Man fights off 15ft great white shark with a spear after it stalked him for 10 terrifying minutes
An Australian man narrowly escaped death as he reportedly fought off a Great White shark for nearly 10 minutes off the coast of Perth on Saturday.
Joe Petrovich, a brick paver from Melville, was spearfishing with friends when he suddenly spotted the 15-feet-long predator circling him in the waters. The chilling moments that followed were captured on his GoPro camera.
Without losing his cool and acting on his survival instincts alone, Petrovich used the only weapon available to him at the time to fend off his attacker — his spear. He jabbed at the creature with all his might, lunging at it multiple times.
"I was about 75% sure I wasn't going to make it back to the boat, to be honest," he shared later. The footage shows the shark snapping at Petrovich with its razor-sharp teeth after it gets jabbed with the spear on the head.
"It was following me, it was pretty much stalking me all the way back, trying to find a weakness in my defense," he told 7News. "It was coming at me from lots of different directions, the left-hand side, the right-hand side, it's coming at me from underneath."
Somehow, he managed to swim back to his boat and get onto it safety, with just a part of his flipper mauled by the shark. The beast, however, continued to circle his vessel for 10 minutes.
"I could have put my fist down its throat. It was that close," he said. "I was s**t scared. I mean how would you be? I think I'm going to lose one leg and I might lose the bottom half of the other one as well. You've only got one shot. It's very hard to kill an animal that big. If you wound it up you are only going to make it angrier."
Petrovich's friends, meanwhile, were fishing at a distance from where he was attacked and had no knowledge of the incident until they were informed of it.
"(The shark) was doing basically what it does all the time," he said. "It was just looking for a feed. I just wish it wasn't me." Regardless of the near-death experience, he will not be kept away from spear-fishing again, he said.