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Most people would not go out of their way to get up close and personal with a great white shark. However, that’s exactly what a fisherman did on the shore of a beach on Nantucket after inadvertently hooking one.
It’s been more than 50 years since millions of people found themselves dealing with a crippling fear of sharks courtesy of Jaws, a movie that continues to traumatize multiple generations of viewers who have trouble entering the ocean without thinking about what might be lurking beneath the surface.
Peter Benchley, the man who penned the novel that the blockbuster was based on, devoted the final decades of his life to championing marine conservation while expressing regret for painting the great white at the center of those works as a bloodthirsty killing machine; he (along with Steven Spielberg) believed they played a role in a rise in hunting and a significant decline in their global population.
Jaws was filmed on Martha’s Vineyard, whose waters attract a fair share of great whites and other sharks during the warmer months of the year. That same can be said for Nantucket, its neighbor approximately 30 miles to the east, and one angler had a pretty wild encounter after hooking one while fishing from a beach over the weekend.
A fisherman leapt onto a great white shark to free it after hooking the animal on a Nantucket beach
It is illegal to actively fish for great white sharks in the United States, but there’s only so much you can do to control what bites down on your line when you cast some bait.
According to The Nantucket Current, Elliot Sudal headed to a beach on Nantucket on Sunday to test the waters and see if he might be able to reel in one of the smaller sharks he’s routinely caught during the 13 years he’s spent fishing on the island. However, he got a very unexpected surprise when he landed what he knew was a “big one” before spotting a fin that made him realize he’d landed a great white.
A beachgoer captured the moment Sudal waded into the surf to drag the shark onto the sand before he climbed onto its back to tear out the hook with a pair of pliers, a procedure that took around 25 seconds before he popped back up to release the animal (which remains surprisingly calm during the extraction) back into the ocean.
Sudal says that was his first encounter with a great white, and he handled it about as well as you can.