A 24-year-old American surfer who was mauled by a shark in Indonesia's Bali last week, is reported to be out of danger, and stable in a hospital in Singapore.
On April 25, Ryan Boarman was found catching waves in Balian when a two-meter-long shark attacked him. The shark bit his arm near the elbow, tearing through muscle, all the way down to the bone.
He was immediately taken to the hospital in Bali. Later he was shifted to a hospital in Singapore for multiple surgeries. Doctors have said the surgery was quite a complicated one.
In a Facebook post the Singapore doctor said: "Ryan should need no more surgeries and will likely recover 99% of the arm's functionality (there may be a small reduction in dexterity, so becoming a surgeon is probably off of his bucket list)."
Online news site Coconuts Bali said Boarman can probably go home in a week's time. But it will take around three months before he can start functioning normally and most importantly six months before he can surf again.
Boarman has travelled the world, often surfing along the way and that's what led him to Bali. But somehow he happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time as Balian is notorious for sharks, especially after a rain. There was another shark attack at Balian a few days before this incident.
According to the reports of Surfline, a local surf hotel owner named Darius Sadeli said: "It happened during a murky water period. Every shark attack in Balian happened after a heavy rain in the mountains, which pushes the entire gunk to sea through the Balian River. The river pushes out nutrients, attracts smaller fish and leads to drawing interest to the sharks. With the brown river water, I believe humans surfing or body boarding mimic seals or turtles."
Sadeli also mentioned that most shark-on-human attacks at Balian are hit and run which could have been the defining factor behind Boarman's survival.
