Fisherman Unexpectedly Hooks Great White Shark, 'Hold My Beer'
A Massachusetts man fishing at a beach unexpectedly caught a great white shark before the predator managed to swim away from him.
At around noon on Sunday at Nauset Beach, located near the town of Orleans in Massachusetts, Matt Pieciak, 25, was fishing alongside friends and family, who were drinking beers and playing cornhole on the beach.
However, during the middle of a cornhole game on Sunday Pieciak noticed something behind his opponent in the water and saw that the fishing rod he had left by the sea was moving and bending.
"I just saw the rod kind of start to go off behind him. The tip of it was bending, and from there, we just kind of ran over to it," Pieciak told local station WCVB on Tuesday. He revealed to Storyful that he told his friend "Dude, hold my beer," as he reacted to the incident.
Pieciak quickly realized that his rod had caught a great white shark, estimated to be around 12 feet long, with one woman in a video of the incident uploaded to Instagram shouting: "It's a shark, oh my god! You caught a shark? Are you serious?!"
However, shortly after the shark was spotted by Pieciak, it broke away from the hook and "disappeared back into the depths of the ocean, I guess," he said.
The 25-year-old told The Boston Globe he believes the shark briefly got stuck to the hook after it went for a large fish that took the bait off of the rod, explaining: "It was just the food chain: fish took bait, shark took fish."
Pieciak then raised concern about how close the shark was to the shore, saying: "What's crazy about this was how close to the beach it was. People had been surfing there, I had been surfing there that day and the day before. We spent the whole week surfing right where that happened."
A spokesperson for the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, an agency that tracks sharks in Massachusetts, confirmed to the Globe that the video showed a great white shark.
Shark attacks are very rare, with fatal incidents even less likely to occur. The International Shark Attack File (ISAF), operated by the Florida Museum of Natural History, states that the odds of being killed by a shark are about one in 3.7 million.
However, shark attacks do occur in the U.S. and in June a great white shark bit a man in the leg while he was swimming off the Gray Whale Cove State Beach in California.
Officials closed off the ocean at Gray Whale Cove to swimmers and surfers following the incident. The victim was treated at hospital but has since been released.
Meanwhile, in Maryland in June, a young girl was been bitten by a sandbar shark in an unprovoked attack, in what the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said was the first bite not related to fishing recorded in the state.
The child was taken by her family to Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin, Maryland, where she was treated with 42 stitches for the 20 cuts on her leg.
Newsweek has contacted the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy for comment.
