Great White Shark bites air supply and gets stuck in cage at Guadalupe Island

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Here is footage of what it was like inside at the bottom of the cage-    • Inside the cage during a great white ...  

Diving at Guadalupe Island, Mexico-
While I was in the other submersible cage, along with Jaycee Butler and Jimmy Silveria, this female shark, known as "Milana Arnone" just casually swims up and bites the shark cage's air supply, getting a mouthful of air. As soon as this happens, our cage air supply dips, and breathing becomes a little labored through the entire event.

While the divemaster, Yann, is switching the valve to the alt air supply for his cage, the shark dives down into the cage with the 3 other divers, David Bodine, Kate Butler (who was in the top part of the cage when the shark entered), and Katie Yonker. This in my opinion is due to being disoriented by the mouthful of bubbles she just got. Having no "reverse", the shark then unfortunately wedges itself into the cage. The divemaster shoots to the top to alert the boat that there is a problem all while one of the biggest sharks we've seen comes to check out what's going on.

The cage is raised and the divers have to exit next to the shark. The captain and crew decide to tie a rope around the sharks tail and lower the cage, essentially holding the shark in place and popping the shark out! The shark swims away. Luckily no one was hurt, including the shark**. If it wasn't for the training and quick thinking of the crew, this could have ended a lot differently.

As I talked with the other divers we all had the same thought, even though the event was scary, it mainly made us all sad. Here we were, a bunch of strangers on a boat, thousands of miles away from home to see our favorite animal on earth, and to see it distressed was absolutely horrible. I can only hope that we can learn from this video and improve on great white shark diving best practices and improve on cage construction.

** in another video you can see the that the shark has some flesh wounds, but this is not from our dive! This is from another shark giving the shark a little bite (probably male) since it is assumed that the Great Whites come here to mate.

The GoPro was attached to the top of my camera housing and didn't have a display, which is why it's a little all over the place.

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(c) Peter Maguire