Like many of you out there, I was traumatized by Steven Spielberg's JAWS at a young age and I am now terrified of going swimming in the ocean… or my local pool. Most of this fear comes from Roger Kastel's killer poster for the film depicting a carefree young woman swimming along blissfully unaware that underneath her a roaring great white shark is barreling upwards to eat her ass like a Big Kahuna burger.
But that's just fantasy, right? Nope. Not anymore.
Today we have a picture taken by a British cage diver that has captured a great white recreating the poster (thankfully sans girl on the surface) and you can check it out – along with the classic poster -below. Brr. The real story behind the pic centers on 32-year-old British photographer and filmmaker Euan Rannachan who was in a cage just a few feet away from the huge 17ft predator off the west coast of Mexico when he captured the image.
Rannachan says:
The shark in my image is a female and her name is Squirrel. We'd been with her for a while. We have these people on the boat called shark wranglers and they throw these two-foot chunks of tuna to get the shark close to the surface. The shark wrangles played an important and dangerous part on the acquisition of this amazing picture. A guy named Crazy Luis stood up on the boat to bring the shark to us when we sit on the surface in the shark cage.
He continues:
Sometimes when the wranglers play with the sharks, the sharks get p****d off and dive down under the boat and the bait so they can come rocketing up and get it. That's exactly what Squirrel was doing here, she was fed up probably messing around on the surface and dived back down under the boat. It was really deep there but the water clarity was amazing.
Wait… this terrifying shark is named… Squirrel?
Whatever, no matter what cute and cuddly name the powers that be try to pin on her she's the stuff of nightmares. Thank God she's not roaming around in the trees of MY backyard is all I'm saying. I knew there was a reason I didn't like squirrels.