Aurora Starchild
A 30-year-old man was attacked by a Mako shark while spearfishing off the coast of Florida. Chad Patti had just emerged from a dive when the shark bit his fin. His GoPro happened to capture the incident and the footage is terrifying.
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GoPro Footage Shows Man Headed Towards Boat When the Shark Attacked
Chad Patti and his friend Josh Loucks were about 70 miles off the Pensacola Coast on New Year’s Day when the Mako shark attacked. Patti told the Pensacola News Journal that he was about to ask Loucks a question when the 10-foot Mako shark surprised him.
“At the point where the video picks up, I’m recovering from the dive, doing what they call recovery breathing,” he said. “I was just about to ask if we were doing another drift. I got ‘are’ out of my mouth when it hit me from the back right corner.”
If it weren’t for the Jaws-like music playing on the video, it just seems like any day out at sea. But suddenly, as Patti is attacked, the camera looks down and the shark flees. However, Patti thought he’d lost a limb.
“It basically shoved my knee to my chest, almost knocked the wind out of me, knocked my gun out of my hand, partially flooded my mask and I did a summersault in the water,” said Patti. “The first scream, the ‘help,’ I didn’t think I had a leg, honestly.”
Chad Patti Thinks the Mako Wanted to Eat Him
He added that they slowed down the GoPro footage later to get a better look.
“You can see the shark clearly has the fin in its mouth,” said Patti. “You can see him crush it. It was a predatory strike from the mako. I was his prey. There was no mistaken identity. There was no fish in the water. No blood in the water.”
The diver told the news that the Mako’s behavior was a typical hunting tactic. By biting the fin of a sea creature, they are rendered immobilized. The shark must have thought that Patti’s flipper belonged to a fish, because the shark went straight for it.
Luckily, Chad Patti was not injured by the shark attack. The footage shows his friend Josh Loucks jumping in the water, and he was brought back to the boat without further incident.
Patti also said he’s not traumatized to the point of stopping his hobby.
“I’m not going to let it stop me from doing something I love,” he told PNJ.
