Father and son recall intense experience helping beached great white shark: Not a good idea

A vacationing Australian dad and his 11-year-old son nearly came face-to-face with a 10-foot-long great white shark that was stranded in shallow water.Tourist Nash Core came across the unusual scene Tuesday while traveling near the coastal town of Ardrossan in South Australia state with his wife Ash Core and their sons, Parker, 11, and Lennox, 7. Nash was using his drone to shoot video of the writhing shark before he and Parker hesitantly decided to help three local men who were trying to return the distressed animal from a sand bank into deeper water. “To be honest, I did have some thoughts about, oh, why am I going out here?” Nash recalled during an interview with The Associated Press Thursday.As the duo began wading toward the shark, Parker told his father his heart was pounding. “I said, ‘Yeah, mine’s beating pretty fast too,’” said Nash, whose family lives in the Gold Coast in Queensland state. But by the time they arrived, the three local rescuers had used crab rakes – a garden rake-like tool used for digging crabs out of the sand – to push the shark into deeper waters. Core decided against getting any closer to the potentially dangerous fish. “I thought it’s probably not a good idea to go any further.That’s its territory and I’ll stay back,” he said, adding that the rescuers later told him they’d never seen a beached shark before. One of the saviors, Tony Dew, felt torn about whether to step in. “We were in about waist-deep water so if [the shark] wasn’t going to survive, I didn’t want to stand there and watch it, and if it did recover, I really wanted to be back on the beach,” Dew told Seven Network Television. “I hope it did survive.

We did what we could,” he added. Macquarie University wildlife scientist Vanessa Pirotta said shark strandings were not common, but they have become increasingly visible through social media. There are a number of ways marine animals find themselves stranded, like illness or...