a sharp jolt.

“For maybe a second I was aware of a grey object closing in on my left side, then I felt a tug and I saw the water turn red with my blood,” says Hamilton, recalling the moment in 2003 when her arm was seized by a 15ft tiger shark. “There was a big chunk of my board missing and I saw that my arm had been bitten off just below the shoulder.”

Hamilton, then 13, remembers being peculiarly calm in the seconds after the attack. Rather than screaming uncontrollably, she simply shouted matter-of-factly to Alana, her friend, surfing a few feet away: “I just got attacked by a shark.” Holt, Alana’s father, who was also close by, fashioned a tourniquet from his long-sleeved surfing vest.

Together they helped Bethany to shore, where the makeshift tourniquet was replaced by a surfboard leash. Hamilton had blacked out several times and lost more than 60% of her blood by the time she arrived at the hospital and a lifeguard had set out on a hopeless hunt for her left arm.

The amateur first aid probably saved Hamilton’s life and it took two operations to repair the wound, leaving her with just a 3in stub below her left shoulder. A couple of inches higher and it would have been fatal. Most people presumed her surfing ambitions would be forgotten. Even if she had the nerve to get back in the water, how would she be able to compete in a sport that relies so much on agility and balance?

“I just felt numb,” recalls Hamilton, who started bodyboarding as a toddler, and was surfing from the age of seven and competing from the age of nine.

“I know I was lucky to live but my whole life up to that point was surfing. The second day after the attack it felt like I couldn’t breathe without surfing again, so I decided to go for it.”

Three weeks after losing her arm, with the wound barely healed, she was back in the water. “I tried to get up [on the board\] like two times and on the third time I got up,” she says. “That was the best feeling in the world. But that first time I was on a longboard, which was easier.”

It took several long weeks after that before Hamilton managed to get to grips with her usual shortboard. “That was much harder,” she says with feeling. “The balancing on that was just really, really hard. I learnt how to do it but it took a few weeks. I did it every day until it came back to me. It’s hard to describe exactly how I do it, I just sort of feel it, you know?”

Unable to use both hands to push off the rails (edges) of the board to stand up, Hamilton developed a technique of pushing her right hand on the middle of the board, sometimes using a glove in the early days for added grip. Her father Tom, also a long-time surfer, attached a small handle to the middle of some of her boards, which she could grab to help her up or hold on to.

Three months after the attack she came fifth in a local competition and went on to win the NSSA (National Scholastic Surfing Association) Nationals in 2005, a leading youth surf championship in America, which led to appearances on the Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres shows, an autobiography — Soul Surfer — and even a range of Bethany Hamilton surfing-inspired perfumes.

Hamilton is joint 10th — out of 100 competitors — in the Women’s World Qualifying Series, which is the second division of the Association of Surf Professionals (ASP) tour, the top international surfing competition. The top seven surfers in the division move up to the ASP tour next year and Hamilton is aiming for one of those places. “They say I’m good enough, especially on big waves.”

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