Jaws drop as shark jumps on boat

There's a scene towards the end of Jaws (1975) where the great white shark jumps out of the water and onto the stern of the Orca, sending its Captain, Quint, sliding into the mouth of the 25 foot long monster.

Some may scoff at the shark as it rises from the depths and plants itself on the end of the boat that arguably needed to be bigger, but a real-life Jaws moment recently happened in New Zealand when a shark did indeed jump on a fishing boat.

It wasn't captained by Quint, instead at the helm was Captain Ryan Churches, and it wasn't a great white that did the jumping (although white sharks can jump).

This time the shark in question was a 9 foot long shortfin Mako, definitely a fast fish as it the world's fastest swimming shark, which can swim up to speeds of 46 miles per hour.

A client - it's his party; it's his charter - on the charted boat was trying to reel the shark in when it jumped out of the water and landed on the bow of the fishing expedition, where it thrashed for a whole two minutes before sliding back to safety in the water. Presumably he'd taken a leaf out of the book of Jaws and gone under the boat.

Captain Churches said: "The customers reacted better than what a lot of people would have. The cameras were out, but they probably didn’t realize the danger we could have been in."

Hopefully they had someone stood in the photos to help give the shark done scale.

The Captain added: “We were lucky it was on the front of the boat and we had windscreens and hard tops blocking it. We were lucky it didn’t come into the back of the boat otherwise it could have a wildly different story.”

As it was everyone on the boat - like the shark - was fine, although no doubt they drank to their legs once the ordeal was over.

Of course the Mako is also the species of shark that the fishermen in Jaws mistakenly think the tiger shark is on the dock in Jaws, when the townsfolk of Amity think that there hangs their killer shark. But as Hooper tells Brody, it is a shark and not the shark.

Ironic then that the shark featured on the iconic Jaws poster by Roger Kastel isn't actually a great white, it is in actual fact a Mako - which is a relative of the carcharodon carcharias.

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