A Honolulu teen and his father were at the right place at the right time Saturday when a tiger shark attacked a swimmer off Lanikai.
At about 11:40 a.m. Saturday, Charlie Liverton, 13, and his father, Julian, were paddling to shore from the Mokulua Islands in separate one-man canoes when they heard someone yell for help. They saw the swimmer but were unaware he had been attacked.
“Initially we thought he had seen a shark and we’ll just pick him up and he’ll be OK and he could paddle back in,” said Liverton, an eighth-grader at the Honolulu Waldorf School.
Both turned and paddled toward the swimmer. That’s when they saw a trail of blood.
“Once we saw the blood, it became real,” said Liverton.
Liverton said his father had a difficult time pulling the victim into his canoe because of sunscreen on the swimmer’s skin. So his father lifted him in by the back of his shorts.
He had been bitten on both feet. Liverton said it appeared the swimmer’s feet were hanging by “threads of skin.”
Liverton’s father then removed his long-sleeve rash guard and used the sleeves as tourniquets.
Meanwhile the man’s swimming companion was about 100 feet away and apparently unaware of the attack because he had been swimming with his head in the water.
Charlie Liverton paddled up to the friend and told him what happened and that he needed to get onto his canoe.
“I thought, you know, get him out of the water so he doesn’t get bitten, too,” he recalled.
In the first canoe his father kept talking to the victim, asking him questions to keep him alert, Liverton said.
Then, more trouble: His father’s canoe capsized as they neared the shore. But Liverton’s father was able to flip it right side up with one hand as he held the injured swimmer with the other.
It took about 20 minutes for his father to reach the shore, he estimated.
Had Julian Liverton not been there, his son said, the swimmer would have “definitely bled out.”
The man remains in the intensive care unit at the Queen’s Medical Center.
“I hope he gets better,” the teen said.
Acacia Barnes, a seventh-grader at Waldorf School, was on the beach taking photos with her new camera when she saw Liverton’s father about a half-mile from shore with the swimmer sitting atop his canoe.
