Florida woman felt a ‘tap’ on her paddleboard — and a hammerhead was hot on her tail
Cue the “Jaws” music.
A South Florida woman had a close encounter with a shark last Sunday, and it was caught on camera.
Malea Tribble, of Fort Lauderdale, was paddleboarding from Bimini in the Bahamas to Lake Worth Pier in Lake Worth Beach to raise money for cystic fibrosis research.
Tribble told West Palm Beach TV station WPBF-Channel 25 that she was in the middle of the 80-mile journey for The Crossing For Cystic Fibrosis when she felt a “little bit of a tap” on her board, but she assumed it was seaweed.
It wasn’t. It was a hammerhead shark, right on her trail.
Video posted to her Instagram and taken by someone in the boat alongside Tribble shows the tense situation up close.
They warn her that the shark is following her.
“Come to the side!” a man says as she paddles, determined but calm, toward them.
“Keep coming, keep coming,” says another man. “You’re doing good.”
A few seconds later, Tribble makes it the boat safely.
“It definitely kind of gives you a little bit of like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that happened to me,’ ” said Tribble, who ended up getting back out there about 10 minutes later with no issues.
“Just like falling in. You fall in, you get back up,” she said. “You don’t sit there and sulk about falling in. You have to just keep moving. It’s the best way to kind of move forward.”
The charity organization re-posted the harrowing clip, informing followers about the “rare sighting.”
“We are grateful Malea was not harmed and so proud of the calm and disciplined response the Tribble’s had during the situation,” said the event’s founder Travis Suit. “We are visitors when we are in the ocean, it’s really their home, so it’s to be expected.”
