Saint Bethany in a sea of sharks

Bethany Hamilton has become a powerful symbol of Christianity.

There is a warning sign along the track leading down to the beach: "Leave this side clear for Emergency Vehicles".

Behind me, steep serrated green crags are stacked 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, October 31, 2003, 13-year-old Bethany Hamilton was floating on her board, dreaming of the perfect wave, when a 4.5m tiger shark knifed up through the water alongside her.

Its great jaws opened then snapped shut. Then 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. Blanchard senior ripped off his vest and used it as a tourniquet.

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. 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 daughter. It was his worst nightmare come true, every father's worst nightmare, everybody's worst nightmare.

Fast forward to today and go a few miles east, to the breathtakingly lovely Hanalei Bay. There are maybe a dozen guys out on a lazy one-metre day at the break known as "Pine Trees". And a girl.

She is quite distinctive. 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, carving radical, aggressive lines into the wave 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 trying to take you with it. But to see a girl with one arm doing all of the above is little short of miraculous.

She has developed a technique of positioning herself right on the peak, in effect making a late take-off, 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. 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 I can't quite spit them out.

Bodyguards

Back on the beach, she's surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of intimidating bodyguards: a crowd of other blonde 15-year-olds in bikinis.

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.

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". She lives with her parents, two brothers and a dog in a sprawling house 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. And she is, so far as it is possible to make out on the back of our brief encounter, 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?" 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. Rip Curl has sponsored her since she was 10 and 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. Now she has her own coach, and she recently won an amateur National Surfing Association title in California (although she also went out early in the two pro-contests on Oahu, at Haleiwa and Sunset Beach).

But Dunne was not the only bedside visitor. Among the swarm of advisers who fell over themselves to offer their services, Roy Hofstetter stood out.

A "Hollywood agent", with an office in Beverly Hills, he had white hair and a very smart suit. As far as he was concerned, everything had changed. Bethany was no longer a surfer, she was a potential "superstar".

He went into overdrive and engineered a feeding frenzy among competing television shows. Soon the girl with true grit, the girl who never lost her faith even when she lost an arm, was on screens coast-to-coast. She was on Oprah. She was on Tonight and on a programme entitled Fearless.

Soon Hofstetter, talking phone numbers, had sold the film rights to a major production company. And he even had her giving speeches to the troops, marines wounded in Iraq (although she forgot her speech and took questions instead).

"You could say that we have been hired by George Bush," he announced.

In Hawaii for the Rip Curl Pipeline Masters, Dunne said this week, "We didn't want to commodify her. We didn't want to go down the merchandising road."

But Bethany Hamilton has become a commodity. Her name is attached to merchandise. Already on sale is a "Bethany Fragrance" - with two lines, "Wired" and "Stoked", presented in surfboard-shaped bottles. Bethany jewellery is coming soon. Earlier this year her autobiography was published.

She admits, "I never wanted to write a book," but was talked into it.

Hofstetter was one of the persuaders. It took teamwork.

First she poured out all her raw feelings to her pastor at the Kauai Christian Fellowship, Rick Bundschuh; he then wrote down the first draft, which was conveyed to Sheryl Berk in New York, who had already ghosted the lives of Britney Spears (Stages) and Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn DiScala (Wise Girl).

Surfing metaphors

I really do like the book. All those vicious surfing metaphors - "rip", "carve", "shred" - are made shockingly literal. It's little short of a resurrection story, a rising from a watery grave. And it is a good news story - overcoming immense pain and suffering.

There is a lot about God in it, too.

God is not an add-on in Hamilton's young life, an embroidery stitched in by an over-zealous pastor.

God saw her through her troubles and gave her the strength to get back on her board.

The attack, in her eyes, is the trial she had to endure, like Job. And others, too, must endure their trials.

In the US, in the 21st century, it was a tremendously powerful message. Hamilton was taken up by the evangelical lobby and put on show as a wounded born-again icon at a rally of 50,000 believers in Washington.

She won not only an award for the best comeback but another for being the "Most Inspiring Person of the Year". She had become Saint Bethany.

The Bethany Hamilton story symbolises a metamorphosis within surfing. In the 20th century, surfing underwent a renaissance as the sport - more a statement, graffiti on waves - of the outsider, a whole marginal subculture of alienated youth.

In the new millennium, Christianity has shrewdly reclaimed surfing for itself.

Surfing has always been transcendental in spirit. But it had a dreamy, mystic, Zen flavour.

Shaun Thomson, South African 1970s world champion, said: "Time slows down in the tube."

Surfing was a hallucinatory drug and surfers returned to the beach looking as if they were still in a trance.

But then it started to get mainstream and wholesome. Surfers, instead of being stubbly, dedicated losers from broken homes, became solid citizens with supportive parents. With the rise of the surf industry, they became athletes.

Now, as the writer Cintra Wilson scathingly remarked: "Many [surfers] are big Jesus freaks, in a real Old Testament, Book of Jeremiah, the Apocalypse-cometh kind of way."

There are surfing contests for Christians.

Former champ Tom Curren distributed Bibles on the beach (and, what's more perplexing, he signed them).

For Bethany, surfing is a manifestation of faith.

Cutting against the grain of the old surfing stereotype, she recently made an anti-drug commercial. She is a synthesis of surfing, salvation, and cinema.

But Bethany always was and remains a serious long-term wave-user. She is the real deal, unfazed by trauma or celebrity.

She has recovered superbly from her brush with the apocalypse and, given a few years, could yet make an impact on the pro ranks.

She doesn't really need to pitch any message: she is the message.

They caught the beast that chewed off her arm and strung it up from a hook, its once-terrible jaws hanging slackly open.

But there are still plenty of sharks out there, not just in the water: especially not in the water.

I hope she can out-surf them, too.

- INDEPENDENT