Andy Burnell spends a lot of time underwater interacting with, and taking photos of, the animals he encounters. He even loves to drop cameras beneath the surface on a baited line just to see what footage he’ll come back with, saying, “you can’t watch live, you just film and later have a look and whoa, check it out. Sometimes drama, sometimes amazing.”
A quick scroll through his YouTube page will show that the last time he ran this experiment was definitely the best combination of both dramatic and amazing. He took his oldest GoPro, tied it to that fishing line, and dropped it to a depth of about six or seven meters from the side of his kayak about 1.5 kilometers offshore of Grange Beach in Adelaide, Australia. Burnell says he drifted for about 30 uneventful minutes before coming back to land, thinking nothing of the everyday experiment he likes to run with his camera. When he eventually did review the footage, however, Burnell saw that he, or at least his camera, was being followed by a very curious juvenile great white shark. Judging by the time stamps on this short video, the stalking went on intermittently for at least five minutes.
“There’s no way that that shark is more than six feet long and that’s cool in itself,” he says, “because I think this is a really, really young white shark, a real baby. It’s got a very damaged right fin, and on the other side, on the left side of the body, right in the middle, there’s a big semi-circular mark that looks to me like teeth marks, so it looks like it’s been attacked by another shark and it’s carrying the scars.”
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