It was supposed to be a routine day on the water off the New South Wales coast. Instead, a drone camera captured the kind of ocean encounter that makes a five-meter fishing boat suddenly look remarkably small.
The scene unfolded last week off Bawley Point, on NSW South Coast, where a floating humpback whale carcass had attracted several large sharks. Among them was a great white estimated to be more than 5 meters (16 feet) long – roughly the length of a nearby fishing boat.
From the air, the comparison was startling. The shark cruised alongside the vessel, then made slow passes around the boats gathered near the whale before disappearing back into the blue.
The footage was captured by Lilly Pollard, a professional bodyboarder, marine-mammal rescue volunteer and drone pilot who had wanted to film a shark from the air. Instead, on her first attempt, she found herself recording several of the ocean’s largest predators at a feeding site just offshore.
“It was a monster,” Pollard told ABC News.
The images quickly became compelling for a simple reason: seen from above, the scale of the animal becomes difficult to ignore.
But what looks like a scene from a thriller was, according to marine experts, a remarkably natural event.
The Whale Was the Real Attraction
The sharks had not gathered around the boats by coincidence. A dead humpback whale was floating about 1.5 kilometers (just under a mile) offshore, providing an enormous source of food for predators and scavengers.
Pollard’s drone captured at least five sharks during the short period she was filming, including several great whites and tiger sharks. The other sharks were estimated at roughly 3 to 4 meters long.
Mature great white sharks are well known to feed on marine mammals, including whale carcasses. A dead whale can provide an unusually concentrated source of food in an otherwise vast ocean, making it an irresistible gathering point for large predators. That also explains why the sharks were repeatedly passing near the boats.
According to Pollard, the sharks would feed and then cruise around the vessels, apparently investigating them before returning to the carcass. There was no indication that the great white was attempting to attack the boat or the people aboard it.
That distinction matters because the aerial perspective can make the encounter look considerably more threatening than it actually was.
A five-meter shark swimming beside a five-meter boat is an extraordinary visual comparison. It is not, by itself, evidence that the shark was interested in the people on board.
Why Great Whites Come So Close to the Australian Coast
The waters off New South Wales are part of a major habitat for white sharks, and encounters with large individuals are not unusual.
The region also sits along important seasonal routes for marine life, including migrating whales. As whale populations recover, more carcasses are also expected to become available to scavengers in coastal waters.
Ocean researcher Duncan Leadbitter told ABC that events involving whale carcasses and large sharks could become more common as whale numbers increase.
The current episode therefore says less about an unusual change in shark behavior than it does about an unusual concentration of food.
The ocean is enormous, and most of these encounters happen far from human eyes. When a large whale dies at sea, however, it can temporarily transform a small patch of ocean into a feeding ground for some of the largest predators in the region. The boats happened to be there too.
The Drone Changed the Perspective
That may be the most remarkable part of the story. From a boat, a shark moving beneath the surface can be difficult to judge. The water distorts its shape, the animal may disappear beneath the hull, and there is no reliable visual reference for its actual length.
A drone changes all of that. Looking straight down, the shark can be compared directly with the boats, giving viewers an almost diagram-like sense of its size.
The animal that might have appeared simply “large” from the water suddenly looks enormous when its body stretches almost the entire length of a fishing boat.
That aerial perspective is one reason modern drone footage has transformed the way people see marine wildlife.
Animals that have always occupied the same waters can suddenly appear to be making unprecedented appearances simply because humans now have a much better view of what is happening beneath the surface. And in this case, the view happened to include a great white more than five meters long.
A Spectacular Encounter, Not a Shark Attack
There is another detail worth keeping in mind when watching the footage. The shark’s behavior, as described by the person who filmed it, was calm.
It did not charge the boat, ram the hull or attempt to attack anyone. It circled, investigated the boats and returned to the whale carcass.
That doesn’t make the encounter completely risk-free. Large sharks are powerful wild animals, and authorities routinely advise people to exercise caution when sharks are concentrated around a food source.
Nearby beaches can also be closed when a whale carcass attracts unusually high numbers of sharks. But the footage tells a more interesting story than simply “giant shark scares boaters.”
It shows a natural feeding event unfolding almost within arm’s reach of human activity – and a predator investigating the strange objects that happened to share its temporary feeding ground.
The Ocean Is Full of Moments Like This. We Just Rarely See Them
The great white off Bawley Point did not suddenly become enormous because a drone happened to be watching. It was already there. So was the whale. So were the other sharks. What changed was the perspective.
For decades, encounters like this would have been witnessed from the surface, described by fishermen or perhaps never noticed at all. Today, a relatively inexpensive drone can rise above the water and reveal an entire ecosystem in a single frame.
That is what makes the footage so compelling. The most startling thing about it may not be the size of the shark, but the realization that an animal of that scale can be moving through the same coastal waters as a small fishing boat – quietly, naturally and almost completely unnoticed. Until someone looked down.
Sources:
- ABC News Australia, “Drone pilot films great white, tiger sharks gorging on whale carcass off Bawley Point” – reporting by Justin Huntsdale and Stefan Posthuma-Grbic, published August 26, 2026.
- ABC News Australia, video report, “Sharks feast on a dead humpback whale floating off the coast of Bawley Point.”
- NSW Government SharkSmart – information on shark monitoring and management along the New South Wales coast.
