A fisherman and his son made a startling discovery of a great white shark while sailing off the coast of New Jersey over the weekend.
Jim Piazza had been fishing with his son, Jayden, when he nearly ran into the massive creature.
‘The videos don’t do it justice,’ Piazza, who fishes in New Jersey every summer, told on Monday. ‘It was just nonchalantly there. I’ve never seen anything like that.’
Soon after its spotting, the US Coast Guard boarded Piazza’s boat and performed a safety check.
Spotting a great white shark off the New Jersey coast isn’t unheard of, but getting as close as Piazza and his son did is quite rare. The International Shark Attack file lists 15 confirmed and unprovoked shark attacks in New Jersey since 1837.
Piazza, who is renting a home in Sea Isle for the summer, estimated that the shark was about 12-feet-long, slightly more than half the length of his 23-foot-long fishing boat. Sharks of that size typically weigh about 1,000 pounds.
He had been out fishing all morning with his son and one of his friends, and as they were headed home shortly after noon when someone called out ‘Shark, watch out!’
Piazza said he almost ran over the shark, but was lucky to slow down enough for the group to pull out their phones and record the encounter.
‘I didn’t think I would see a great white right there,’ Piazza said.
The Pennsylvania native told the outlet that while he fishes nearly every day, spotting the shark has already made it a summer to remember.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that,’ Piazza said.
Piazza’s video got thousands of views on social media and was shared by the US Coast Guard across their social media pages.
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