Close Encounter With Great White Shark Caught on Camera in Florida

A great white shark in a file photo. (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

A commercial fisherman and his girlfriend saw a large great white shark lunging from the water to get a bait bag near the Florida Keys.

The shark was estimated to be about 15 feet in length, according to the Miami Herald.

“Oh my God,” Suzy Grumbo, the girlfriend of Carter Bates, can be heard in the video.

The big shark emerged near Summerland Key on April 23 to get a taste of what was inside Bates’s chum bag while Grumbo filmed it.

As of April 26, it had about 200,000 views on Facebook.

“I’ve certainly never seen anything like this before,” she told the Miami Herald. “Yeah, it was definitely the most humbling experience I think I’ve ever come across,” she added to NBC Miami. “It’s like going from this small town girl to the girl with the great white shark, you know?”

Bates said he worked as a commercial fisherman for about 10 years, and he added to the paper that he was fishing for yellowtail snapper.

The great white, he said, was circling their vessel for about three hours before it bit the chum bag.

Bates noted that the large fish didn’t want the snapper that they had caught.

“It only wanted the chum block,” the Herald quoted him as saying.

“When it’s there, right there, it’s like yeah, a little intimidating, but at the same time amazing because that’s a creature I’ll probably never ever see again,” Bates also told NBC Miami of the animal.

It can be a bit of a shock when a giant great white shark pops its head out of the water. (Bernard Dupont/Flicker—CC BY-SA 2.0))

Preserved Great White Gets a New Home

A preserved 4,000-pound great white shark that was suspended in fluids inside an abandoned Australian wildlife park found a new home in February of this year.

The shark, which was called Rosie, was discovered by urban explorer Luke McPherson, or “Lukie Mc,” who posted images and a video of the animal on social media. He found it inside the Wildlife Wonderland Park in Bass, south of Melbourne. His video of the finding went viral on YouTube.

After images of the shark were shared en masse on social media platforms, some people called for it to be moved to safety. According to the Daily Mail, some vandals tried to break into the shark tank, which was filled with green embalming fluid.

Crystal World and Prehistoric Journeys in Meadows, Australia, said it would rehome the shark, according to the Mail, and a spokesman, Shane McAlister, said it will difficult to restore shark, which died in 1998. He said vandals threw trash inside the shark’s tank.

“It’s a remarkable thing, for starters with all the vandalism and everything that has happened to the actual wildlife park and to Rosie’s tank,” he said.

A person behind the Save Rosie the Shark Facebook Page said that the shark would have probably been destroyed.

“She was close to being destroyed and thrown away,” Trent Hooper told the Mail. “It’s such a great outcome. Australia rallied together to save Rosie and get her a forever home at Crystal World.”

He continued, “It has been an exhausting week but we are very happy with Crystal World coming to the rescue.”