SYDNEY: A French deckhand yesterday admitted he was lucky to be alive after escaping with bite wounds when a crocodile latched onto his head in northern Australia. Yoann Galeran, 29, had swum out from shore to retrieve a moored dinghy after dark at Nhulunbuy on Sunday when the two-meter saltwater croc attacked, grabbing him by the head and rolling him in the water. “I just feel that I’ve been lucky and I just think if it was a bigger crocodile, I maybe wouldn’t have any head,” he told ABC radio.

“I was swimming, and maybe four or five meters from the boat, I just feel like rocks hitting on my head and something strong and I just realize (it was) a croc,” he added. “I just had the feeling that if I want to fight for my life, I just need to move all my body as much as I can. “He just hit me on the top, on the left side, and on top of my neck and tried to push me down in the water.

I punched him anywhere.” After fighting off the beast, he managed to scramble to safety aboard the dinghy and make it to shore where he was rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment to bite marks to his head, neck and shoulders. Saltwater crocodiles, which can grow up to seven meters long and weigh more than a ton, are a common feature of Australia’s tropical north.