Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 6:45 am Post subject: Man wrestles shark drunk
'I'm a bit of an idiot' Phillip Kerkhof saw a shark and thought he'd have a tussle with it. It's more fun when you're blind drunk.
A MAN who caught a 1.3-meter (4-ft.) shark with his bare hands off an Australian beach said on Friday he only tried the feat because he was drunk on vodka. Phillip Kerkhof was fishing off a jetty at Louth Bay, a town on South Australia state's Eyre Peninsula 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) west of Sydney, when he spotted the bronze whaler shark swimming in the shallows, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
"I just snuck up behind him, and eventually I went for the big grab and I fluked it and got him," Kerkhof said. "He was just thrashing around in the water ... starting to turn around and try to bite me and I thought 'well, it's amazing what vodka does'," Kerkhof said. The shark bit a hole in Kerkhof's jeans, but he was uninjured. "It's not something I'd recommend to do. When I sobered up I thought about it and I said, 'I'm a bit of an idiot for doing it'," Kerkhof said.
Many species of sharks are common in Australian waters, and there are an average of 15 shark attacks per year in the country - roughly one person each year is killed by a shark. Last month, an abalone diver had an incredible escape after being almost swallowed head first by a huge shark off the New South Wales state coast.
____________________________________________________________________
Bit of an idiot? I think he's giving himself a bit too much credit.
Diver grapples with 12ft tiger shark A diver fought with a 12ft tiger shark for nearly two hours when it tried to attack his friend during an underwater spear fishing expedition in Louisiana. 11 Mar 2009
telegraph.co.uk
Craig Clasen went head to head with the aggressive predator, shooting it seven times with a spear gun, when it was about to attack another fisherman. Mr Clasen was hunting yellow finned tuna with his friends Cameron Kirkconnell, photographer D J Struntz and film maker Ryan McInnis in the Gulf of Mexico when the close encounter happened. The group were about to leave the deep waters south of the Mississippi River's mouth, when Mr McInnis found himself alone in the company of the tiger shark. Mr Clasen, 32, grabbed his spear gun and swam to help his friend, who was being circled by the giant predator.
He said: "I positioned myself between Ryan and the shark and I tried to watch it for a second, hoping it would pass us by. I noticed that the shark was getting tighter and tighter and just kept trying to get a back angle on us and behaving in an aggressive manner. The shark made a roll and looked like it was going to charge us so I just went ahead and took the conservative route and put a shaft through its gills. Cameron and I have been around sharks for years and we all have a lot of experience with them but this encounter had a different feel to it. Down in my core I really felt the shark was there to feed. I didn't want it to come to that."
Mr Clasen, from Mississippi, spent nearly two hours wrestling with the 12ft (3.6m) shark, spearing it seven times and even attempting to drown the beast before eventually finishing it off with a long blade knife in June last year. He said: "Once I shot it in the gills I felt a moral obligation to finish the job. I didn't want it to go on any longer than it had to. I shot the fish like I would do any other fish and worked it up closer and did my best to kill it as humanely as possible. I speared it in the gills which I knew would kill it and from that I tried to put a shaft into its brain as quickly as possible. I shot it six times in the head with a spear and I wasn't having much luck – it was a slow drawn out process. Sharks are so resilient and so tough from millions of years of evolution they are just survivors. The best way and quickest way to finish the job and kill the shark and recover it was to get a rope around its tail, drag it from the back of the boat and attempt to drown it. In the end we had put a knife its skull. Once I got close enough to it I used a long blade knife, even after trying to drown it."
Hundreds Of Tiger Sharks In Feeding Frenzy
September 03, 2010
Anglea Barnes,
Sky News Online
Tiger Sharks have been spotted in a massive feeding frenzy off the southern Queensland coast. The rescue helicopter crew who filmed the sharks said they spotted more than one hundred of them encircling fishes in a long stretch of the coastal area in Noosa.
The night crew were flying back from Fraser Island when they noticed the feeding sharks just 20 metres off the beach at Teewah. Luckily, there were no swimmers in the vicinity but local life guards were alerted of their presence. Although known as solitary hunters, recent studies on different shark species indicate that some of them follow a pattern of group hunting.
Enal is around 6 years old. He knows this shark well - it lives in a penned off area of ocean beneath his stilted house in Wangi, Indonesia. It is very rare for someone to have this kind of connection with a shark.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
