yak
Contributor
I scraped this July 18 Cape Cod Times story off Google's cache. Hmmm, I wonder why the story's no longer online?
CHATHAM - On Saturday, Paul Bremser was at Chatham's Lighthouse Beach preparing to go surfing. He had one leg into his wetsuit when he heard someone yell, ''Shark!''
He looked up to see a big fin circling a seal, just beyond the breakers about 75 feet away.
''After it came around in a full circle, the shark came off from the back side and cut him in half with one bite,'' said Bremser, a commercial fishermen with 28 years of experience fishing out of Chatham. The seal tried to swim away as a pool of spread around it. The shark went down, then the seal dropped out of sight.
''It's a classic, textbook, attack pattern for a great white,'' said Greg Skomal, shark expert for the state Division of Marine Fisheries.
The sight of a great white shark hunting down seals among swimmers and surfers is not comforting and could be the start of a disturbing trend.
In the 1970s, fewer than 20 gray seals frequented the waters of southern New England.
Since then, with marine mammal protection regulations in place, the seal population has exploded to about 6,000 on the Monomoy islands, making it home to one of the largest seal colonies in New England.
Lighthouse Beach is just a couple of miles from Monomoy.
''With an increasing seal population, in all likelihood we may see a redistribution of white sharks to target that,'' Skomal said.
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I was out fishing off Monomoy yesterday. Here's the booty:
And the beauty:
CHATHAM - On Saturday, Paul Bremser was at Chatham's Lighthouse Beach preparing to go surfing. He had one leg into his wetsuit when he heard someone yell, ''Shark!''
He looked up to see a big fin circling a seal, just beyond the breakers about 75 feet away.
''After it came around in a full circle, the shark came off from the back side and cut him in half with one bite,'' said Bremser, a commercial fishermen with 28 years of experience fishing out of Chatham. The seal tried to swim away as a pool of spread around it. The shark went down, then the seal dropped out of sight.
''It's a classic, textbook, attack pattern for a great white,'' said Greg Skomal, shark expert for the state Division of Marine Fisheries.
The sight of a great white shark hunting down seals among swimmers and surfers is not comforting and could be the start of a disturbing trend.
In the 1970s, fewer than 20 gray seals frequented the waters of southern New England.
Since then, with marine mammal protection regulations in place, the seal population has exploded to about 6,000 on the Monomoy islands, making it home to one of the largest seal colonies in New England.
Lighthouse Beach is just a couple of miles from Monomoy.
''With an increasing seal population, in all likelihood we may see a redistribution of white sharks to target that,'' Skomal said.
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I was out fishing off Monomoy yesterday. Here's the booty:
And the beauty:
