An Australian daredevil filming "extreme cage diving" with sharks had the tables turned on him when a nearly 8-foot-long shark came directly at him.

Shaun Harrington, 27, was 3,000 feet offshore on Australia's Gold Coast with friends and his twin brother, Dean, when he decided to jump in the water, even though he knew a shark that had been caught by a local fisherman was nearby.

"I thought I would just jump in, get a couple of shots and hop out but the thing just went crazy," Harrington told Australia's Channel 9. "It wigged out and came at me."

"I just thought, 'I gotta get out of here,'" Harrington said. "I saw the shark coming and threw the budgie cage in front of it and it just bounced off it."

Harrington's only defense against the shark was the "budgie cage," a cage made for the budgerigar, a small parrot native to Australia.

"It's probably one of the dumbest things I've ever done," Harrington said.

Harrington can be seen on camera, in video posted to his website, holding the cage with his hands to fend off the shark before scrambling to safety on the boat.

The video, which has garnered more than 200,000 views on YouTube since Tuesday, has made Harrington a viral star, but his decision to jump in the water with a shark has flopped with his wife.

"I'm pretty much in the dog house," Harrington told Channel 9's "Today" show, adding that his wife is not speaking to him. "I'm thinking of renovating the dog house at the moment and putting a pool table in there."