“This ’v’ of water came streaming towards us and this tiger shark leapt at the boat and bit huge holes in it."
Almost an ironic end, I suppose, for a film crew shooting the latest instalment of Only Planet, the four-part documentary series narrated by the great biologist Davey Attenborough, still kicking, remarkably, at almost one hundred.
The Netflix crew were set upon by two fifteen-foot tiger sharks while filming in Laysan, one of the northwestern Hawaiian islands and almost one thousand miles from Honolulu.
“This ’v’ of water came streaming towards us and this tiger shark leapt at the boat and bit huge holes in it,” the nature show’s director Toby Nowland told the Radio Times. “The whole boat exploded. We were trying to get it away and it wasn’t having any of it. It was horrific. That was the second shark that day to attack us.”
The little inflatable boats the crew were using to film from had just enough air left in ‘em to get back to the beach.
“They were incredibly hungry, so there might not have been enough natural food and they were just trying anything they came across in the water,” said Nowland.
The original plan was to shoot the tigers from underwater but, as series producer Huw Cordey told Forbes, “It was like something out of Jaws. The crew was panicked, and basically made an emergency landing on the sand.”
Tigers have been getting wild in Hawaii over the past few years, with four attacks so far in 2023 including a surfer whose right foot was bitten off and the death of a snorkeler from Washington State in December.
Not all encounters with tigers end in catastrophic injury.
You must remember the moment last November when marine biologist Ocean Ramsey almost climbed into the mouth of a feisty tiger. The optics, as they say, were spectacular though the risk of injury, as it turned out, was low.
“I was actually overjoyed to see her, especially that particular individual shark. We call her Queen Nikki and I have grown up with her, we were teenagers at the same time,” Ramsey said at the time. “We have had so many beautiful interactions with her over the years and sharks are so important. They are wild animals. They are apex predators, but they’re not monsters.”
