Charlie Vercoe

speaker

799 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Charlie Vercoe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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You’re Gonna Want To Hear This · Charlie Verco: He Paddled Towards The Shark To Save Her · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

But most of my interactions had either been small sharks that

you'd kind of go, okay, that doesn't really bother me as long as I'm on a big craft, I wouldn't swim with them.

Or you just see it and get out of the water as quickly as you can and you try and reduce the risk so you wouldn't go out when there's massive bait balls or at sunset, although I kind of break that rule all the time if the surf's good.

And yeah, all my interactions had been where the sharks had been acting pretty docile.

So that was, yeah, a complete situation change once that it actually started acting aggressively.

I guess what was going through my head is initially I thought I was, yeah, whenever I've thought about what would happen if I was in a shark attack, because just something that goes through your mind when you're spending a lot of time in the water, is that if I was on a big craft like mine, that I'd be able to paddle over towards it and just the presence of something as big as mine.

I'm on an 18-foot board.

would just scare off the shark.

And when I saw the shark come out of the water a little bit, surfaced, I could see its dorsal fin and its back and its tail and felt like I was looking up at the shark and the size of it and the power just made me realize that this thing's not going to be scared of me.

And that changed the situation a lot in my head.

I guess the previous examples in my head, it would have been a smaller shark.

But at the same time, I still felt somewhat of an obligation to be there because I was the only person nearby that was on a craft.

Everyone else was swimming.

And it was amazing how quickly the water just felt empty as well.

It feels like you were out there for a long time.

I had no gauge of how long the whole scenario took.

But...

I kept paddling towards her hoping that I would be able to do something.

And when the attack was going on, I realized that paddling in there and interrupting what was going on wasn't an option because that would just be putting myself under unnecessary risk.

And well, frankly, I was too scared to, I guess.

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