“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.
