AN ANGLER has told how she had a bizarre brush with death when her throat was slit wide open by a giant FLYING FISH.

Belinda Bingham was left lying on the floor with blood streaming through her fingers after the 22lb, metre-long mackerel launched itself from the ocean into her neck.

"It sure had some momentum. It just knocked me off my feet. [I] didn't see it coming, didn't see a thing," the Australian revealed following her ordeal.

"I came up and just blood was everywhere."

Belinda was fishing in a boat with her husband Neil off the Channel Island boat ramp, about 30 miles from Darwin in the Northern Territory.

He said the blood from his wife's horrific wound soaked through his shirt in seconds.

"Neither of us had a line in the water at the time. I was putting bait on so my back was towards Belinda," he told ABC news.

"Next thing she's on the floor at my feet going 'Something's hit me, something's hit me'. Looked up, she had her hand to her throat.

"You could see the blood coming out through her fingers, pumping. My shirt was just, the whole chest on the righthand side was just blood, and that was in a matter of two or three seconds."

Neil quickly called the emergency services, and an ambulance crew then rushed Belinda to Royal Darwin Hospital

Belinda was left with a deep wound to her neck, which she said doctors told her had nearly reached her thyroid.

"Other than that it's the chest pain and my voice, because the fish bashed my throat," she told reporters.

Asked if they later ate the fish - which died after falling on the deck of their boat - the couple said they had decided against the idea.

"The main thing is she's still here to tell her story," said Neil.

However, St John Ambulance NT operations manager Craig Garraway said Belinda could have ended up "a lot worse off".

"I believe from the paramedics report there, it had actually impacted on a number of major vessels within the throat area," he said.

"As you're aware a very serious part of the body to get a nasty laceration and could have ended up a lot worse off."

He said the couple did well to stem the flow of bleeding after the bizarre incident.