For the second time in one week, swimmers at Fox Point Beach near Hubbards, N.S., have gotten up close and personal with a great white shark.
Maria Maclean-Guy, who lives in the area and studies engineering at Dalhousie University, was snorkeling with her mom and brother on Monday afternoon when the three of them saw the shark.
“I was pretty much terrified,” she said. “The visibility in the water wasn’t great, so you couldn’t see much more than 10 to 15 metres away … and so we were just trying to keep eyes on it at all times, and then we were just slowly backing ourselves in towards shore to get out of the water.”
Last Wednesday, two scuba divers encountered a great white shark at the same beach, some 53 kilometres west of Halifax.
But encountering a shark while you’ve got an oxygen tank strapped on isn’t quite the same as seeing one when you’re snorkeling near the surface of the water, said Maclean-Guy.
Great white sharks are experts at ambushing surface prey, like seals, from below.
“They [the scuba divers] had the ability to stay on the bottom and watch it,” she said. “Whereas we had to sit on the top and watch, which is just a bit of a scarier position to be in.”
Maclean-Guy has been snorkeling down at Fox Point Beach since she was a kid.
She knew a shark had been spotted there last week but assumed the chances of coming across another one were quite low, going so far as to joke with a friend that she was heading down to “find the shark.”
Little did she know she’d have no trouble doing just that.
“I looked to my left and … there was the shark,” she said. “That’s when I screamed and I said some profane words. And then I apologized to my mom for swearing.”
Chris Harvey-Clark, a shark researcher and veterinarian who recently retired from Dalhousie University, said that from his initial observations the shark is a juvenile, but it doesn’t appear to be the same one seen last week.
He believes the area is becoming something of a hot spot for great whites.
“This year alone, we’ve had three diver white shark sightings, and now with this one a fourth, and they’ve all clustered in the last couple of weeks,” he said.
Though attacks by sharks are quite rare, Harvey-Clark said it’s important to take them seriously as a threat.
“Just as you wouldn’t feed a bear a peanut butter sandwich in Banff National Park … the same thing with these animals. When they’re around, you get out of the water fast and you keep your eye on them and you exercise caution because they have the potential to do great harm to you,” he said.
For some swimmers, getting this close to a shark might lead them to swear off the open water altogether.
But Maclean-Guy and her family opted for some exposure therapy instead.
“We went home, and then I thought, you know, if I don’t go swimming again today, I might never go swimming again,” she said. “So we did go for a quick swim.”
