You’re stranded on a rock in the ocean. Your boat is 500 metres away. And swimming between you and it is a hungry great white shark.
At what point do you dive in?
It’s a chilling scenario that New South Wales diver and speargun maker Will Brunker was faced with while going for a dive recently.
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Brunker told Today he and his diving partner were going spearfishing in Eden Bay on the Sapphire Coast in southern New South Wales when they got up close and personal with one of the world’s most fearsome predators.
“When you’re snorkelling, you tend to be looking underneath you, and I glanced up to my right and there’s a four-plus-metre white shark just looking at me,” Brunker said.
He said there had been a lot of salmon in the area as well as a whale calf with its mother about 100 metres away.
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“We think she was probably thinking we were a bit of a threat to her food source and just wanted to maybe intimidate us off the food source. And, you know, she did her job,” Brunker said.
Incredibly, the freedivers caught the encounter on camera, even as they made a cautious retreat.
Brunker said it had been an “honour” to share the water with “the queen of the ocean”.
”I didn’t want to lose the chance of a lifetime to swim with a four-plus-metre great white shark,” he said.
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“It’s a bucket list moment, so we had to make the most of it.”
He said he and his diving partner knew they had to stay calm after he alerted her to the shark’s presence.
“We actually paddled backwards and kept our spear guns aimed at the fish in case she wanted to get a bit closer, and the problem was then was that once we got to the rocks, we realised that we had to get back in the water to get to the boat because the boat was about 500m away,” Brunker said.
“And that was the truly scary part because, you know, we knew she was there and we had to cross some much deeper, darker water, to get back to the boat.
“And that was definitely the longest two minute swim of our lives, because we were acutely aware that there’s, you know, this apex predator.”
He said the shark was perfectly camouflaged in the deeper water.
“We had no idea where she was. So, yeah, that was the scary part. Getting back to the boat,” he said.
The speargun builder, who is in the water two to three times a week, said he had never had a moment like it before.
“We’re acutely aware of, as we enter that marine environment, we know that we are not at the top of the food chain, and, you know, we see some incredible things, but nothing quite like that kind of apex predator, right up close and personal,” he said.
“It was really quite something.”
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