A SURFER has been rushed to hospital after being attacked by a nasty seal.
The bad tempered sea mammal sunk its teeth into Nathan Shepherd’s right arm while he was paddling in Sydney’s Shelly Beach.
3 The seal is pictured following one of The surfers to shore
3 The determined beast moves towards the woman holding the camera
3 The vicious sea mammal continues to lunge towards the camerawoman
The Manly Daily reports that the shocked boarder was taken to a nearby hospital where he was given antibiotics and is set to have surgery on his bloodied arm.
Lawyer Shepherd revealed he initially thought the Australian fur seal was friendly.
He said: “I thought it was amazing to be out with a seal. It was swimming closer to me.
“It swam quite fast – it jumped out of the water and bit me on the upper arm.”
His wife Miriam told the news outlet that she was relived it wasn’t a shark which attacked her sporty husband.
Terrifying footage shows the seal beaching itself after following a surfer to the shore.
And Shepherd wasn’t the thuggish seal’s only victim that day.
Surfer Peter Fitzhardinge, 54, also had a run in with the unfriendly beast, reports The Manly Daily.
And engineer Tom Wallington, 26, told the Daily Mail Australia that he was attacked by the seal on the same fateful Sunday.
He said: “We saw him [the seal] come up to us. At first he looked playful and he was kind of rolling around on his belly.
“He hit me from below, I have puncture marks on board, and he knocked me off my board. That’s when I thought, ‘I’m in some trouble here.’
“The force at which he bit my board was quite frightening actually.”
Wallington said the vicious seal also attacked another man who was swimming near him.
He described the brutish animal as ‘four or five feet’ long weighing a sizeable 50kg.