Many people who saw us on the Discovery Channel’s Pacific Warriors TV show have asked about the tiger shark that came to visit after we caught the marlin. How big was it? Did the production company chum the water to get her to come around? Was that a REAL shark? How close did she get to our Hobie® Mirage® Tandem Island?
Here’s the straight scoop…
We were with the Pacific Warriors film crew with our marlin in the water and they wanted us to pretend that there was a shark coming to get our catch. We said no because we told the producers from the start that we would not do or say anything to make fake drama for the show.
All of a sudden the captain of our support boat started yelling, “Shark! Shark!” We started laughing and thought why is the captain getting into this filming session? Then he yelled, “No, for real, there is a BIG shark on your port side!”
I stuck my hand in the water to get underwater footage of the shark. One of the cameramen in the boat followed suit with his GoPro and filmed from his side too, while his girlfriend was freaking out on the support boat.
We’re not really good with nautical terms, so first we had to figure out which side was the port side. When we finally looked over we saw a BIG, dark shadow in the water swimming toward us. The adrenaline kicked in and boom… the marlin was on the trampoline and we celebrated the successful catch.
The tiger shark swam calmly straight to our Tandem Island and swam under us. She was around 15 feet long. When she realized the marlin was no longer in the water she started swimming off. I (Kevin) knew we couldn’t blow this chance to get footage of a big shark for the show, so I grabbed one of our Intova cameras off the mount and pounded on the side of the kayak.
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Luckily for us, she came back to see what the ruckus was, so I stuck my hand in the water to get underwater footage of the shark. One of the cameramen in the boat saw this and followed suit with his GoPro and filmed from his side too, while his girlfriend was freaking out on the support boat.
There was no reason to worry because #1. Unlike the way she was portrayed on the show, the tiger shark was not aggressive at all. #2. We were on the Hobie Tandem Island… the most stable watercraft in the world! We finally had enough underwater footage after filming her for over an hour, so we opened up our sail and glided our way to shore.
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