A Wollongong man has recounted his terrifyingly close encounter with a massive great white shark that dwarfed his boat and repeatedly circled him near a decomposing whale carcass.
Lucas Clark, an experienced fisherman and diver, said the shark was easily six metres long and was attracted to the area by a sperm whale carcass that had washed up on the rocks at the southern end of Era Beach in the Royal National Park, about 30 kilometres north of Wollongong.
Mr Clark had originally planned to take his daughter Charlie surfing at Era on Monday but cancelled those plans after learning the whale carcass was drawing in predators. Instead, they took the boat up to have a look, and around 9am encountered a highly curious great white.
“It was a unit,” Mr Clark told the Mercury.
“As soon as we turned up, a mate Dennis who was there was pointing at the water and I thought, ‘What’s he pointing at?’
“Then it just comes straight up the side of the boat with its big black eyeball and it’s just staring at us.
“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s hectic.’ Then it did a loop and came back around, went under the boat and used its nose to punch straight into the propeller.
“Dennis said, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t like engines – it’s hit my engine twice.’”
The shark returned several times, cruising slowly past the boat. With his daughter on board, Mr Clark was acutely aware of the potential danger.
“It’s an apex predator, so it’s menacing regardless – you know what that thing’s capable of,” he said.
“I’d seen the bite marks in the whale carcass and they were massive – maybe three feet wide.
“It was just so curious, it kept coming back around.
“Any time it heard a vibration it would come and do like a full investigation, check you out.”
A six-metre shark is a rare sighting, but Mr Clark had a way to measure it. He saw it pull alongside his friend’s boat, which was 5.8 metres long, and the shark was at least that size.
“It was much bigger than my boat – my boat’s only 15 feet,” he said.
“I was looking at the gunwales on the other boats that were there … and I had the lowest gunwales.
“Mine kind of looked like a bathtub in the water compared to the other boats.”
Mr Clark, who has seen bronze whalers and tiger sharks before, said this was the largest shark he had ever encountered.
“I’ve seen bronze whalers and tigers, but I’ve never seen anything that size,” he said.
“That thing was just slicing through the water with minimal effort – it just looked so powerful.
“It was just keen on seeing what we were there for – it really wanted to suss us out.”
Earlier that day, a shark believed to be the same one had swum up to a friend’s boat and placed its nose right on the transom step at the back of the vessel.
“It just slid its whole head up on the transom step,” Mr Clark said.
“He almost jumped off the boat up the other end.”
Era Beach, as well as nearby beaches Garie, Burning Palms and Wattamolla, have been closed while authorities make plans to tow the whale carcass away for disposal.
