A man who was "eaten alive" by a Great White shark has opened up about how he managed to escape from the jaws of the beast.
Eric Nerhus suffered one of the most traumatic things any human could ever endure: being eaten alive.
The sea explorer, from Eden, Australia, was on the hunt for abalone - an edible sea snail - in a spot he had dived in multiple times before, but on one fateful day in 2007, his entire life changed forever.
Eric was out exploring several feet below the surface of the Tasman Sea with his 16-year-old son Mark, his trusted deckhand back on the boat, when things suddenly turned pitch black.
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He quickly realized that he was stuck between the jaws of a Great White Shark, who had clamped it's jaws around his head and neck.
Despite being protected from the worst case scenario due to his equipment and his lead-lined vest, Eric spent an agonizing two minutes inside the mouth of the beast before his body slid further down its throat.
But in such a dire situation, he acted fast.
"Half my body was in its mouth," he told Australia's Nine Network."I felt down to the eye socket with my two fingers and poked them into the socket. The shark reacted by opening its mouth and I just tried to wriggle out.
"It was still trying to bite me," he continued before adding: "It crushed my goggles into my nose and they fell into its mouth."
He revealed that he finally managed to escape after jabbing at the shark's eye with a chisel - a piece of equipment that he used to chip abalone from rocks - that was luckily still in his grasp throughout the attack.
The animal reacted by opening its mouth enough for the diver to crawl out and swim to safety, though he was worried that it would hunt him again due to the pool of blood that followed from his injuries.
"It was just circling around my flippers, round and round in tight circles," he told the outlet. "The big round black eye, five inches wide, was staring straight into my face with just not one hint of fear, of any boat, or any human, or any other animal in the sea."
When he reached the surface, he was helped into his boat by his son, before being rushed to the hospital where he was being treated for severe cuts to his head, torso, and left arm.
He required 75 surgical sutures to stitch him back up, but he lived to tell the tale.
Speaking to The Sun in an interview, he said that while he's happy to be alive, he now fears the deep blue.
"I am glad I am still around," he told the outlet in an interview. "Sometimes you get a break in life... I'm a working man that just wanted to survive very, very badly, at all costs.
"I have no animosity towards the shark because I realize it obviously mistook me for its natural prey, which possibly would be a seal," he continued before adding: "When you think about it, this was probably a one in ten million chance of escape."
Eric is truly a lucky man.
