A Netflix docuseries crew nearly became shark bait after they had a “horrific” encounter with 15-foot-long tiger sharks while filming in Hawaii.
While shooting the four-part climate documentary series Our Planet II, the team was attacked by sharks who “leapt at the boat and bit huge holes,” the show’s director, Toby Nowlan, told the Radio Times.
“The original idea was to do an underwater shoot with the tiger sharks waiting in the shallows at Laysan,” the series’ producer Huw Cordey explained to Forbes in an interview that was published on Wednesday. Laysan is one of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
“But the first day the tiger sharks were around, the crew got into these inflatable boats — and two sharks attacked them. It was like something out of Jaws,” Cordey said of the startling moment.
The “panicked” team, who were only around 100 metres from land, were forced to swiftly make their way to the beach for an “emergency landing” after the attack.
Cordey added: “Suffice to say, they didn’t get any underwater shots.”
Nowlan also revealed that the shark attack was the second one of that same day.
“This ‘v’ of water came streaming towards us, and this tiger shark leapt at the boat and bit huge holes in it. The whole boat exploded,” he shared. “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.”
Calling the sharks’ behaviour “extremely unusual,” Nowlan added: “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.”
The wild incident comes just a month after Newsweek reported that Hawaii’s tiger shark population had increased after the state experienced a string of attacks.
Though the chances of being bitten by a shark in Hawaii are less than one in a million, according to Hawaii’s Division of Aquatic Resources, tiger sharks are “considered particularly dangerous because of their size, and their indiscriminate feeding behaviour.”
Narrated by broadcaster and biologist David Attenborough, episodes of Our Planet II are streaming on Netflix.