Bait-stealing mako shark backflips through the air to break fishing line

ROCKINGHAM, Australia, July 5 (UPI) -- An Australian man out fishing with friends captured footage of a mako shark doing a backflip through the air to steal the bait from a line.

Jake Beazley said the mako shark approached the boat last week about 7-1/2 miles off Point Peron, near Rockingham, Western Australia, and took the bait at the end of a line.

The shark can initially be seen in the video swimming near the engine of the boat, which Beazley was fishing from alongside friends Lachlan Dance, Ben Hall and Shaun Davenport.

The shark appears to attack the boat's engine.

"He was biting the motor man, he was biting the propeller," one of the men says in the video.

The shark next swims a short distance away from the boat and performs a backflip through the air.

Beazley said the shark flipped two more times to break free from the fishing line after finishing off the bait.

"We have caught small sharks off the boat before but we've never had one swim right up to us," Beazley told WAtoday.

"When it started jumping out of the water it was amazing. It jumped out three times but we soon realized we had to take precautions because they can jump right up onto boats. So we drove off pretty soon," he said.