Rip Curl has sponsored her since, at the age of 10, she started winning nearly every title that a 10-year-old girl can win. “Our ambition,” he said, “is to see her surfing again just as well as she would have done without the bloody shark.”She got back in the water a bare few weeks after the shark-attack. And she is, so far as it is possible to make out on the back of our brief encounter, stupendously unaffected by either the shark or the subsequent wave – the tsunami of attention she has received in America.One of the first things she said, while recovering in hospital, was, “When can I go surfing again?” One of the second was, “Does this mean I’m going to lose my sponsorship?” Gary Dunne, team manager of the surfing company Rip Curl, flew from Australia to reassure her on that. She lives with her parents, two brothers and a dog in a sprawling house with banana trees in the garden in the secluded village of Princeville that stands on the bluffs overlooking Hanalei Bay.She likes to go to the cinema and one of her favourites is The Passion of the Christ. It was lucky I was standing there in baggy shorts or I may have been tempted to ask for an autograph As it is, I awkwardly shake her by the hand. I come within a whisker of bowing.Bethany Hamilton is a classic girl-next-door, tall and slim, shy, with streaky blonde hair, freckles on her face and braces on her teeth Her conversational staples are “yeah” and “uh-huh”. There are a couple of other monosyllables I think about uttering: one of them is “shark”, the other, “God”, and they both play a big part in the book.

But one way and another I can’t quite spit them out.Back on the beach, she’s surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of intimidating bodyguards: a crowd of other blonde 15-year-olds in bikinis. She can still paddle after a fashion, using one arm and a foot dropping off the back of the board. And she has developed a technique of positioning herself right on the peak, in effect making a late take-off every time, dropping down the face and levering herself up by shoving down on a wooden handle strapped to the deck.We have the kind of salty, halting, monosyllabic conversation, punctuated by passing waves, that you have in the water:Me: “Good wave.”Her: “Thanks.”Me: “Liked your book.”Her: “Cool.”The book I refer to is called Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board. But to see a girl with one arm doing all of the above is little short of miraculous. As the woman who works at the Hanalei Surf Shop said to me: “You can’t miss her. She’s 15, blonde, and has only one arm.”Added to which, even in the fearsomely competitive Hawaiian waters, Bethany Hamilton is still the best surfer out there, grabbing more than her fair share of waves, and carving radical, aggressive lines into the face.There’s always something magical and mysterious about surfing: walking on water, rising to your feet and staying on them even as the wave is crashing down and trying to take you down with it. There are maybe a dozen guys out on a lazy 4ft day at the break known as “Pine Trees” And a girl She is quite distinctive.

It struck a universal chord of horror: the next day a paper published a picture of the surfboard with the chunk bitten out of it.Fast forward to today and go a few miles east, to the breathtakingly lovely Hanalei Bay. He was wheeled out to make way for a terribly injured girl who had been out surfing at Tunnels.Tom Hamilton knew then it could only be Alana or his own daughter. It was his worst nightmare come true, every father’s worst nightmare, everybody’s worst nightmare: Jaws, The Beast, Little Red Riding Hood. Blanchard senior ripped off his vest and used it as a tourniquet on what was left of the girl’s arm and slowly, agonisingly, they guided her to shore.

In the ambulance that took Bethany to the nearest hospital (nearly an hour away) the paramedics thought she had lost so much blood that she was going to die.By an uncanny coincidence, her own father was in the operating theatre about to have surgery on his knee. It swam away, having bitten off a crescent-shaped chunk of her red, white, and blue board and 90 per cent of Bethany Hamilton’s left arm.
She was out surfing with her best friend, Alana Blanchard, and her best friend’s dad. Behind me, steep serrated green crags are stacked up like immense teeth. This is where it happened, I can’t help thinking as I stroke out over the disturbingly shallow reef. Here, at “Tunnels” on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, about 8am on the morning of Halloween, 31 October 2003, 13-year-old Bethany Hamilton was floating on her board in the crystal-clear waters of the Pacific, dreaming of the perfect wave, when a 15ft tiger shark knifed up out of the water alongside her The great jaws opened then snapped shut. He added: “There is a possibility the Government will be fairly innovative in how it seeks to recover those funds.”.