I guess if you’re an Australian surfer competing in a South African surfing contest you’ve got to be prepared to meet up with the occasional shark. It must be par for the course. If you want to avoid sinister and lethal sharks I guess you could only surf while there’s a blizzard going on. But that can’t be particularly pleasant.

Triple World Surfing Champion Mick Fanning had a quick meet and greet with a shark this afternoon. The footage is more than a little bit unnerving.

Fanning was competing at J-Bay open in South Africa when a shark got tangled up with him and gave him, what I imagine to be, the biggest fright of his life. The competition has been postponed for obvious reasons, although, I’m guessing those beasts are pretty much constantly hanging around there any way.

Fanning had this to say about the traumatic shark event:

I was just sitting there and I felt something just get stuck in my leg rope, and I was kicking trying to get it away… I just saw fins. I was waiting for the teeth.

Incredibly the surfer wasn’t injured in the near-miss and says he managed to ‘get a punch into its back’. Good lad.

Check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtzu9Vgb_zE

Well, sod that for a game of soldiers, I’m sticking to chess and topiary thanks very much. There’s just too much to be scared of down below, ain’t there?