A 73-year-old Australian fisherman must have thought he was in Steven Spielberg's classic movie Jaws, as he survived a 9-foot great white shark attack that knocked him off his feet and landed on his boat.

The airborne shark that flew out of the water and into a 15-foot powerboat injured the fisherman, Terry Selwood. The shark's pectoral fin badly bruised and caused bleeding to Selwood's right arm. Fortunately for Selwood, after the coast guards took him to the paramedics at Evans Head, 450 miles north of Sydney, it was reported that his swollen arm did not have any fractures.

Once Selwood fell on the deck from the collision, he quickly jumped up and avoided the shark's extreme erratic wiggling. Selwood quickly went to the gunnel at the bow of the boat.

"I didn't give it a chance to look me in the eyes. I wanted to get up and get on top of the gunnel because it was thrashing around madly," Selwood told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Selwood radioed the Evans Head coast guard and stayed away from the wiggling 440-pound carnivore until the coastguard skipper, Bill Bates, arrived and pulled Selwood out of the vessel.

Bates mistook the serious danger of Selwood's radio call.

"Often a fisherman will bring a small shark on board - maybe 2 or 3 feet - and they're still ferocious. That's what I was expecting, but I was totally wrong," Bates said.

Selwood told the Associated Press on Monday that other than his boat, he will have to replace destroyed equipment like buckets and coolers before he goes back to the favorite fishing spot that he has visited for more than 50 years.

"He didn't do anything structural to me boat, it just smashed anything that was in his road," Selwood said. "You can understand, he was a wild creature out of his comfort zone."