As Australian bodyboarder Matt Marshall was paddling to catch a wave, he thought he glimpsed a dolphin creating a splash in the same wave ahead of him only to find out later he narrowly missed colliding with a great white shark.
The encounter was caught on camera by a friend filming from shore, shows Marshall catching a wave in the surf when a great white shark appears in the water next to him.
“All I saw was a splash, I thought it was a dolphin at first. Then I went back through the footage and realized it was a shark,” Marshall told 7 News Perth.
“You just see the fin pull off the wave a meter in front of me, so it’s lucky it didn’t come towards me a bit quicker.”
Coby Evans, who captured footage of the close encounter, told 7 News it looked “almost like it was going for him.”
“He was lucky he caught the wave essentially, otherwise he could have been missing a leg for all we know,” Evans added.
Marshall caught one more wave before calling it quits for the day. He says the close encounter wouldn’t keep him out of the water.
The incident occurred in waters off Prevelley, Western Australia, on Sept. 24, the same day a great white shark knocked a surfer off her board at a beach in nearby Gracetown. The woman was not injured, but the surfboard sustained three marks from the shark’s teeth.
