Husband recalls frantic moment he punched away shark to save wife's life in NSW attack

A man who punched a shark that latched onto his wife's leg off a NSW beach has recounted the frantic moment he saved her life.

Chantelle Doyle, 35, was surfing at Shelley Beach at Port Macquarie, north of Sydney, when she was bitten on her right leg by the great white about 9.30am yesterday.

READ MORE: Husband punched shark until it let wife go in attack on NSW beach

Her husband, Mark Rapley, was in tears today as he described how he immediately launched into action when he saw the three-metre animal.

"You see the mother of your child, your support, everything you are, you just react," he told 9News.

"Get off that calf, that's all I could think, just get off."

Mr Rapley said the shark hit his wife's surfboard with such force that it threw her off it and by time he could move towards her, it had latched its 6cm-long teeth onto her leg.

"I was trying to leverage punches down onto it," he said.

"It feels like you're punching a brick wall, like it's hard."

The shark swam away after the barrage of punches, but despite his efforts Mr Rapley doesn't believe he is the hero – instead saying his wife, injured and bleeding at the time, acted more heroically by getting back onto her board and paddling an agonising 50m to shore alongside a group of locals.

The group used her long board as a makeshift stretcher and her leg rope as a tourniquet to stop the loss of blood.

"At one stage it got pretty heavy and we slipped a bit and she said 'I'm only 60 kilos, you lift more than that in the gym, come on'," local surfer Peter Lobb told 9News.

Ms Doyle is expected to face a long recovery, but her husband says she will always consider the frightening incident as special.

"She's a conservationist and botanist and doing a PhD, so she's worried about the shark," he said.