Fisherman’s GoPro Captures the Moment a Shark Attacks His Kayak

A fisherman’s GoPro camera captured the jaw-dropping moment a large tiger shark attacked his kayak.

The startling footage was taken by Scott Haraguchi off the coast of Oahu in Hawaii on Friday. He only had his GoPro turned on because he had just caught a fish and had forgotten to turn the camera off.

“It was incredibly bad luck but incredibly good luck to capture it,” Haraguchi tells KITV.

Haraguchi says that if he hadn’t caught the incident on video people wouldn’t believe him.

“I heard a wooshing sound that sounded like a boat heading towards me without the motor,” he tells KITV.

“And I looked up and I saw this big wide brown thing which my brain thought was a turtle but then I got slammed by it and I realized it was a tiger shark.”

Haraguchi says that he didn’t even realize he had taken his left foot out of the water to brace for impact and then later used it to push the shark’s head away until he reviewed the footage.

“If you asked me to do that again, even without the shark, I don’t think I’d have that flexibility. I actually only thought the shark rammed the kayak until I saw the video at home,” he jokes on his YouTube channel.

Haraguchi isn’t exactly sure why the tiger shark went for him, but he has a theory involving a wounded seal that he spotted nearby after the attack.

“So I’m thinking that the shark actually disabled and wounded the seal, let it die or was waiting for it to die, came back and thought I was the seal and attacked me instead,” he says.

Tiger shark
A tiger shark | Photo by N. Hammerschlag, courtesy of Oregon State University

Despite the ferocious attack, the shark barely made a dent in Haraguchi’s kayak and the fisherman was unhurt, just shaken up.

“I realize that life is short, time is short on Earth. Make the most of it, be nice to people — all that stuff,” he adds.

Haraguchi operates Hawaii Nearshore Fishing, he updates his YouTube channel with spectacular videos of the marine life that a Hawaiian fisherman encounters.

Fishermen can utilize GoPro cameras to capture truly fascinating footage. Earlier this year, PetaPixel reported on a curious man who attached his action camera to a fishing rod after wondering “What’s going on” down in the ocean.

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