iStockphoto / Alessandro De Maddalena
Diver Chad Patti was spearfishing off Pensacola, Florida on New Year’s Day when he captured the scariest incident of his life on camera but swam away relatively unscathed.
Chad Patti was surfacing from a dive when he looked back down into the water at the exact moment a mako shark attacked him.
Luckily for Patti, the mako shark attacked him from below and latched onto his diver’s fin and took a chunk but quickly let go.
The group was spearfishing about 70 miles off the coast of Pensacola, according to Brandon Girod of the Pensacola News Journal. Had the shark bitten him instead of his fin it would have been about a 2-hour boat ride back to land.
What it was like when the Mako Shark attacked him from below…
Patti told the Pensacola News Journal “At the point where the video picks up, I’m recovering from the dive, doing what they call recovery breathing. … 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.”
His story continued by saying “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. … The first scream, the ‘help,’ I didn’t think I had a leg, honestly.”
Chad Patti went on to say “It wasn’t just a bump. I got it [the video] slowed down five times the speed and you can see the shark clearly has the fin in its mouth. 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.”
Patti said they were out that far spearfishing for Wahoo, another pelagic species. The incident occurred at around 2:50 in the afternoon. And in the past 3 year of deep water spearfishing this was only the third shark he’d ever seen.
Mako Sharks are amongst the fastest creatures in the ocean. They’ve been recorded at speed bursts up to 46 miles per hour and regular speeds of 31 mph, according to the Smithsonian Institute.
Their awesome speed means mako sharks are often seen engaging in spectacular aerial displays. These mako sharks attack as ambush predators. Swimming up quickly from below. And when they miss their prey they rocket out of the water and can often be seen doing acrobatic flips.