WARNING: There is a lot of swearing in this video.
Close encounters with great white sharks usually occur in nightmares – or at least from the relative safety of a diving cage.
But this one was a little too close to home for Dale Pearson, who spotted the 14ft specimen thrashing in the 3ft shallows within view of his apartment in Baja California, Mexico.
Pearson initially suspected the animal to be a beached whale or a hammerhead and waded out to see if he could help it.
Cue his realisation he was face to nose with a great white, prompting him to unleash a mighty stream of invective.
Armed with just his camera phone, Pearson, who is a dive boat operator with experience in shark rescue missions, managed to film the encounter noting the animal had a large wound close its dorsal fin – perhaps inflicted by a boat propeller.
After recording the incident, Pearson uploaded the video to his company’s Facebook page, Pearson Brothers Winery, where it went viral.
“It would come in to the shallows and lay there motionless, then it would move out again [swimming to] six feet of water, circle back in [to the shallows], come into another spot and lay there motionless,” Pearson told HuffPost.
Pearson was not injured by the shark, though he was attacked by stingrays as he observed the animal. Upon his return to the same spot the next day, it was gone.
After watching the video, officials at the Marine Conservation Science Institute shared it on their Facebook page, explaining that “the injuries from the boat propeller would likely not kill the shark.”
“They are exceptionally tough with incredible healing ability,” the institute wrote this week in a post.
