Diver rescues hooker shark snagged on Florida reef: video
This time it was the shark that needed saving.
A courageous Florida diver freed a shark with a large hook in its mouth that was snagged on fishing line on an artificial reef, video of the daring rescue operation shows.
Tazz Felde, an Under Pressure Divers instructor, encountered the fighting nurse shark off John Beasley Park on Okaloosa Island at Fort Walton Beach.
“It was between 6 and 7 feet,” he said said FOX Weather. “It was a pretty big shark.”
The video shows the shark squirming with a large metal hook in its mouth as it tries to escape. Felde is seen gently trying to pull the hook out of his mouth, but the desperate fish won’t cooperate.
Felde then places his hand on the shark’s head to hold it steady while he attempts to cut the tether with pliers, footage shows.
You see the shark turn around and bump into Felde.
Suddenly, with a tail flick right in front of the camera, the freed shark shoots off into the blue – with Feld’s pincers in tow.
Felde said another diver reported the shark to his wife, who works at a local snorkel shop. He said the diver and his son made several unsuccessful attempts to extricate it from the structure.
He and a friend quickly swam 100 meters to the site last month to see if they could help, he told Fox Weather.
“The area where they described where the shark was was there,” he added. “There were a lot of monofilaments lined up all over the reef. The shark was all the way down and you can see it can only move its head a little.”
Once there, Felde was able to cut through the steel leader of the 120-pound test line attached to the hook in the shark’s mouth.
While normally harmless to humans, nurse sharks have powerful jaws filled with thousands of tiny, serrated teeth that they use to crush prey found on the sea floor. according to National Geographic. Although not known to attack swimmers, they will bite defensively when threatened.
The sharks can grow up to 14 feet in length, with their large, distinctive tails accounting for up to 14 feet of their body length. They are found in the warm, shallow waters of the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific.
Felde said losing his pliers was worth it.
“I just wanted to make sure that thing was free and would live out the rest of its life happily,” he said. “It was rewarding just to watch him swim away.”
