The men drifted in the Torres Strait, located between Australia and the Melanesian island of New Guinea. They wound up roughly 10 kilometers from the location where their boat initially capsized. At moments while they waited to be found, a shark came within meters of them.
After the fisherman floated for 15 hours, they were spotted by the captain for the oil ship MT Godam, who turned around to rescue them. “They were feeling cold,” Captain Ritesh Bhamaria of MT Godam told 7 News initially.
It appears that Lui sees the incident as a trial sent by a higher power. “At the moment when we saw the boat, I kept thinking ‘God, he brought this boat to us … At the right time and the right place’,” Lui told 7 News. Despite the conditions, he said he was optimistic that he and his uncle would be saved. “I was scared at first, but then I started to come to my senses that if I’m going to panic, that’s when we’re going to lose hope,” Lui added.
While they waited to be saved, Lui and his uncle bided their time by chatting. He even compared it to taking a drive, saying, “It’s like sitting in a car together with him and just cruising around.”
Luckily, the men were relatively unscathed from the experience, only receiving cuts and scratches. They were brought to Australia’s Thursday Island Hospital. Even after the horrifying experience, Lui is excited to get back to fishing. “We’ll jump on the dinghy again, we’re heading back out again,” he said of his next adventure with his uncle.
Needless to say, these men were incredibly lucky. In the event that you come close to a shark, you should not splash around, shark expert Richard Pierce told CNN back in 2015. “You’re just going to excite, incite and encourage the shark’s interest.” He added, “If you go swimming and splashing away, you’re almost inviting the shark to come give you an exploratory or an attack bite.”
You should also try to keep eye contact with the shark, and make yourself as big as possible. “The bigger you are in the water, the more respect you’ll get,” Pierce noted. The shark expert also advised not to play dead, to try and remain facing the shark so it can’t attack from behind, and to slowly back away.