Bull sharks are known to be aggressive, but a recent video from the Florida coast shows a whole new level of hostility. In the video that was shared to Instagram on July 24, a bull shark attacks a fishing boat while the anglers onboard fish for cobia. The shark rams the boat several times, smashing its huge snout into the stern and damaging one of the twin outboards.
Josh Jorgensen, the host of BlacktipH Fishing, captured the footage with a drone. At the beginning of the clip, Jorgensen explains that he was flying his drone from the beach when he spotted two big cobia swimming alongside a bull shark. This is typical cobia behavior, as they’ll often swim in the wakes of bull sharks, picking up baitfish, crustaceans, and other prey items that the sharks kick up off the seafloor.
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As he tracked the three fish with his drone, Jorgensen called his friend Carl Torresson, a charter captain who runs Slob City Charters in Riviera Beach. With directions from Jorgensen, Torresson raced over to the cobia in his boat. Then he and his clients started sight-casting to them.
“I was following his boat with my drone when all of a sudden, the shark attacked his engines,” Jorgensen says in the video. “The shark attacked the boat five times, swam away, and then came back for more. In total, the shark attacked Carl’s boat eight times.”
It’s unclear if Torresson or his clients ever caught one of the cobia, but he eventually cranked his engines back on and returned to the dock. When Torresson got there, he finally saw the damage the bull shark had inflicted on one of his two outboard motors.
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“We were thinking that maybe he grabbed the propeller, but we weren’t expecting the damage that we had when we got back to the dock,” Torresson explains as he points to the bite marks in the outboard’s lower unit. “The whole middle of the engine was completely ripped out, the trim tabs broken. I didn’t think a shark could actually shake a boat like that.”