Watch a Shark Breach an Underwater Photographer’s Cage

A crazy video from 2016 is making the rounds again today after photographers started sharing it on social media. The video, which was captured three years ago off the coast of Mexico, shows the crazy moment when a Great White shark accidentally breached a diving cage… while the diver/photographer was still inside.

The video was captured by the father of Gabe and Garrett, stars of a kids YouTube channel with 1.7M subscribers. When it was first uploaded in 2016, it immediately garnered international news coverage as people tried to figure out what the heck happened, who the diver was, and how in the world everything turned out okay.

We spotted the video earlier today when David Hobby, aka Strobist, tweeted it with the tongue-in-cheek caption “‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.’ -Robert Capa”

As you can see in the video above, the Great White lunges for a piece of bait and accidentally hits the side of the cage. Since sharks can’t swim backwards, it began thrashing forward and managed to break through the bars and into the shark cage. Incredibly, Ming Chan, the part-time diving instructor and iPhone photographer inside the cage, was able to escape through the bottom of the cage until the shark thrashed its way out.

The blood that you see as the shark escapes is coming from the shark, which was spotted later and confirmed to be okay.

Once the shark is out, Chan simply swam back up into the cage and got back into the boat without so much as a scratch. “I’m still alive,” he can be heard saying in the video. Later, he uploaded some photos that were taken just before the incident to his Facebook page, and clarified that he felt no ill-will towards anybody involved, least of all the shark. In fact, he told the New York Times that he went back in the water the very next day.