Tough kid

Sam Jones has an article in the Guardian about a very tough Kiwi:

When she hit Oreti beach on New Zealand's South Island for a spot of surfing last night, Lydia Ward felt there was something different, perhaps even treacherous, about the sea floor. "At first, I wasn't quite sure what it was," said the fourteen-year-old boogie boarder. "And I was trying to say to myself it was just a piece of driftwood." It was only when she again stood on the unfamiliar surface and turned to her little brother, Alex, that she began to worry. "I just looked at my brother's face and he said 'Whoa!'. And I looked to my side and I just saw this massive grey thing twisting in the water." The "massive grey thing" proceeded to lunge at the teenager and bite her hip.
Thanks to the adrenaline, Lydia didn't feel the shark's teeth breach her wetsuit, or hesitate to defend herself. "I hit it with the end of my boogie board and that scared it away," she told the New Zealand Herald.
Although she could see the blood spreading out in the water, Lydia was too far from the shore to run and began to worry that her attacker would return. It, was, she said, "quite nerve-racking". Fortunately, the shark stayed away and Lydia was able to scramble on to the beach, near Invercargill, where the margin of her escape became apparent. "I only realised it bit me when I hopped out of the water and saw the bite marks through my wetsuit." As her hip "sort of just went numb", she ran to her mother's car to explain what had happened.
"She's a really cool-headed little girl," Fiona Ward told the paper. "There was no screaming or anything, or hysterics. She just came up to the car, she looked a bit shaky, and she said 'Oh, I've just been attacked by a shark'. And I was like 'What?'. We didn't really almost believe her. And then she showed us the teeth marks on her wetsuit, and it was ripped in several places." Ward also found a couple of puncture marks on her daughter's leg from the shark, which her ten-year-old son said was about 1.5 metres long.
Lydia, who said she went surfing only "on a hot day when there's nothing much to do", has been rethinking her leisure activities since the encounter. "It's sort of put me off the beach, but it's still fine with rivers and lakes," she said. "So I'll just stick to them now."

Rico says, like the Kiwis would, bugger...