These folks may need to get a bigger boat! That’s just one scene from the movie Jaws that could be playing over and over again in these fishermen’s minds.
They had a close encounter with a 7-foot mako shark on a charter boat off the coast of Maine recently. But it wasn’t just them looking down into the water from the safety of their boat. This encounter was literally in their face!
The massive mako jumped right onto the deck of the boat after launching itself out of the water wile hooked on one of the lines.
Dave Sinclair of Sea Ventures Charters and his grandson, Cameron, two of the fishermen out for a pleasant day on the waters. The group consisted of mostly young fishermen just off of the coast of Mohegan, Maine.
Sinclair and his grandson tag sharks for research and then they release them back into the wild. This time, the shark launched itself out of the ocean from a distance and the fisherman had time to shout some expletives from onboard before it launched itself a second time and landed right into Cameron’s head.
“And then all of a sudden, there he was in my face, and I feel him hit the side of my face with his tail,” he told NBC affiliate NECN. “And then he landed on my right foot and I kind of jumped out of the way.”
Sinclair thought he had seen it all in his decades at sea, but this was “the frosting on the cake.”
“My first thoughts were injuries,” Sinclair told NECN. “We had a boat full of young guys and one young gentleman was fighting the fish.”
Sinclair and his grandson were able to remove the hook from the mouth of the shark, measure it, tag it and then push it back into the ocean. No one suffered any injuries from the incident.
“You kind of feel like, ‘There’s no way this is happening,'” Cameron said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to be that surprised again.”
The moment was captured on video by passenger Chris Kingsbury.
Watch:
