Watch: Great White Shark Circles Fishermen Drifting In Ocean

Two Australian men drifted away from their boat while spearfishing off the north coast of Tweed Heads, New South Wales, on May 2. After a while, they found themselves being circled by great white sharks just a few feet below the surface of the ocean.

While the incident took place months ago, a footage of the fishermen’s rescue was posted by Westpac Rescue Helicopter Service on Facebook recently.

The fishermen in question were Trevor Ketchion and Dylan Briggs who drifted far into the middle of the ocean after a strong current caused Briggs’ father, who was controlling their boat, to lose sight of them.

“[Dylan’s] father had lost track of where we were and we got separated,” Ketchion was heard saying in the video. “For the first half-hour or so we tried to swim back up the current to get back to the boat but that wasn’t very effective.”

Since the pair had nothing in their possession except their fishing equipment, both were forced to take off their swimming fins off the foot, put it on their spear and wave it like a flag, with the hopes that light will reflect off the shiny surface of the fin and will be spotted by some rescue boat miles away.

“That didn’t work and also when you do that, you’re swimming a bit erratically and erratic swimming attracts certain creatures that you don’t usually want to attract in those situations,” Ketchion, adding that splashing water around while waiting for help to arrive made him “look like a weak prey animal”.

Sure enough when one of the fishermen moved the camera below the water, a great white shark was seen swimming a few feet away from the man’s legs. “Shark! There’s a shark!” the man exclaimed to his partner. While more than the one shark was not seen, the information in the video said the fishermen were surrounded by multiple predators.

Luckily, after being stranded for three hours, a rescue helicopter did manage to spot the pair and come to their aid.

“When they first came very close to where we were it was quite an uplifting feeling and definitely took a lot of the stress off,” Ketchion said. “It was a very large sense of relief.”