Eric Nerhus
There aren't a whole lot of things out there that scare me. I can handle bugs. I don't mind snakes. I don't get claustrophobic and I'm not scared of heights. Even spiders are OK I guess. But one creature that skeeves the ever-loving piss out of me is sharks. I hate the damn things, but yet in an interesting twist I am totally fascinated by them and torment myself every single year by watching all of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Despite my morbid fascination, however, I know that if I was ever actually in the water with one of them I'd probably have a fucking heart attack and die on the spot. I mean, just look at this motherfucking picture and tell me you wouldn't crap your wet suit if you had to go face-to-face with one of these unrelenting merciless killing machines in it's natural habitat:
I mean WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?!?! Holy shit I can't even look at this picture without flinching (because apparently I'm such a damned pussy). The thing just looks evil. Like the sort of thing that desperate Medieval Kings should send fucking knights out to slay or something.
Well 41-year old diver Eric Nerhus was out off the coast of Australia this week foraging for bologna or something, just minding his own business, when all of a sudden everything went dark and a sharp painful stinging sensation coursed throughout his entire body. He quickly realized that he was having a first-person encounter with this:
He quickly realized that A MOTHERFUCKING GREAT WHITE SHARK BIT HIS HEAD and he was now all up in the grille of a 10 foot-long eating machine. The thing caught him completely off-guard, sinking it's teeth into his head and shoulders and driving his dive mask into his face, breaking his nose. Then the shark took a second bite, chomping down on Eric's back and torso, driving it's rows of razor-sharp teeth through his diving suit and puncturing his skin in its effort to devour this wayward mollusk-hunter.
I've photoshopped a couple of pictures to help give you a better visual of what Eric was going through:
Now at this point most of us would just go "oh fuck" and then become fish food for the deadliest and most efficient predator on the planet. But not Eric. He was a badass.
Eric used the one arm that wasn't inside the shark's mouth to start punching the fuck out of the shark. Think about that for a minute. This guy is in the process of being eaten, and he has the presence of mind, the determination and the balls-outitude to start wailing on this thing like fucking Rocky Balboa at the New England Aquarium. He's punching this ten-foot long, two ton shark in the fucking eye, desperately trying to free himself from this thing's mouth and prevent himself from doing a real-life re-enactment of Jaws 4: The Revenge. Finally, the shark got sick of having the shit beaten out of it and let Eric go. He swam up to the surface, was pulled out of the water by his son, and rushed to the hospital for treatment.
Eric Nerhus is a total fucking badass. He was completely surprise attacked by one of the Earth's most feared predators, and ended up kicking it's ass. He was about fifteen seconds from becoming two hundred pounds of chum, but instead of panicking and letting himself be devoured he fought his way back (literally) from the jaws of death. It all just sort of reminds me of this motivational picture my Mom always had hanging in her office at work:
