At just 10 years old, Australian surfer Eden Hasson has had the ride of his life after sharing a wave with a great white shark.
The Newcastle boy was surfing at the northern point of Samurai Beach on Tuesday evening (local time) with dad Chris and family watching on from the shore.
A proud dad and surfer himself, Mr Hasson snapped photos of his son when he noticed a "big dark shape" in the water.
"Just as he is taking off I see something out of the corner of my eye. I keep shooting and after he finishes and starts paddling out I zoom in on the second photo and see he's just done a backhand snap on an 8 foot Great White Sharks head [sic]," the surprised father wrote in a Facebook post.
The photo shows how astonishingly close Eden came to potentially colliding with the shark or becoming its next meal.
"Lucky he didn't fall off," Mr Hasson says.
Eden also felt something in the water with him at the time, but didn't think that it could be a great white.
"When I took off I thought I saw something, and when I went to do the first snap off the top I hit something and I thought it was seaweed," he told the Newcastle Herald.
"Then when [Dad] called me in I thought it must be a shark, because there was a big school of fish we saw."
But it didn't put Eden or any of his family off surfing - the boy went back into the surf the next day. Mr Hasson says he's taught his children "sharks are to be respected, not feared".
It's a moment which will be memorialised in the family's home, with Mr Hasson saying the photo is "going straight to the pool room".
Newshub.
