A group of fisherman won’t forget their close encounter with a feeding great white shark off the New Jersey coast any time soon.
Jeff Crilly, 31, was out fishing with some of his friends on his 31-foot boat Big Nutz Required II when they stumbled into a scene straight out of the movie Jaws.
A movie can’t prepare you for this
The fishing crew captured video of this once-in-a-lifetime encounter when the shark emerged and bit into their bait bag.
Everyone on board goes into hysterics as soon as they spot it going in for a bite.
“We’ve fished for sharks a lot and never seen anything like that. We were amazed by how big it was,” Capt. Crilly told the Ashbury Park Press.
Crilly and his crew were competing in a mako shark tournament. They had multiple types of bait in the water in addition to the bag of ground-up fish.
The shark took the bait but didn’t get hooked and instead swam off, disappearing as soon as it finished its meal.
Everything was over in a couple of minutes as the shark that Crilly says was over half the size of his boat made its escape.
Bigger fish in the sea
Crilly estimates it was between 16 to 18 feet in length.
“It was harder to guess the weight because we had nothing to compare it to, but it was probably about 2,000 pounds.”
Terrifyingly enough, great white sharks can get even bigger.
National Geographic states white sharks can grow to over 20 feet in length and weight upwards of 2.5 tons.
Situations like this aren’t uncommon with sharks, Marie Levine, with the New Jersey-based Shark Research Institute, told The Washington Post.
“White sharks are intelligent animals,” says Levine. “And if something’s unfamiliar, they’re going to inspect it, see what’s going on.”
