Florida fishing boat seen 'shaking like an earthquake' as underwater predator pounces
PALM BEACH, Fla. - A drone-flying Florida fisherman captured amazing footage of a shark attack on his friend's boat at the beginning of Shark Week.
Josh Jorgensen, who produces videos for the popular BlacktipH Fishing YouTube channel, posted aerial footage to Instagram earlier this week showing a bull shark repeatedly and violently attacking his friend Carl Torresson's boat off the Palm Beach coast.
"I was flying my drone at the beach and spotted two huge cobia swimming with a bull shark," Jorgensen said in the video. "Cobia is one of the best tasting fish in the ocean. So, I called my buddy Carl, and he raced over to try to catch them."
Jorgensen filmed two large cobia swimming in the clear blue water with a menacing bull shark circling nearby. The video cuts to Torressons's fishing boat and shows people casting their lines into the water when the shark suddenly attacks.
"I was following his boat with my drone, and then, all of a sudden, the shark attacked his engines," Jorgensen said in the video.
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The shark can be seen lunging at the boat's stern, ramming into the outboard motors and thrashing about the water. The boat shakes with each impact by the powerful animal and its huge jaws.
"The shark attacked the boat five times, swam away and then came back for more," Jorgensen said. "In total, the shark attacked Carl’s boat eight times."
"I didn’t think a shark could actually shake a boat like that," Torresson said in the video. "The boat was shaking like a bag of popcorn. Like, literally, I was shaking like an earthquake. I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ I went back there, and I noticed it was a shark doing it. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ This is like a ride from Universal Studios."
After he returned to shore, Torresson was shocked to discover the extent of damage the shark dealt his engines.
"We’re thinking, you know, maybe he grabbed the propeller," he said. "We weren’t expecting the damage that we had when we got back to the dock, and it was just astronomical. The whole middle of the engine’s completely ripped out. The trim tab’s broken."
The boat was not ruined beyond repair.
"The engine was salvageable," Jorgensen told The Palm Beach Post. "Carl had to buy new parts for it."
Bull sharks are one of three shark breeds known to regularly attack humans. The other two are the tiger shark and the great white shark, according to National Geographic.
Bull sharks are mid-size predators that can grow from 7 to 11½ feet and weigh up to 500 pounds. They are notoriously aggressive and prefer to live near high-population areas like tropical shorelines. Because they are not bothered by brackish and freshwater, they can travel far inland via rivers and tributaries. Many experts consider bull sharks to be the most dangerous sharks in the world because of these attributes.
In May, a 20-year-old spear fisherman encountered a bull shark in the Florida Keys and suffered bite wounds to his leg after the animal "came out of nowhere" and bit him twice during a dive.
A 13-year-old Florida girl was bitten multiple times in another bull shark attack that month.
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