Great white shark (?) stalks kayaker

Over the weekend, Walter Szulc Jr. went kayaking off a Cape Cod beach. That's a great white shark (or perhaps a basking shark) behind him. Eventually, Szulc says he "saw the fin out of the water … I looked down and saw the body and realized that part of the shark was underneath me, and I just proceeded to paddle… paddle and head out of there." (AP/CBC)

UPDATE: The shark may have been a basking shark, not a great white. (CBS)

• [big ryan]

  there are always sharks in the water, every now and then we see one and we think its something special, but they are there the rest of the time too, just watching us

• [Michael Curran]

  Or it could have been a basking shark, you know, a shark native to the region.

  http://www.wcvb.com/news/local/boston-south/Shark-that-terrorized-kayaker-may-be-harmless/-/9848842/15458904/-/item/1/-/396f2h/-/index.html 

  • [Jeffrey Deltano]

    You are correct. Local Boston MA news stations today are reporting that it was a basking shark.

    • [Dean Putney]

      It may not want to eat you, but that is still an enormous shark. Certainly terrifying if you weren’t expecting it.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Uh. Huh.

    And Amity, as you know, means friendship.

• [Romeo Vitelli]

  Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  A Great White chomped a hole in kayak off Santa Cruz the other day.

  • [Robert Drop]

    Indeed: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/great-white-shark-attacks-kayaker-near-santa-cruz.html

• [~chrisw]

  This picture has more WTF
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18778414

• [AwesomeRobot]

  I think he needs a bigger boat.

  • [bcsizemo]

    Almost wondering if the shark is just waiting for it to flip over…

    (And I say this a a larger sized guy myself.)

  • [Paul Renault]

     What he needs, first, is a life jacket.  Then, to grip the paddle with his hands at shoulder width.

• [ikelleigh]

   Duuun dun duuun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun

  • [Bill Beaty]

     Toy idea:  RC shark dorsal fin, which also tows a small tail fin about 5m behind.   Available in white, blacktip, and Orca.  Expensive version w/’Jaws’ theme and powerful underwater loudspeakers.

    Hmmmm.  No electronics needed, just tow ‘em behind your watercraft.

    • [AllyPally]

      Put a weight in the centre of the tow rope, and when you stop paddling the beast will seem to catch up. A guy in my kayaking club used to do that with an inflatable crocodile. As there are no crocodiles here in Scotland, it sometimes caused quite a stir.

• [signsofrain]

  It’s Nauset beach in Orleans, MA – I wonder why the article doesn’t say so.

• [Gabriel Morgan]

  I really wish the people who penned ‘shark articles’ would stop with the loaded words.  The shark here didn’t ‘stalk’ the guy; the shark swam around his kayak.  If the shark wanted to stalk the guy, he never would have seen him.  If the shark wanted to kill the guy, the guy would be dead.  What happened was: the guy was paddling, the shark was swimming, he understandably freaked the fuck out, and the shark let him paddle away.

  It probably increases hit counts, but please, quit it with the ‘stalk’ stuff, will ya?  Ascribing evil intentions to animals is dumb.  Ascribing them to endangered animals with PR problems is much worse.

• [PatrickO]

   The Santa Cruz shark was pretty clearly stalking.  It bit into the kayak, leaving a tooth.

  And sharks aren’t all powerful… sometimes their prey gets away. 

• [eldritch]

  (Edit – This was meant to be a reply to PatrickO.)

   Sharks bite things for reasons other than trying to eat them. Sharks lack hands or other anatomical manipulators, so if something confuses them they may bite at it to get a sense of what it is – similar in many respects to a primate picking up an object and inspecting it.

  Shark is swimming along. A strange object comes near. The shark swims around it once or twice, curious. It goes in for a closer “look”, bites, decides this is not an object it likes, and leaves. No stalking involved, no predatory motive.

  Also, sharks leave teeth behind all the time. They have several rows of them for exactly this reasons.

  • [Øyvind]

     so what i’m hearing is that we should try to breed shark species with arms and hands to prevent shark attacks?

• [PatrickO]

   ”The shark swims around it once or twice, curious. It goes in for a closer “look”, bites, decides this is not an object it likes, and leaves”

  Um… that’s stalking a potential prey.  It’s not looking for a friend.  Predators do that.  Of course sharks leave behind teeth all the time… but they have to bite something. 

  It seems like you’re ascribing some kind of moral judgment using the word “stalking.”  It’s not like internet stalking or stalking a celebrity… following them around taking pictures.  It’s a predator following potential prey and then attacking it.  Whether or not it decides to continue and fight to the death, proclaiming itself victor of all the spoils isn’t really the issue. 

  If the kayak was made of tasty seal flesh, then the same act would have been called stalking prey. 

  The sharks were doing what sharks do.  What cats do.  What predators do. That’s called stalking. 

• [Hakuin]

  terrifying
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0qkr2cIe5c

• [Incipient Madness]

  Fin seems kind of blunt for a basking shark, though I have to admit I have never seen a basker in person. Could it be a bull shark? But if the local reports say basking shark and people there are used to seeing them, I’ll trust those reports.

  I’ve had two encounters with sharks, both quite peaceable; A lemon shark bumped me and swam around me, and I once stepped on a shovel head shark.