Adrenaline pulsed through fisherman Ben Brown’s veins as one of “nature’s spectacles” played out before his eyes - and he has the video to prove it.
The footage, originally published by Brown’s Built To Fish TV and shared with the Herald, shows a marlin leaping out of the water - followed close behind by a mako shark on the hunt.
“What do you say?”, Brown told the Herald.
“It was pretty crazy. We didn’t know what was going on. It’s one of nature’s spectacles, isn’t it?”
Brown has caught “hundreds” of marlins over his life but he’d never watched a shark try to butcher one in front of him.
“It all went down pretty quickly. The fight was going on as normal and then all of a sudden the mako jumped out after [the marlin]. Then it jumped again.
“The mako had the fish across its mouth like a dog with a bone. The shark took its tail.”
While he ranked it “pretty high” on his list of unexpected spectacles, Brown said trying to compete with the shark for his catch “wasn’t what we want as fishermen”.
“Luckily we had a camera going. The way I described it to mates - you know what fishermen are like, you tend to overexaggerate - they didn’t believe it.”
Brown said of Monday’s trip off the coast of Kawhia: “That’s the cool thing about game fishing. We were jumping out of our skin when we saw it.
“Adrenaline was pulsing through me. We were cleaning the boat up afterwards and we were still jazzed up.”
While Brown kept his composure when recounting the experience to the Herald, “we certainly weren’t blasé about it at the time”.
Brown said his “eleven-year-old mate” who joined him for the trip was “blown away” to witness the hunt.
“He caught a marlin earlier that morning. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He was very stoked.
“We just thought ‘holy s***, that’s crazy!’
“It’s something that happens very rarely. The footage speaks for itself.”
The shark missed out on a meal. Instead, Brown and his crew hauled the tail-less marlin onto the boat and smoked and ate it.
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