A kayaker down under got a good look at the razor-sharp bridgework of a great white shark while fishing last November in South Australia.
Avid angler Matthew Gorne, 33, a manager at Hungry Jack’s in Adelaide, was kayaking near the old power station site three miles (5 kilometers) from Port Augusta when the scary encounter happened on the water.
“I was slowly paddling at the time when I saw a big image on my fishing sounder, which looked like a shark, and it was right below me, halfway up the water column,” he told The Epoch Times. “That’s when I looked down into the water and saw the shark about three meters below the surface.”
He said he had always wanted to video-record a great white—this one, reportedly, was about three meters in length—but the situation soon became too precarious for filming.
“It started to circle around me and getting closer and started brushing up against the kayak,” he said. “I quickly grabbed my phone and started videoing it, but as soon as I realized it was getting way too close, and doing more frequent circles around me, I realized that I needed to get out of here before it decides to flip the kayak.”
Gorne put away his phone and turned on his GoPro instead.
He started paddling away when suddenly, from under the kayak, the shark swooped up and lunged at Gorne’s paddle before veering off into the murky, dark waters. In the footage, the shark’s gaping jaws are clearly visible, as is one of its bulging eyes.
The angler opted to escape the aquatic apex predator in a hurry. “I kept on paddling quickly to the rocks nearby as it was still following me,” he said.
The shark kept following until, finally, he reached shallower waters.
Besides getting the thrill of a lifetime, Gorne got the footage he had always wanted. But it isn’t his first shark sighting; he once saw a shark thrashing on the surface at Lady Bay a few hundred feet from his kayak.
The fisherman posted the footage on Facebook, regarding it as a pretty momentous moment in his life and “really cool.”
“I didn’t expect it to go viral so quickly,” he said. “I guess, at the time, I didn’t see the video properly so didn’t actually realize that his mouth was open when he lunged at the paddle, as it happened so quickly.”
A lot of people considered him very lucky to have survived the encounter, as sharks at Port Augusta are known for being aggressive with so many kingfish swimming thereabouts.
The angler had hooked a big kingfish himself just before the incident, which the great white claimed as its meal.
“Luckily, the fish was a big distance away from me,” Gorne said.
The 33-year-old will be taking extra precautions on his next outing. He said he knows someone who got knocked out of his kayak by a great white in the same area because he didn’t have a shark shield.
“I will definitely be getting a shark shield before I fish down there again,” he said.
