Surfing Movie Bethany Hamilton along with the Teeth of the Tiger

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• Publié par: linahanoren1975
• Publié le: 07 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• Licence : En savoir +
  Paternité, partage des conditions initiales à l'identique
• Langue: English

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Surfing Movie Bethany Hamilton and also the Teeth of the Tiger

Red Water: Bethany Hamilton along with the Teeth of the Tiger

MATT GEORGE

Ha’ena, Kauai, Hawaii—October 31, 2003.

She’d been major a daredevil life for weeks at present. And from the end, she had no idea of the trouble she was getting herself into. Swimming beneath the moon, swimming beneath the radar, on the other hand swimming. Always swimming. Hungry for life, for survival. Starving with need. Patrolling the reefs for opportunity, for flesh. Swinging her gigantic statuette with the regularity of a metronome, propelling her 14 feet of girth with the trouble-free pull and intent of a heavily martial shewarrior. With her ragged, 14-inch dorsal fin breaking the surface, she’d been bumping into surfers for weeks at present. Testing them, feeling their fear, waiting for her time. They seemed such simple prey. Slow, awkward, lounging on the surface like something sick. And at present it was in her path. It was time. Another was here, apart in the trip. Alone and feeble, and this one looked so small and feeble. She approached her prey from the side, taking her time, timing the strokes of the thin, pale arm that dipped off the surfboard in a slow rhythm of bubbles. Twenty feet . . . ten feet . . . five feet . . . and with one last savage kick of her big tail she opened her jaws in a ragged yawn. Taking the thin pale arm in her mouth, she clamped down with over sixteen tons of sawing pressure. As her teeth met, she effortlessly plucked the thing inside body that once owned it.

The bite was so clean and painless that Bethany Hamilton, 13, noticed that the sea had turned red before she realized that her arm was gone at the shoulder. A strange serenity came over her, a warmth, as her body began to scream its outrage. Spurting a deep, lively, burgundy-colored blood, she struggled over to her greatest friend, Alana Blanchard, also thirteen, and could individual manage the words, I think a shark just attacked me. Alana told her to not even joke of such matters. Then Alana eyes saw something that her mind couldn’t grasp. The bleeding stump where her extreme friend’s left arm used to be. Alana’s stomach revolted and purged twice before she called for her father and her brother who were paddling for a nearby wave.

Imagine the dilemma of Holt Blanchard, 45, who was now almost a half mile offshore with his son and his teenager and a profusely bleeding and seriously injured Bethany Hamilton and a large, dangerous shark somewhere below. After struggling to apply a tourniquet with his rash guard, he now had an impossible decision to make. Should he send his kids on ahead, across the deep lagoon, to keep them away from a bleeding Bethany? And if so, how could he protect them? Should he keep them close? And if so, could he put himself between them and the shark if it returned? For one brief moment he even thought of slitting his own wrists on the ragged edge of Bethany’s board and slipping into the sea to await his fate while the other three made for shore. He had no time to deliberate. He made his decision on instinct. Keep the family close, look the danger collectively. He instructed his lass to keep talking to a quickly fading Bethany while he and his son rigged her leash and began dragging her to shore.

Cheri Hamilton, mother of Bethany, was driving so fast behind the ambulance that law enforcement pulled her over. She hadn’t seen Bethany nonetheless, and had no idea about her condition. Frantic, it wasn’t until the ambulance driver called back to law enforcement officers with a walkie-talkie that they let Cheri pass through. As she mashed the accelerator to the floor, a call came in on her cell phone. It was Holt Blanchard. Cheri asked him how fatally Bethany was hurt. The conversation went like this:

Holt: You nasty you don’t recognize?

Cheri: Identify what?

Holt: Cheri . . . her arm is gone.

Cheri: (long pause) Gone where?

Tom Hamilton, Bethany’s father, was basically to be put under for a knee operation at the small local hospital when he was informed that the doctors essential the table he was on for an emergency. There had been a shark attack on a adolescent girl at Makua Beach. His focus sank. He knew he had solitary a fifty-fifty chance, since Bethany and Alana were the only adolescent girls on the island with enough guts to surf the place. He got up and stood in the hallway as the victim was wheeled into the hospital. He held his breath. He would distinguish in a second. Alana had dark brown hair; Bethany’s was almost white blonde. As the gurney turned the corner all the look went out of his chest. The hair was blonde.

It has been widely stated that the tiger shark’s characteristic serrated tooth shape and grotesquely influential jaws have evolved

for trained feeding on large sea turtles, whose shells cannot be split with an axe. Called the hyena of the sea, the tiger shark strikes with a sawing motion of its bottom jaw against the razor blades of the best rated jaw. Bethany’s arm was removed so cleanly, with such precision and efficiency, that the operating doctor was confused when he first saw the wound. He wanted to make out who the son-ofa- bitch was that had amputated without his permission.

The next day, after word had spread through the islands, Laird Hamilton (no relation to Bethany) called his father, the legendary surfer/fisherman Billy Hamilton and told him if he didn’t tour out and kill this fucking shark, he was going to do it himself. Fourteen days later, much to the outrage of the indigenous Hawaiian people, Billy Hamilton and Ralph Infantile hauled to the beach a 14-foot tiger shark with a ragged dorsal fin. It took a gutted 5-foot gray shark as bait and a barbed hook the size of dinner plate. Butchering it offshore away from prying eyes, they found no evidence of Bethany’s arm or her watch or the 18-inch semi-circle of surfboard that the shark had taken with it. The shark would have long before regurgitated the irritating fiberglass and foam and probably the arm with it. Nonetheless, removing the jaws and matching them to Bethany’s board revealed a ideal forensic healthy to within two micrometers. Aside in the jaws, the individual other part of the shark that was saved was a section of its dusky, striped skin. This skin was unfilled to Boy Akana, a local Kahuna, who would fashion it into a ceremonial drum to call on the ancient spirits to calm the seas. Governor Lingle would guideline in a citizens statement that the business was now closed and that the tourist industry should “just acquire back to normal.”

Seven days successive, Bethany Hamilton pays a visit to Ralph Youthful’s several with Billy Hamilton and her father Tom. She is there to visit the jaws that took her arm. Crouching beside the bloody things within the middle of the lawn, they come up to her shoulder. For long moments the gents stand around uncomfortably as she curiously pokes at the razor sharp teeth one by one. Then she looks up at Billy Hamilton and asks if she can have some of the teeth for a necklace she would like to make—an amulet to protect her within the future. The adult men are so stunned that nobody speaks.

Bethany Hamilton, 200 yards within the spot where the shark that attacked her was caught. Hanalei Bay Pier, November 2004. (Photo, Matt George)

Upon leaving the manifold with her Father, Bethany is heard saying to herself, I hope I don’t have dreams.

On the way dwelling, with a sleeping Bethany next to him inside the car, Tom Hamilton begins to hum a tune he hasn’t heard or sung since he was within the U.S. Navy as a little gunner’s mate. His lips go slightly as he recalls the words of the Navy hymn:

Eternal Father, healthy to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

Driving on through the rain, the windshield wipers beating monotonously, these are the lone words Tom Hamilton can remember. He reaches out to softly take his child’s hand in his, then again it is not there.