A first-time kayaker had a close encounter with one of nature’s most feared predators when he noticed a shark lurking behind him as he paddled along the shoreline of a Cape Cod beach.
Walter Szulc Jr. was kayaking at Nauset Beach in Orleans on Saturday when several frenzied beachgoers began yelling for him to paddle back to shore as fast as he could.
The moment Szulc Jr. finally looked over his shoulder and noticed the dorsal fin of great white slicing through the water nearby has been captured on camera in a photo that looks as if it could be a still-frame from the 1975 film “Jaws.”
“I got a pretty good glimpse of it. It had a fin sticking out, so I just turned and paddled,” Szulc Jr. recalled in an interview with WHDH-TV, a Boston NBC affiliate.
Szulc Jr. managed to get away from the great white, and credits much of his successful escape to a paddleboarder who tried to alert him to the toothy stalker.
The paddleboarder was Orleans resident Dana Richardson who told the Cape Cod Times he noticed the apparent fin of a shark moving through the water as he was paddleboarding near Pochet, about a kilometre south of Nauset Beach on Saturday.
Spooked by the fin, Richardson headed toward Pochet Beach and eventually Nauset Beach. He said his goal was to ask fellow beachgoers if they had seen a shark in the water.
That’s when he spotted an ominous dorsal fin trailing Szulc Jr.
“When I saw the fin following the kayaker I began yelling and waving my paddle” Richardson told the Cape Cod Times.
With the help of Richardson and other beachgoers, Szulc Jr. swiftly rowed ashore.
NausetBeachwas temporarily closed after the sighting, but reopened to swimmers on Sunday.
Marine experts told the Times that an increased seal population is attracting sharks to Cape Cod’s beach, a popular summertime draw for tourists to the United States.
