Shark encounter at Galveston beach caught on video

GALVESTON, Texas (FOX 26) - You never know what you are going to catch off Galveston. So when Attalia Borden saw a woman struggling to land a fish, he grabbed his phone and started rolling.

"Everybody starts screaming 'get out of the water, get out of the water. I said 'what kind of fish do they have?' I see this dude pulling a shark out by the tail and it's my length," he said.

It appears to be a black tip shark hooked just a few yards off shore on the east end of the island. Borden says there were plenty of people swimming nearby.

"That looks like a baby shark and if you see it's a shark that small you know it's a baby and you know there's got to be more out there," Borden says.

He's right. There are.

"It's not that they don't exist. It's just rare to have an encounter with them," says Peter Davis with the Galveston Beach Patrol.

He says in the 35 years he's been with the beach patrol, he's seen 10 shark bites, and there's a theme.

"Every one I've worked, which is most of them, is people were in schooling fish and the shark was eating the fish and it was a case of mistaken identity. One bite and release. It's not an attack. It's a bite," Davis says.

That's what happened last June when a shark bit a girl who was in shallow water. It's also what happened in October 2015 when a shark chomped on a boy's heel. In the last 106 years there have only been 17 bites in the waters off Galveston. Statistically, riptides kill more people there, but those statistics won't  convince everyone it's safe to go into the water.

"I'm going back but I'm not going in. Same reason,"  laughs Borden.