It’s the stuff of nightmares, but this isn’t a nightmare at all – and a GoPro captured it all.
Randy Fales, of Satellite Beach, was spearfishing last Sunday near Sebastian Inlet, but he said when he surfaced, his boat was nowhere to be found. Fales said his boat, with his two daughters and others aboard, disconnected from its anchor and drifted 3 miles away.
What made matters scarier, a 16-foot shark approached him. A GoPro camera captured the entire incident.
https://youtu.be/OF-OHISZJx8
“I’ve been diving for 35 years, and this is the first time anything like this has ever happened,” Fales told ABC News.
Before diving into 90 feet of water, Fales said, he’d dropped a yellow jug, attached to the boat by parachute rope, onto a reef. Two of his daughters, one daughter’s boyfriend and several grandchildren were on the boat at the time. The scuba driver was carrying his gear, a GoPro and a spear gun.
Fales said that when he surfaced, after 30 minutes of diving, he realized that likely because of the windy conditions, the jug had drifted off the reef, pulling the boat with it. He said his family had not noticed, thinking the jug was still anchored in place.
“That’s not exactly an exciting feeling, you know, to realize there’s no boat in the area,” Fales said. “I was pretty confident there might be other boats in the area because it’s a fairly common fishing area. I did see a boat after almost 15, 20 minutes.”
Fales said he blew a whistle he was carrying and waved his bright-yellow diving bag high over his head, using his spear gun, to get the boat’s attention. When that boat seemed to anchor a mile away, he started to swim toward it. Then the first shark appeared.
“He kept getting bolder, a little bolder, a little closer. … The closest he got is he rubbed my leg with one of his pectoral fins,” Fales said. “I would always go into a little bit of a defense mode and he would veer away.”
He was eventually rescued by another boater.
