Captain Scott Fitzgerald got the shock of his life when a Great White Shark bit his boat Monday morning.
He was about eight miles out into the Gulf of Mexico when the 10-foot shark bumped his boat and bit his trolling motor.
The captain, who runs Mad Fish Charters quickly pulled the motor up and began filming the shark on his cell phone.
“He had the entire trolling motor in his mouth, and was moving it side to side, and it was shaking the boat.” Fitzgerald told New 13
“I’ve been chartering for nine years, and I’ve never seen a shark try to attack my boat. It was very exciting for all of us. It really got our hearts beating hard.”
The shark could have been attracted to the motor by the electromagnetic pulses it produces.
The Mythbusters team attempted an experiment with the electromagnetic field of a flashlight in a 2008 Shark Week special.
They found that flashlights will attract sharks during a night dive and the sharks behaved more aggressively toward the flashlights.
According Dean Grubbs, of Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory, encounters with Great Whites in the Gulf are rare as they prefer cooler waters.
The location has been marked on the 2015 shark bites attacks map under interactions.
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Related: shark swarm at Orange Beach Alabama and OCEARCH Great White tracked in the Gulf.
