A Southington, Connecticut, couple has much more than a full scrapbook to memorialize their honeymoon. The video of their close encounter with a shark is going viral.
Tiffany Levesque and Spencer Reilly went shark diving in a cage in South Africa on Nov. 2 and the YouTube video they posted of their very close encounter has been viewed nearly 1 million times since Nov. 8.
Spencer Reilly said he was in the shark cage, holding his breath, when a Great White shark suddenly crashed into it while chasing bait.
"It all happened just so fast. The shark just came out of nowhere, out of the murky waters," Reilly said.
Tiffany, who had already seen enough sharks, was back on the ship, out of the cage, when it happened and saw it happen.
"I was right behind it, looking over the rail, when I saw the shark come and slam into the cage," Tiffany Reilly said. "I didn't know it went inside until we watched the video. I just thought, 'Hey, he's going to be happy about that footage.'"
The Reillys, now married for just three weeks, are now back home in Southington from their two-week trip to South Africa and are enjoying watching this honeymoon video.
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Some people who have watched the video are blasting the shark cage company for endangering the animal.
"That shark came at the bait really fast and they didn't really have much time to do anything else but pull the bait," Spencer said.
And pull they did, right where Spencer would have been holding on if he wasn't holding his camera.
Coincidentally, Tiffany Reilly is a professional videographer and makes wedding videos for a living.
"I'm mad about that too," she said, "It would have been another cool angle, but we were all wet in the wet suits, so we didn't really have any phones or cameras out."
Spencer Reilly said it's "kinda funny" to see the articles that have been written about the incident with headlines like, "Extreme Diver Narrowly Escapes Death."
"It's funny reading all those things. It didn't seem that dangerous or crazy when it was happening," he said.
Even after the frightening encounter, laughing is heard in the video.
Spencer Reilly actually stayed in the cage a while longer because what he had seen was a juvenile Great White shark. Bigger sharks swam by later.
