Cue the Jaws theme song. On a recent outing, a California kayak angler was followed closely by a massive great white shark—and his buddy captured the scary incident on camera.
Ian Walters and John-Patrick Thomas were fishing for halibut and lingcod in Half Moon Bay, a popular saltwater fishing area just south of San Francisco, on Tuesday, August 6. At around 10 a.m., the duo ran into the shark approximately one mile from Pillar Point Harbor. Walters noticed its massive dorsal fin; the shark was trailing just feet behind Thomas’s kayak.
“There he is,” says Walters in the video footage. “You alright?”
Thomas replies that he is—but that he’d understandably like to start heading back to shore. As they do so, the shark continues trailing Thomas’s boat.
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“It was pretty shocking, because I had never seen a fin in the water like that, and certainly nothing that big, up close,” Walters told the San Francisco Chronicle. He estimated that the shark was 14 to 15 feet long. It followed Thomas for several minutes before disappearing back into the Pacific Ocean.
