A Netflix documentary crew filming Our Planet II in the Northern Hawaiian Islands says in recent interviews that it was attacked twice by tiger sharks, causing an inflatable boat to “explode.”
Series producer Huw Cordey told Forbes that the crew was documenting the first flight of baby albatross chicks, as the David Attenborough-narrated series revolves around animal migration patterns.
“It took six days to sail there from Hawaii, and I believe we are the first natural history series to film the maiden flight of a Laysan albatross. They’re the longest-lived birds of all, and they take this enormous journey around the planet for years before they breed for the first time,” Cordey explained.
All the while, tiger sharks, which can grow up to five metres long, make a 3,000-kilometre migration of their own to prey on feeble fledglings.
“The original idea was to do an underwater shoot with the tiger sharks waiting in the shallows at Laysan, but the first day the tiger sharks were around, the crew got into these inflatable boats — and two sharks attacked them. It was like something out of Jaws,” Cordey recounted. “The crew was panicked, and basically made an emergency landing on the sand.”
Toby Nowlan, another producer and director working on the four-part series, said he was on one of the inflatable boats when it was attacked.
“This ‘V’ of water came streaming towards us and this tiger shark leapt at the boat and bit huge holes in it. The whole boat exploded,” Nowlan told the Radio Times. “We were trying to get it away and it wasn’t having any of it. It was horrific. That was the second shark that day to attack us.”
He said the boats were only about 100 metres from shore, so the crew was able to get to land and patch up the vessel. Nowlan added the crew later sent out a small rubber dinghy, which was then attacked by a school of giant trevallies — metre-long fish that can weigh up to 80 kilograms and that took out their motor.
As for the tiger sharks, Nowlan said their behaviour was “extremely unusual.”
“They were incredibly hungry, so there might not have been enough natural food and they were just trying anything they came across in the water.”
Shark attacks are exceedingly rare. In 2022, the International Shark Attack File run by the Florida Museum of Natural History investigated 108 interactions between sharks and humans worldwide. Only four incidents involved bites to motorized and non-motorized boats, and two “sea disasters where victim’s boats sank.”
Last year also saw 57 unprovoked shark bites on humans and 32 provoked bites, the organization found.
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