DHAKA: A man who jumped off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to try to take his own life and was kept afloat by a sea lion said Wednesday suicide prevention was now his life’s work.

Kevin Hines, in Australia to speak at several conferences, was a teenager struggling with mental illness and depression when he jumped off the famous bridge in 2000.

He survived the fall, only to see what he thought was a shark beneath him.

‘I was freaking out in those waters. And I was thinking I didn’t die there and now I am going to die here in the water because of a creature of some sort,’ he told the media, reports the Straits Times.

‘I really thought it was a shark and I thought it was going to take off a leg and I was panicking.’

‘And then it just didn’t, it just kept circling beneath me. I remember floating atop the water and this thing just bumping me, bumping me up.’

Hines later spoke to a man who had been on the bridge that day and who had seen that it was not a shark but a sea lion.

‘Everyone who looked down saw this creature circling in a clockwise motion beneath me. So they saw me laying atop the water and being bumped.’

‘This thing beneath me didn't stop or didn't go away until I heard the boat behind me.’

Hines believes another factor also helped save his life - a woman driving past saw his plunge and immediately reported it to a friend in the coastguard.

‘I’ve been given the gift of a second chance of life so many times,’ he said.

Hines, now 33, is a mental health advocate who speaks at events around the world in a bid to prevent suicides.

BDST: 1502 HRS, MAR 04, 2015