Charlie Vercoe

speaker

799 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Charlie Vercoe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

You’re Gonna Want To Hear This · Charlie Verco: He Paddled Towards The Shark To Save Her · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

And once they were all safe, they went back out on the jet ski and went, let's go find this thing.

And when they found the shark, it saw the jet ski and just did a 90 degree turn and came up and looked at them to go, where's my food?

Thinking it was, it's, yeah, it's food that had just attacked, I guess.

But no, I didn't see it.

So I was very much in a,

the state of mind of just get her to the beach and hadn't and a lot of my stress had just been going into that so i was really lucky that when i got to the beach there was lifeguards that came out into the water to help me they helped me with the last little bit of the paddle and then when we could stand um they just grabbed that leah's legs and i was able to grab her torso and there was heaps of people just helping get her up onto the sand and they

Because it was such a busy day at Coogee, there was police on scene, there was all the council lifeguards ready to go, but there was also medical professionals and other surf lifesavers on the beach that were on the sand whilst I was dragging her in and had taken that time to prepare what they were going to do and thought through of how they were going to execute it.

And so when I put Leah on the ground, I was able to put pressure on her leg to try and prevent a bit of the bleeding while they put the tourniquets on.

that were all ready to go.

And then from then I could just see how much more prepared and honestly how much more training these people had had than me and felt comfortable that I could step back and let them take over and collect my thoughts because

There was so many people there available, help and ready to go.

And by the time I came back to the scene and I took a second to myself and made sure I was all right, I was happy with how I was going, went and checked that my dad was all right, the other people I was paddling with were all right, and then checking on the swimmers that were right next to Leah when the attack was going on.

I went back over and just tried to hold up a board for a bit of privacy and they had Leah conscious again.

So it just shows that the training they had and the confidence they had was so impressive and the skills they were able to execute under a high pressure environment.

Yeah, yeah, it definitely wasn't a normal state of mind, but I've spent a lot of my life being scared of things and I've spent a lot of my life managing high arousal environments, be that through racing or just training and having to push myself to go out and surf that I was scared of.

Yeah, I've always been fearful of sharks, not as scared as my dad is of sharks.

He's very protective of his family in that sense, and he hates them.

So he was the one who would always yell at me when I was out surfing at sunset, even when now I'm 25 and I go, Dad, I need to be responsible for my own decisions.

And he goes, no, I don't care.

You can get out of the surf.

Showing 161–180 of 799 · page 9 of 40