"It Was Like Something Out of 'Jaws'": Tiger Sharks Attack Film Crew in Inflatable Boats
While filming a docuseries, a Netflix crew almost became an open water statistic.
Shark attacks might be incredibly rare, but our culture is totally obsessed with them. There are just a few shark attacks that occur annually, but each unfortunate encounter gets lots of attention. According to the Florida Museum of Natural History's International Shark Attack File, in 2022, there were 57 unprovoked bites in the entire world, most of which occurred in the United States and Australia.
Of these, five attacks were fatal. However, Jaws-like encounters never get old. This week, a producer from Sir David Attenborough's Our Planet II revealed that the film crew had an incredibly scary shark encounter while filming the Netflix series when Tiger Sharks attacked the crew while out in inflatable boats.
In the Jaws franchise, the Great White Shark was famous for attacking humans who were in boats. So, it is understandable that Attenborough's crew was terrified when a bunch of Tiger Sharks approached them while out in the ocean.
The crew were on a six-day trip to an island close to Hawaii and out in the flimsy inflatable boats. They were shooting footage of an albatross, a large oceanic bird. However, they were forced to flee the ocean when the Tiger Sharks approached.
"The original idea was to do an underwater shoot with the tiger sharks waiting in the shallows at Laysan," the show's producer Huw Cordey told The Sun newspaper's TVBiz column. "But the first day the tiger sharks were around, the crew got into these inflatable boats – and two sharks attacked them."
According to the producer, the experience was way too similar to the horror movie. "It was like something out of 'Jaws,'" he said. Despite the professional crew, who had lots of experience encountering wildlife on similar filming trips, he maintains that everyone "panicked" as the boats were attacked.
RELATED: 14 Mind-Blowing UFO "Sightings" Reported by Credible Witnesses
Cordey says the boats promptly fled the scene, returning from the shark-filled waters and making "an emergency landing." Unfortunately, because of the evacuation, the crew didn't get all the footage needed for the four-episode documentary series. However, they managed to escape without any injuries or becoming any sort of a shark statistic.
