GoPro / YouTube
If you tuned into the Discovery Channel over the past two nights, let me be the first to welcome you bros to Shark Week 2017. This year’s #SharkWeek festivities got off to a rocky start with eager fans tuning in Sunday night to see the greatest Olympic swimmer in history, Michael Phelps, race an actual Great White Shark. As it turns out, the shark was CGI and the entire stunt was a massive waste of everyone’s time. The Twitter reactions were priceless, and that’s about the only thing good to come out of the Michael Phelps vs. Great White Shark race.
It’s worth mentioning that the clip above is actually from 2015. It was submitted to GoPro as part of the ‘GoPro Awards‘, and though it’s been around on YouTube for a while it was just uploaded to the GoPro channel on Sunday.
[protected-iframe id=”36d864b206c4af6b5661eade2abeef06-97886205-55047561″ info=”https://static.apester.com/js/sdk/v2.0/apester-javascript-sdk.min.js” height=”491″ class=”apester-media”]
In the clip, Johan Potgieter was spearfishing off the coast of Arniston in South Africa when the shit the fan. The shark swooped in out of nowhere and the spearfisherman had to prod it with his spear gun. The shark didn’t like this and took off, only to make an aggressive about face, drop his pectoral fins which is supposedly aggressive behavior for these sharks, and come right at the diver. It’s truly a miracle that the water didn’t turn brown from him dropping logs in his wetsuit.
You can read a full account of the great white shark encounter over on The Inertia.