Humans often enjoy outdoors activities like hunting and fishing, but it can be easy to forget that when you do that, you are entering the “home field” of some of nature’s most vicious beasts.
And in this heart-pounding video, it was probably only thanks to a drone that one of the fishermen didn’t turn into a hearty lunch for the Great White Shark that was stalking the boat and swimming his way.
Some spear-fishermen were enjoying the day out on the water when some unexpected danger came their way. The only reason there’s video proof of the scary incident is because a drone operator was filming out on the ocean, and spotted a shark lurking nearby the fishing boat.
In a way, this video is cinematic, and gives you all of the classic horror movie tropes that you would want. With a drone shooting the footage, and a shark threatening a boat, you could basically come to the conclusion that this is the modern day, real life version of Jaws.
During one of the more frustrating moments of the video, the drone operator is trying to warn the fishermen about a shark that is nearby their boat. The person flying the drone flies about the shark and repeats an up and down pattern, hoping to communicate to the men on the boat to look down below the flying device.
However, the men just confuse the signal as a “hello,” so they wave back at the drone and smile. And to add to the high tension moment, the drone’s battery starts running low around this time, so the drone operator has to return the flying device to its launch location to replace the battery, leaving the fishermen to fend for themselves.
The drone is able to exchange batteries and get back out to the fishing boat, where the shark is still hanging around, and as the commentary says on the video, “showing a clear interest in the boat.”
If it wasn’t horror-movie-esque enough for you already, one of the fishermen starts to dip into the water, and then completely submerges himself, presumably to cool off from the heat. That’s when the shark starts to move in closer, and the drone continues to do its best to warn the fishermen of the looming danger.
In the nick of time, the fisherman still in the boat begins to yell and motion towards his friend to get out of the water as the shark moved in closer and closer. The one still in the boat scrambles to get his fellow fisherman out of the water and back into the vessel, and ends up pulling him up and in with only seconds to spare.
The Great White Shark had made its way within 10 feet of the boat and the man in the water when he was finally pulled out, and once they were both in the safety of the boat, both of them began gesturing towards the drone to “thank it” for potentially saving the one man’s life.
As exhilarating as the video is to watch, we need to remember that this was no movie. This was real life with real consequences, and these fishermen owe a lot to the drone operator who happened to be in the right place at the right time to warn them.
You can view the footage in the video below, with the shark closing in on the boat starting around the four minute mark:
