Great White Sharks Return to Cape Cod, MA | Man Attacked in July 2012 | Jaws is Back?

Outside Magazine just wrote up a great report about how the Great White Shark has returned to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  It’s crazy to think that Great White Sharks have returned Cape Cod where the 1975 movie Jaws took place.  We never thought that Great Whites hung out on the East Coast, but it’s clear that they do.  A Great White Shark even attacked and injured a man in July 2012 at Cape Cod, MA (see video above).

This article is very interesting as they go through the impacts of the movie Jaws had on sharks on the East Coast as well as the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.  They discuss how Great Whites are now becoming good for business as ecotourist pay big money to dive with, see, and photograph the sharks.  It’s a great read:

DAVE LAMOUREUX WAS paddling his sea kayak out from the beach at Truro, a small town near the northern tip of Cape Cod, when he saw something bob to the surface off his bow. It was a calm, clear Atlantic morning last July, and at first Lamoureux, a 45-year-old titanium businessman who has made a name for himself on the Cape by fishing for tuna from his kayak, thought it was a seal feeding on a striped bass. He coasted forward to take a look. Two fins emerged from the water, about seven feet apart. Lamoureux realized that he wasn’t approaching a live seal but a dead one, and it was in the mouth of a great white shark. He had just baited his lines, so his deck was covered with fish blood. He reversed course and headed for shore, trying to keep calm. The shark followed. It was longer than his 12-foot kayak. Eventually, it disappeared under the surface. Lamoureux kept paddling, his mind racing, until he reached shore and pulled out near an old fisherman. “Feeling lucky, are you?” asked the fisherman. Lamoureux was, and the feeling resurfaced four weeks later, when news broke that the first great white attack in Cape history had occurred off the same beach, a nonfatal bite of a tourist from Denver who was swimming near some seals.

Read the full article here:

THE GREAT WHITE SHARK RETURNS TO CAPE COD

The big surprise about the return of great whites to the birthplace ofJaws? No one’s freaking out.