Safety Bay diver Tim Ryan captures heart-stopping encounter with great white shark off Shoalwater

A veteran diver has captured the moment he and his best mate were stalked by a massive great white shark off Warnbro on film.

Tim Ryan shared the terrifying eight-minute video on social media showing the four-metre shark getting up close and personal with the pair on Wednesday.

The pair were diving for crayfish off the Shoalwater Marine Park coast when the shark appeared out of the deep.

The footage shows the female shark circling Tim, who maintains his composure throughout and manages to capture every second on his GoPro.

At the five-minute mark, the footage becomes truly heartstopping when Tim’s mate, Andy, appears above the reef.

Tim begins to gesture urgently to his mate to come towards him, he then points frantically as a shadow looms behind him.

Andy turns and begins kicking hard, getting his body as close to the reef as possible.

“So Andy popped up, and the shark came up behind him, and then basically there were now two lots of bubbles in the water and two big black bodies,” Tim said.

“And sharks are sneaky attack hunters. They’ll never attack you when you’re looking at them. They’ll always just sneak up behind something that looks like a soft target.

So, two of us in the water was all of a sudden, enough, for it to say, ‘Nah, this is no good, I can’t do sneaky’, and it took off.”

Tim, a Safety Bay local, often goes diving off Coventry Reef with his mate Andy, but this is the first time they’ve experienced anything like what happened on Wednesday.

“My mate, Andy, he’s done 2000 dives over 30 years and has never been confronted with an apex predator like a white shark,” Tim said.

“And then yesterday was my 82nd dive, and I have one circled with five minutes.

“It’s a pretty, pretty rare occurrence that somebody not only gets footage but experiences this and doesn’t get eaten.”

This wasn’t Tim’s sole brush with death on Wednesday, either.

“Because I’ve been down so long, basically sheltering from the shark, I completely ran out of air at 10 metres.

“I had to swim to the surface with no air. Andy was a legend for going to the surface when I was running out of air to try and find the boat, even though we knew the shark was in the area.

“That was a pretty ballsy move. But it’s what you’ve got to do, right?

“One of my kids said that’s the 29th life you’ve lost along the way. I’ve had a few adventures.”

Tim said the Jaws theme began playing in his head when he first saw the shark.

“It was just a funny moment for me, like it straight away, went from — oh, s...t, I’m in big trouble here, to right, I’ve got to deal with this, all in the space of a few seconds,” he said.

“I had to cycle through those emotions, and then it was on to my right, and I’ve got to slow my breathing down, I’ve got to slow my heart rate down, I’ve got to keep an eye on the shark the whole time.

“You’ve got to keep eye contact with the shark; they’re smart enough that, if you’re looking at them, they’re generally less likely to attack you because they sneaky, sneaky attack hunters, right? They don’t want you to see them coming.

“You cannot panic, yeah? You just, like, make a conscious effort to just calm down. You know, don’t lose your sh*t because you start swimming and flapping around in a panic, that’s the alarm bells, the dinner bell ringing, you know?”

Tim said since sharing it online, people who know more about sharks believe the pair came close to becoming a snack.

“A few guys who on the internet, on the socials, who I think know more about sharks than us, have come in and said what they observed in the video - from the start to the middle to the end - is that it started to display attack behaviours,” he said.

“So the dorsal fins, the ones on the side, they change angle and direction when they’re about to attack. And it had done that.”

Tim said he and Andy were laughing by the time they were both safe in the boat and most importantly, both took home a feed of crabs.