If the Worst Happens

Why this chapter exists

People ask us this constantly. After talks, in messages, at the shop, from the back of a boat: what do I do if one gets hold of me. So we answer it. Refusing to answer has never made anybody safer.

What follows is what we would do. Not a procedure. We are not handing you instructions to carry out. Read it as an answer to a question, given by people who have spent their working lives around these animals and have been asked it more times than we can count.

Understand where you are by the time any of it applies. If this chapter is relevant to your day, prevention already failed. The rest of this book is the part that keeps you alive. This is what is left after that part didn't.

And none of it is guaranteed. We mean that. People have survived doing these things, and people have died doing exactly the same things, in water that looked the same, against animals the same size. We can tell you what we would try. We cannot tell you that it works.

One more thing, and we mean it as the most useful sentence in the chapter: if anything here ever conflicts with what a dispatcher, a paramedic or a doctor is telling you in the moment, do what they say. They can see the situation. A book cannot.