A drone flying over a Florida beach Saturday caught on camera a struggle between a fisherman and a massive hammerhead shark. The man was standing in shallow water on Panama City Beach during the encounter.

Curtis Williams, a drone operator, captured the shark fighting against the man. A friend identified the fisherman as Per Eghoj, who was with the group Modern Day Outdoors. The organization films their adventures in a nature show aimed at attracting a new generation of outdoorsmen.

Read: Sharks Surprise Tourists In Shallow Water At Florida Beach

The two-minute drone footage was uploaded to YouTube Saturday and had been viewed more than 127,000 times as of Monday afternoon. At certain points in the video, the man can be seen just inches away from the massive shark as a crowd gathers around.

“We got lucky enough to be filming when a friend from Denmark who was in America on vacation with his family hooked into a shark the minute the bait was taken offshore,” member Jacob Saylor told WZTV. “We weren’t directly targeting hammerhead sharks but when your line is out there you never know what you’re going to hook into.”

While the fisherman appeared to capture the shark unscathed, not all such incidents end that way. A man attempting to help a fisherman bring a shark back to shore in North Carolina last week had the tables turned on him when the shark fought back and bit him on the arm.

“Someone caught the shark and as they were pulling it in, it whipped around and bit him on the arm,” Catherine Patton, an employee at the beach’s pier, told WNCN-TV. “There was a lot of blood.”

Hammerheads, however, are generally considered to be almost harmless to humans, according to National Geographic. Despite their massive size, few attacks on humans by hammerheads have ever been recorded. There have been 21 unprovoked attacks and two fatalities resulting from the entire hammerhead genus, according to the International Shark Attack File.

It was unclear whether the fisherman removed the hammerhead from the water, though it is illegal to harvest great hammerheads in the state of Florida. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission urges fishermen to “minimize fight time” with prohibited sharks by using a certain kind of tackle that helps to release the sharks.

Read: Shark Attacks Man Helping Fisherman In North Carolina

The commission also urges people not to delay releasing the animals for any purpose, including to take pictures or video.

It was unclear what type of hammerhead the shark in the video was. There are estimated to be 10 species of hammerheads in the waters off Florida, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History. Most hammerheads are considered by scientists to be especially vulnerable to overfishing due to being accidentally caught as bycatch.

RELATED STORIES
Florida