A brave paddleboarder explained how he desperately tried to fend off an alligator as it savagely tore into a swimmer’s arm in a Florida river.
Mike Head was out on the water with his wife and kids Saturday afternoon when he spotted the reptile heading towards the female victim “like a missile” in the Silver River in Marion County, he told Fox 35.
By the time he reached the woman, the gator’s jaws were locked on her arm and he used his paddle to fight it off, he revealed.
“I couldn’t swing because I knew I was going to hit her in the head from my position, so I come around the other side,” Head said.
The victim was then pulled to the shore with the help of another boater and Head said that when he tied her bleeding wound off with a rope, she turned to him and said, “Tie it tight.”
Good Samaritan Head described how he and his family were having a fun day on the water before two women started yelling “Gator!”
Head admitted he worried that the animal would turn on him and his children as the scene unfolded from around 30 feet away.
“Is she dead? Do I dive in, and now I’m going to get ripped apart myself?” he said.
“There’s a lot of things going through my head, trying to figure out what I was doing as I was paddling on this thing towards her.”
Another bystander, John Gamache, was eating lunch on his boat when he heard the cries for help from the woman’s family.
He sped towards the group, and the noise from the craft helped scare the gator away, Gamache told Fox 35.
“It was a terrible injury, bones poking out, blood everywhere. Obviously, the minutes mattered,” he said.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) said it is believed the woman was swimming in the river when the beast attacked.
Trappers contracted by the FWC caught and removed a 9-foot, 8-inch alligator Sunday, allowing for the river to be reopened to the public.
The harrowing incident comes just weeks after a Californian woman was killed by an alligator in a Florida river.
Brittany Clark, 31, died after a giant, 13-foot gator ripped into her as she paddled in the shallows of the Econlockhatchee River at Little Big Econ State Forest on June 28.
In a harrowing 911 call, Clark’s boyfriend can be heard pleading with emergency services to rush to the scene.
Also in June, a boy lost his hand after an alligator in Florida clamped its teeth into his flesh while he was fishing with his dad.
Brodie Terry, 11, from Pennsylvania, was fishing in Marion County on June 27 when the 8-foot, 7-inch gator snapped its jaws around his hand as he was about to release a fish back into the water.
