LAUDERDALE-BY-THE-SEA, Fla. (WSVN) — An off-duty lifeguard came to the rescue of a nurse shark that had a hook stuck in its mouth.
“Pretty sure it was scared, like he was just trying to wiggle his tail, like he wasn’t moving anywhere, so I was trying to do my best to get him out as fast as possible,” said Szilard Janko.
Janko and his friends were free diving off of Commercial Pier, Wednesday, when he noticed the shark trapped under a rock. “We see this little hole with the shark’s tail sticking out, so I dive down with my camera to try to get a good picture of him, and I see that he has like a hook, like stuck inside the hole,” Janko said.
Janko freed the shark and began working on the hook. “Once I had him on his back, that’s when I tried to get the hook out of his mouth,” he said. “Like, I was waiting for him to bite me while he was wiggling.”
After a few minutes of work, Janko was able to free the shark, which then swam away.
Janko’s friend, Eliz Fulop filmed the entire ordeal. “If there was nobody there, I may have given it a try, but it was kind of scary,” she said.
Janko himself wasn’t worried at all. Instead, he is worried about people who don’t keep the beach clean. “Clean up the trash you see around the beach, and if you have any trash, any fishing lines, try to put it in the trash can, don’t just throw it in the ocean. It’s destroying the environment out there,” he said.
Janko said this is the first time he has ever done anything like that.
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