A Netflix documentary crew almost became shark bait after having a “horrific” encounter with 15-foot tiger sharks while filming in Hawaii.
While filming the four-part climate documentary series Our Planet II, the team was attacked by sharks, who “jumped on the boat and bitten huge holes,” said series director Toby Nowlan. said the Radio Times.
“The original idea was to do an underwater shoot with the tiger sharks waiting in the shallow waters of Laysan,” said Huw Cordey, series producer Forbes explained in an interview published on Wednesday. Laysan is one of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.
“But on the first day, when the tiger sharks were around, the crew got on those inflatable boats – and two sharks attacked them. It was like something out of Jaws,” Cordey said of the surprising moment.
The “panic” team, which was only about 100 meters from land, had to rush to the beach after the attack to make an “emergency landing”.
Cordey added, “Suffice it to say they didn’t shoot underwater.”
Nowlan too revealed that the shark attack was the second on the same day.
“This ‘V’ of water was rushing towards us and this tiger shark jumped onto the boat and bit huge holes in it. “The whole boat exploded,” he said. “We tried to get rid of it, but it didn’t do any good. It was terrible. This was the second shark that attacked us that day.”
Nowlan called the sharks’ behavior “extremely unusual,” adding, “They were incredibly hungry, so there might not have been enough natural food, and they were just going to try whatever they could come across in the water.”
The wild incident happened just a month later Newsweek reported that Hawaii’s tiger shark population had increased after the state experienced a series of attacks.
Although the odds of being bitten by a shark in Hawaii are less than one in a million, according to the Hawaii Department of Aquatic Resources, Tiger sharks are considered “particularly dangerous because of their size and indiscriminate feeding behavior.”
Episodes of Our Planet II, voiced by British broadcaster and biologist David Attenborough, are streaming on Netflix.