A Motril fisherman made the mistake of putting his hand where he shouldn’t, yet was lucky enough not to lose it, when a small shark took a glancing bite at his wrist.

This fishing boat, Nuevo Mirandilla, was about 22 nautical miles south of Motril at 07.00h when the incident occurred. They had already landed about 50 tintoreras (blue sharks) as they gathered the net in but for some reason the man put his hand into the net and the next thing you know he was wearing a real, shark-skin wrist band…

Luckily, it was a glancing bite, but it still took flesh off his wrist and caused him to bleed copiously.

The skipper called the port and the rescue boat, Salvamar Hamal, was dispatched to pick him up, arriving back at 10.00h. He was taken to Hospital Santa Ana, where he was patched up and discharged.

Between ten and twenty million of these sharks are killed each year through fishing. It’s not the most appetizing morsel but it is smoked or salted and even used as fish meal. Their skin is used for leather, the fins for shark-fin soup and the liver for oil.

So rarely do blue sharks attack humans that in nearly 500 years there have only been 13 attacks on people, four of which ended 1 – 0 for the sharks…

(News: Motril, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)