Terrifying moment diver comes face-to-face with 13ft great white shark as beast circles him for agonising five minutes
THIS is the terrifying moment a diver came face-to-face with a great white shark that kept circling around him for an agonising five minutes.
Tim Ryan shared the nail-biting footage of his encounter with the huge 13ft beast while his mate was inside a cave looking for crayfish.
Ryan and pal Andy Nelson went cray fishing in Coventry Reef, some 34 miles south of Perth, Australia.
In search of crayfish, Nelson dived into a cave and stayed there for five minutes, unaware that the giant shark was swimming around his friend, who was low on oxygen.
Meanwhile, outside the cave, Ryan was waiting for his mate when the “bloody big shark” showed up.
Mimicking the famous Jaws tune, he told Australian media: “’Don, don, don, don’ literally and hilariously just popped straight into my head when I saw the shark pop out.
“’Oh my god it is Jaws’, I thought, and then a second later I was bloody scared, then a second after that I thought I have to deal with this and this is how I do it.
“I did my very best to to hold it down.”
The diver recalled the great white being so terrifyingly close he could have touched it.
“There were a number of times when it swam overhead, and also when it swam along side me I could have reached out and touched it,” Ryan said.
“It circled me for a full five minutes, and oh my god, it came in and made passes at me for the full five minutes.
“It was only at the very end when Andy popped out of the cave, having a second person in the water scared it off.”
As he could no longer see the shark and his oxygen level was very low, Ryan described had a “pretty awful” swim back to the boat.
Ryan’s friend Nelson swam back to find the boat and found the quickest way back, but Ryan had to keep turning around to see if he could see the shark when he lost sight of it in the sea.
He said: “Well that’s the point when the adrenaline levels went up a little bit because that’s their whole gig right, they go into the darkness and they sneak around and they come smashing up on you from behind.
“It’s the one you don’t see that you got to really worry about, especially when you definitely know there is one around.
“You just turn around and it’s coming at you at 20 knots, you know.”
The pair then burst out laughing once finally back at safety on the boat.
“It was all pretty exciting, you know, it took probably half an hour for us to get a heart rate and breathing rate back down,” Ryan confessed.
“Andy at that stage had no idea that I had a full five minutes with the shark circling me, he was pretty amazed at the whole thing, we just shook our heads for a while.”
The diver went on to explain the five things one should do when encountering a shark.
“So obviously you have to not splash or flap about and become attractive to the animal,” he said.
“You’ve got to maintain eye contact with it at all times or it will come and sneak up on you, you have to remain vertical in the water, then you have to keep your breathing and heart rate down.
“I think I did all those things.”