New Zealand angler and spearfishing creator Henry Gibbs is on the mend after a shark attack turned the first dive of a Fiji trip into a hospital stay involving four surgeries and a skin graft to his right leg.
Gibbs, who has built an audience of more than 100,000 across Instagram and TikTok through fishing and diving content filmed in New Zealand and overseas, went public with the ordeal on July 24 after two weeks offline. He described the opening dive of his trip ending in a "pretty nasty shark incident" in Fijian waters, sharing photographs taken from his hospital bed.
As People detailed, friends pulled Gibbs from the water "quickly" and got him to medical help, where doctors carried out four operations and grafted skin onto the injured leg. Despite that, his message was one of gratitude rather than grievance.
"It's looking like I'll make a full recovery, which I'm hugely grateful for," he wrote, adding that he held no hard feelings toward the shark because he had been in its environment, hunting its food.
"Wrong place, wrong time, and there are definitely a few lessons I'll share when I post the footage in the hope it helps someone avoid ending up in the same situation and a bit on how to respond to it," Gibbs wrote.
The attack was reported across several outlets. The New Zealand Herald quoted him as "feeling incredibly lucky to still have my leg," NDTV recorded the four surgeries the diver endured, and Surfer magazine ran the hospital images alongside its account of the incident.
Gibbs thanked those who had reached out in the days after the attack. "Just wanted to say a genuine thank you to everyone who's reached out over the past six days since the incident, both in Fiji and back home in New Zealand," he wrote. "For now, just feeling very lucky and with an even greater appreciation for life. Cheers."
That outlook matches how he has described his purpose online. "At the end of the day, if my content could put a smile on your face — or even inspire you to get out there and do something yourself — then that's a huge win in my book," he said when he introduced himself on TikTok in 2025.
Gibbs plans to publish footage of the encounter once he has recovered, pitching it as guidance on how to avoid and react to a shark encounter. The immediate task is rebuilding a leg that came uncomfortably close to a far grimmer result.