Fishing spear impales Cairns boatie
Julie Lightfoot

Monday, March 8, 2010

© The Cairns Post

A SPEARFISHER is lucky to be alive after being impaled by a spear in a freak boating accident.

The man was shot in the stomach and had a spear “protruding about 5cm from his abdomen” when paramedics and firefighters raced to Yorkeys Knob boat ramp about 3.20pm on Saturday.

"The whole piece was still in him," a witness told The Cairns Post.

"He was in a lot of pain but still conscious. He had his wetsuit peeled off to the waist and it looked like the spear might have gone right through him."

Ambulance officers called for help from firefighters with specialist cutting equipment but decided the spear did not need to be cut after assessing the man’s injuries at the boat ramp.

A fire spokesman said the injured spearfisher was put on a stretcher sitting up, with his knees up and the spear still lodged in him.

He was taken to Cairns Base Hospital, where he was in a stable condition yesterday.

The man, in his 20s, is believed to have been involved in an accident on board the boat, rather than in the water, during a fishing trip with mates off Cairns.

Police said there were no suspicious circumstances.

An emergency services officer said the spearfisher had been extremely lucky.

"He was pretty tough throughout it all (but) he was lucky it didn’t go anywhere else, that it didn’t get his spine," the officer said.

"It’s not the kind of thing you usually see."

There also was a crowd of worried onlookers on hand at the boat ramp when the injured man was brought in.

How the hell did it impale him to such a degree above water...?

That is why you never have a loaded gun out of the water.

Its not bad enough that it was loaded out of the water, but loaded on a boat? Out of control.