Shark Week star Paul de Gelder back for ‘Blood in the Water’

For its 35th Annual Shark Week, Discovery has, as always, dedicated itself to all things Selachimorpha.  For Australia’s Paul de Gelder, this marks his 10th year as a Shark Week star.

De Gelder gets wet and all-too-near the apex predators as he hosts Wednesday’s “Florida Shark: Blood in the Water,” a look at what’s touted as the “Shark Attack Capital of the World,” and Friday’s “Deadly Sharks of Paradise,” a shark haven 100 miles off Brazil’s coast.

De Gelder stands out in any Shark Week as the survivor of a horrific 2009 bull shark attack.  He, a Navy diver, was in Sydney Harbor when he was bitten, lost his right hand and most of his right leg. Now an advocate for sharks, he isn’t afraid to talk about how scary being underwater can be with three massive sharks heading his way.

“I never was provided any therapy or counseling from the military. I had to do all my own physical therapy. So I had the opportunity to learn things the way that I do like to learn them — and that’s by trial and error,” de Gelder, 46, began in a phone interview from LA, his home for the last six years.

“I never started to have PTSD. I don’t have depression. I’ve never had nightmares. I think the reason is because I’ve learned to open up myself. I don’t have to hide behind that facade of being a manly-man anymore.

“Because I feel like I’ve had my man card pretty well stamped for life. I got eaten by a shark, lost two limbs, swam back to my boat through a pool of my own blood and still lived. Now I’m with sharks for a living and don’t feel the necessity to have to bury stuff and be like, ‘Man, I gotta be tough.’

“Being a real man is being vulnerable as well as sharing that side of you that you might be a little bit embarrassed of. But if you don’t share it, you just keep it all inside, it just boils over and bubbles into something else and that’s not healthy at all.

“So I like to tell people: In vulnerability there is strength. Once you don’t have all of that stuff inside of you, you’re free to be the person that you want to be.

“What I’m trying to achieve is I want people to learn the truth about sharks. I want people to learn about how you can interact with them. Learn how important our oceans are. Because knowledge is power, as we all know.

“And also knowledge dispels fear. So that’s just how I like to live my life now. Just share it all. Lay it all on the line.”