Great White gets too close for comfort

"Get inside the shark cage," they said. "Be grand," they said.

You know the whole shark cage thing?

Apparently the sharks have worked it out - watch the below incredible footage as a 2.5m Great White bypasses the bait meant to distract him and instead makes straight for the cage full of juicy tourists, even managing to get his head inside the bars.

WARNING: NSFW owing to some choice language, which is pretty understandable given the circumstances.

( Bryan Plummer via YouTube)

The video was posted to YouTube by South African Bryan Plummer, who was shark diving in the SA resort of Gansbaai last week with his sister and some friends.

Mr Plummer had completed his own dive and was filming a group of Canadian tourists inside the cage when the shark rewrote the script.

"A shark totally ignores the bait and goes straight for the cage!," Mr Plummer said.

"He gets his head inside the cage, while fellow diver Roger... acted quickly to swim below the gaping shark's mouth and to avoid any injury."

The shark-diving company responsible for organising the tours has since reduced the size of its cages' viewing windowns, the Cape Times reported.

"“The cage is built to industry standards and is inspected every year," Great White Shark Tours general manager Greg Donald told the Cape Times, adding that it was the first such incident in the 18-year history of the company.

“The shark wasn’t lured to do that in any manner. It did that on its own and we don’t know why," he said.

Gansbaai, near Cape Town, is known as the great white shark capital of the world