A man who took a suicide leap off the Golden Gate Bridge told an audience at a mental health conference in Australia how he survived the normally deadly fall after a sea lion pushed him to the surface and kept him afloat until the Coast Guard arrived.

"I really thought it was a shark and I was panicking," Kevin Hines told the AFP.

"I remember floating atop the water and this thing just bumping me, bumping me up."

Now 33 years old and a mental health advocate, Hines said he spoke to a man who had been on the bridge that day and had seen that it was not a shark but a sea lion.

(READ the AFP story in the UK Telegraph)

Photo credit: jeroen020, via CC on flickr