A hammerhead shark swimming off the coast of an Alabama beach was caught on camera chasing some stingrays Monday morning.
The video posted to Facebook has nearly 30,000 views as of Tuesday.
Catarena Peek told WALA she and her boyfriend, Alec Deshotel, come to Orange Beach every year. This time will be a trip to remember for the Texas natives.
“This is the first time we have ever seen anything like this for sure,” Deshotel said. “I look out the window … and there it is. Massive 10 to 12-foot hammerhead, whatever it is I don’t know, but it was a big one. We don’t know how big it was, but it was massive.”
The massive shark showed off its speed by chasing stingrays in the shallow part of the Gulf. In the video, the few people in the water scrambled to get out.
“There was some man down there screaming that there was a shark, and I guess they finally saw the dorsal fin and they realized how close he started getting so they started jumping out of the water as fast as they could,” Peek said.
Peek said she started recording because it was the second shark they had seen from their 10-story balcony at only 10 a.m. Her video took off on Facebook very quickly.
“I just ended up videoing it, and it was a really cool video, so I just posted to Facebook thinking a couple hundred of my friends would find it kind of cool, and then all of a sudden, I looked down at my phone and it was over 100,000 views and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool,’” she said.
Peek and Deshotel said the sighting didn’t keep them from getting in the water. Peek is a certified diver and said she’s swam with sharks her entire life. Deshotel said he sees sharks while deep sea fishing. Still, this was a first for both of them.
“Once in a lifetime kind of experience for sure. It was just really cool to watch,” the couple said.