A great white shark was spotted swimming a mile from the New Jersey shoreline by a startled fishing group who captured the close encounter on video.
Jim Piazza said he was returning to Sea Isle City in his boat on Saturday when his son spotted the shark lurking within touching distance of the boat.
“I almost ran it over. My son was like pointing to it like, ‘Hey, there goes a shark.’ And I’m like, ‘No way!’” Mr Piazza told Action News.
While his son threw the shark a fish, Mr Piazza said he “made a loop around and yeah we circled it for about 10 minutes”.
He said the shark was about 12 feet long was “kind of swimming north towards Ocean City,” about 55 miles southwest of Philadelphia. It was undisturbed and continued swimming about a mile from Townsend Inlet, further down the New Jersey shoreline.
The nearby US Coast Guard station at Cape May was notified of the encounter and said in a Facebook status that “On Saturday 4 June, Townsend Inlet was notified of a 12 foot Great White Shark less then 1 mile from the beach!”
A video shared by Mr Piazza on social media has meanwhile gone viral on Facebook, where it has earned more than 4,000 views and 180 likes.
“Look at this monster,” he says in the clip. “Jesus Christ. Dude, that’s nuts. He was a big shark”.
Steve Nagiewicz, a professor of marine science at Stockton University, told ABC30 that based on Mr Piazza’s video of the shark it was indeed a great white.
He said it was probably a teenage shark about around eight feet in length and said: “They’re always there, but they stay away from people. It’s a good thing. It means the environment’s healthy”.
The sighting comes a month after a 12-foot long shark known as “Ironbound” was located off New Jersey by researchers at OCEARCH, who first tagged the animal in 2019.
It was unclear if the shark spotted by Mr Piazza was Ironbound or another Great White.
