'I watched friend get eaten by a shark and most haunting moment was exactly like Jaws'

A woman who desperately swam for over seven hours to survive a shark attack watched her friend get mauled by a beast in the water – and said one horrifying moment was just like the movie Jaws.

Tamara Ennis was a 21-year-old waitress when she endured one of the scariest scenarios imaginable near Ormond Beach, Florida, in August 1981. She was out sailing on a catamaran with three others when disaster struck. After sailing one mile from shore, dark clouds suddenly circled, and a storm battered their boat, before a pontoon filled with water.

The small catamaran, that only seated four people, flipped over and the four explorers, Daniel Perrin, who owned the boat, Randy Cohen, Christy Wapniarski and Tamara, scrambled to get up on a hull to stay out of the shark-infested water.

They had no food or water and spent six hours drifting further from the shore wearing just bathing suits.

After briefly hearing an engine nearby before it left, Tamara remembered: "The reality hit us, and we were just quiet. And Christy who was sitting in front of me, she was very quiet, and I could tell also that she was just making peace and I had a sense that she knew she was gonna die.”

After dawn, Tamara declared that she was going to start swimming before the sun went all the way up, which could make them lose direction.

At that moment, she thought she was going to die, but wanted to die trying, and Christy was the only one out of the four who was not a comfortable swimmer.

After giving her tips, the four then set out into the water, and Tamara will never forget what happened next.

She told YouTube channel A&E: “I was up in front and it was only probably about an hour into the swim that I looked back and I heard, um, Christy screaming and yelling for Randy to come get her.”

Tamara initially thought her friend was drowning and she shouted at her to stay afloat, however, she then realised a shark was circling.

She continued: “I realised I saw her thrashing about in the water. And then she went straight up just like in the movie, in the Jaws movie, when she went straight up and straight back into the water. And I knew she’d been hit by a shark.

“So I yelled to Randy that it was a shark and he thought she was drowning. So he was yelling back to her, and you know, calling her name, and she was just screaming ‘come and get me now’ and she went up again and down.

“And he was swimming while this happened and he didn’t see that it was a shark. He just thought she was drowning. So the last time I saw her go up and down she just went face down into the water. I knew that, you know, I knew she was dead. She was completely pale, completely white, I knew she’d lost all her blood.”

Knowing there was nothing she could do to help, she carried on swimming, and she then felt something brush against her own leg.

She revealed: “After seeing Christy get hit by the shark, I got bumped by something. And I looked down and it was a grey shark, bigger than I was, and I just had a split second vision of Christy and me saying, 'That’s not how I wanna go. There is no way I can die like this.'

“I put myself in the frame of mind of a fish, or that I belonged to the ocean. It was the weirdest thing. Just in nanoseconds I was like, I belong here too so get out of my way too, so I just kept swimming backstroke.”

After five hours of swimming, Tamara lost sight of Randy and Daniel, and at one point had to swim against the current after spotting sharks in the distance.

She also suffered hallucinations and said her life flashed before her during the swim that left her severely exhausted and sunburnt.

Finally, after seven hours, Tamara made it back near land, and a lifeguard recused her.

She recalled: “I just told him instinctively – 'I’ve just swam about nine miles, there’s a boat out there, one person’s dead. And there are a couple of guys and I don’t know if they are dead or alive.'”

Randy and Daniel both made it out alive and Tamara saw the former in hospital where he stayed for two weeks with hypothermia.

As for Daniel, she never saw him again, and has no idea what happened to him.

Tamara meanwhile started working on boats in the Bahamas to help her trauma and she concluded: “I still to this day won’t go in dark water but surviving that also gives you a whole new outlook on life.

“Dying wasn’t an option for me during that time so I just had to keep good thoughts and say, 'Ok, I’ve made it another minute, I made it another five minutes, I made it another hour.' And just keep going and thinking about, you know, your family, or your future, and not giving in to the negative thoughts is how I survived.”

The body of Christy, who was just 19-years-old and was from Chicago, was never found.