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'this is the end'
Shocking footage captures horror moment great white chews through divers’ air supply before getting stuck INSIDE shark cage
The 15ft beast thrashed around inside the steel pen while four divers feared the worst
FOUR divers have told how they escaped certain death after a huge great white severed their air supply then jammed its massive body INSIDE their shark cage.
The terrifying encounter happened as they dived off a remote Mexican island 160 miles west of the Baja California port of Ensenada.
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“The first minute or so felt like a horrific earthquake underwater, and I kept thinking, ‘We just need to wait this out,’" revealed Katie Yonker, operations director for Bluewater Dive Travel.
“But in the back of my head I feared the cage would break apart and this would be the end for me.”
The divers had entered a their open-topped cage with an upper viewing platform called a balcony, and were lowered into the waters to view sharks.
Air was supplied via a hose on the vessel with an emergency air supply valve was fixed inside the cage.
Katie was inside the cage with a diver master named Yann, and passengers named David and Katie B.
A chum bag was attached to the cage to provide scent for nearby sharks.
The shark, measuring 13 to 15 feet, approached Yann and Katie B., who were exposed on the balcony, reports .
Yann pushed the shark away, and moments later the shark bit through the air hose, “creating an explosion of air bubbles.”
Then the shark entered the balcony area and swam vertically into the cage, becoming angry and stuck.
Yann managed to stay above the shark but the other three divers cowered beneath as it began to thrash in an attempt to free itself.
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“We stood, gripping the cage in an attempt to stay upright, while the cage circled back and forth and at one point was at a 45-degree angle,” Yonker writes.
“Yann’s regulator had been knocked out of his mouth by the shark, so he retreated to the surface to catch a breath and to tell the crew to bring up the cage.”
After the cage was pulled near the surface they still had to work out how to get out with the shark still stuck inside.
Katie revealed “it was nearly impossible to see anything because the shark was blocking much of the exit and visibility was limited by all the air bubbles and blood [from the chum bag] in the water…. I could see the boat, but had no idea how I would get around the shark.”
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She eventually made it onto the boat, however, and the crew freed the shark after an arduous process that involved tying a rope around its tail.
“To be clear, this was in no way a shark attack. It was a shark enticed by the scent of tuna, not humans. I suspect (and hope) that this incident prompts some changes in the operations, mainly to the design of the cages so that this cannot happen again,” insisted Katie.
Lat month we told how another great white shark defecated on a group of divers who were filming underwater in the same location.
However, it sounds like this time around it wasn't the shark's bowels that were in danger of letting go.
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