Great White Shark spotted off Jacksonville

From Jacksonville.com -

Captains Dave Crisp, Fred Morrow and Rick Ryals slipped out around 2 p.m. to do a quick snapper fishing trip near the Pablo Grounds on Crisp's 21-foot Sailfish.

As Ryals tells it, he was fishing one side of the boat when he heard Crisp yell. He looked around in time to see Crisp jacking a red snapper up out of the water and under it, "all I could see was white."

The blur that Ryals saw was the underside of a great white shark that had come out of the water after the snapper.

Ryals said it happened "in seconds, but it took us all 20 minutes to compose ourselves and start fishing again."

Ryals said they estimated that the shark's head was between 3 and 4 feet wide and its length was between 15 and 20 feet.

"It was nearly eye-level out of the water," Ryals said. "The three of us have, I'll bet, 125 years of experience on the water and it scared us like I've never been scared before."

The shark disappeared, but not before taking the snapper by biting cleanly through an 8/0 hook. This is the time of year that these rare encounters with great whites occur off our coasts. The big sharks follow the migration of right whales south. The whales calve here and baby whales are among the shark's favorite prey.