“Apparently the idea is to stay calm and slowly swim into shore and fast thrashing movements attracts action from sharks."
A surf-mat rider, trialling an experimental helmet-mounted 360-degree camera, has uploaded footage to Reddit of the moment a shark closed in on his legs at Gunnamatta Beach on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
The footage is pretty classic. Roger Essig turns around, sees the lil shark, a sevengill, named thus cause it has seven gills instead of the usual five, screams and motors outta there, a natural reaction.
“Fuck, fuck off! Shark!” he says, adding, resigned to his fate,“Fuck me.”
“I thought about how peaceful it was and how the ocean floor must be so far below me, which made me think of sharks,” Essig told the Daily Mail.
“Apparently the idea is to stay calm and slowly swim into shore and fast thrashing movements attracts action from sharks. I had been motionless when it first came up to me, and my thrashing scared it off, so I haven’t decided if I reacted in the best possible way.”
His reddit pals let him have it, although he good-naturedly deflected each barb.
Sevengills ain’t in the same realm as Great Whites, seven attacks in five hundred years and no fatals, although they are part of the same family.
It’s a shark hunted by the Chinese for its excellent liver oil, very good for giving a man the hardest of honeymoon dick.
Regular readers will recall, one year ago, a French surfer thought he was a goner when a sevengill moved in on his feet during a surf at Bells.
Much shrieking etc, understandable as always.
Commented on Disqus? Log out, tap the Disqus button, and your old name and comments come back. The box is ours.
Your comments are still here. Every one of them.
Twelve years of BeachGrit comments came across from Disqus. Connect and we will show you how many are yours. We get your username, nothing else.
Connect Disqus to reveal.
Surf blogging 101: When in need of clicks, go to the over-dramatized shark content.
I take it she sailed or paddled to Indo then? Pretty sure there’s not a soy powered plane just yet.
ah, the one that got away
Six months later, that lady became my wife!
And that’s how I met your mother. (Never saw her again after that night).
Save the planet, kill yourself.
My dream is that when I go to the great gig in the sky, sharks actually talk and can tell me why they didn’t bite this dudes junk off. Draggers are probably of the tofu/soy variety, gives off a bad scent. I’ve seen them do some gnarly stunt level stuff, but……NO
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
We are calling boogie boarders surfers now?
That French guy is always a pisser. Many times coming in and navigating the Hossegor shories I’ve thought that I’d much prefer the threat of sharks as opposed to my face getting rubbed off from the forty five degree gravel incline. Then usually some old VAL woman would ride half way up to La Centrale and step off blissfully ignorant.
I’m of the opposite mindset. One of my dearest memories of living in Hossegor was swimming a click into the middle of the ocean, floating on my back, fearing no beast.
This does sound very nice.
“A surf-mat rider, trialling an experimental helmet-mounted 360-degree camera” by rights should at least have been maimed, if there was any justice in the world.
Hey! That’s mean!
Kaipo’s creep quiff is scarier than a seven gill…
It’s got a sort of ‘rusty kidnapper van’ thing going on.
When I read “hardest of honeymoon dick” I scrolled back to the top to confirm this was a DR story
Why did you need to confirm?
The day I decide to go surfing with any kind of recording device (POV or otherwise) you all have explicit instructions to set the sevengills on me