Andrew Jones loves to tell fishing stories and playfully admits they’re not always all true, but the Grand Manan teacher has video proof he looked a great white shark in the eye Thursday.
“I think it was looking … to see if maybe I’d be maybe a good meal,” he said.
“I guess I probably should have been scared, but we’ve got a big boat and to see something like that, just marvellous. Just incredible.”
Jones, 54, was fishing on his boat, School’s Out, with two of his buddies in the Bay of Fundy, between Grand Manan and Wolf islands.
They had the engine off, had just finished lunch and were chatting when they spotted the shark in the clear, blue water.
That shark looked us right in the eye as it sailed on by.– Andrew Jones
“It was large and it circled our boat several times,” said Jones.
“I thought, ‘We should take a picture,’ and [then] I thought, ‘Why am I taking pictures? This is a video situation.'”
He captured the shark on video, just as it was coming around the bow.
“That shark looked us right in the eye as it sailed on by,” said Jones, still awe-struck.
He estimates the shark was about 10 to 12-feet long, based on the size of his 27-foot boat. “Of course like every good fish story, the fish gets bigger each time.”
In the 19-second video, the shark opens its mouth just as it ducks under the dive platform on the boat.
“Oh my … Look, he just bit us,” Jones exclaims. “Wow!”
After he stopped recording, the shark rolled “and then, of course, tail-slapped the side of the boat.”
Jones suspects the shark was just curious — “just like we are curious of them.”
One of his friends isn’t so sure. “He said, ‘You know, I don’t know whether that shark was hungry or horny, but either way I didn’t want him in the boat.'”
Video goes viral
Jones posted the video on Facebook. “A HUGE great white shark just bit the dive platform on my boat. That was a once in a lifetime experience and we got him on video (against the advice of the crew who thought we should be leaving),” he wrote.
Within 24 hours, it’s been viewed 101,000 times and nearly 400 people have commented.
Grand Manan resident Andrew Jones was fishing in the Bay of Fundy when this curious white shark approached his boat — and even tried to get a taste.
Jones said he got so many calls and texts after he posted it, he had to hand the helm over to his friends to steer them home.
“I was the teenager on the cellphone for about an hour there.”
No danger
Chris Fischer, founder of Ocearch, a non-profit research organization based in Utah specializing in marine research, watched the video and confirmed it was great white shark — a mature female, about 12 feet long.
It posed no danger, he said. It was “giving them a flyby probably to see if [it] could pick up an easy meal, and then it’s on its way.”
It’s not unusual for a great white to be in the area, said Fischer. His group has tagged about 40 of them in the region.
This is the time of year when the sharks arrive in Atlantic Canada for their summer-fall feeding aggregations, said Fischer. They prevent the seals from hitting the fish stocks too hard and “keep everything in balance.”
“What we’re really witnessing is the return to abundance of this whole region of the western North Atlantic,” he said, including the steady recovery of great white populations to their historic range.
“It’s super exciting to see and I think we’re going to see more and more of it.”
Jones said he has always been partial to white-sided dolphins. “They take the cake.”
But after his close encounter with the great white, “maybe that’s my new No. 1 because that was just an experience I’ve never had before,” he said.
“It was just one of those incredible events.”
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