A second great white shark has been spotted off the Florida coast.
Kyle Morningstar and his friend Ian Smith captured the encounter March 24, while fishing near Daytona Beach.
Around 2:30 p.m. Morningstar, who was located about 40 miles off the coast of Ponce Inlet, started pulling up his boat’s anchor. That’s when he saw remora fish swimming toward a “great, gray blob.”
When the blob surfaced, he realized it was a great white shark.
“I was just in shock,” he told the Daytona News- Journal. “When it circled a second time I was shouting and yelling to my friend to get the phone and shoot the video.”
The 31-year-old was able to compare the size of the shark to his 23-foot Sea Box boat named Team Side Effects. He estimated the shark was to be 12- to 15-feet-long.
“We ran around our boat and that monster shark just circled around us, did two laps just checking us out,” Morningstar said. “It was not scared.”
“After it disappeared, we hurried to get ashore,” the Port Orange resident said.
Earlier this month an estimated 14-foot great white was spotted around 6 miles north of the jetties off the coast of Fernandina Beach.
Captain Tony Peeples saw the shark on March 10, as it tore a 50-pound drum fish in half.
The drum was still attached to the fishing line as the shark came back for another bite. As the shark swallowed what was left of the drum, it briefly became hooked on the fishing line.
Peeples, owner of Southern Style Charters, said he has seen 5 or 6 great whites, but this was the closest he has been to one.
Related: 10-foot Bull shark filmed biting fishing boat off Florida
Great white shark sightings have been on the rise.
On February 20, biologists from Georgia Wildlife filmed a 12-foot great white shark near the Florida Georgia line.
In partnership with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the two groups tracked the whale was it was devoured by sharks as it floated down the Florida coast.
In August of 2017, diver Stacey Tucker spotted one on a scuba diving trip.
The Arizona resident had flown to Jupiter, Florida to dive with sharks. Her group had just finished their first dive and were headed to the sunken tanker ship Esso Bonaire III.
The Bonaire rests 90 feet under the surface and is known to host both nurse and lemon sharks.
As Tucker was filming several lemon sharks, a fellow diver alerted her to the great white, which was about 15 feet away from the group.
She said the shark was passive and she did not feel threatened and was in awe of its appearance.
A white was filmed 3 miles off the coast of Juno Beach January 1.
Divers with the Calypso Dive Charter were visiting a site known as the Lemon Drop when the 12- to 14-foot shark appeared.
The shark, which scared away all the other sharks in the area, circled the group three times before leaving.
After a surface interval, the divers returned to the bottom and saw 10 lemon sharks which indicated to the divers that the great white was gone.
On December 28, a 12-foot white shark took a bite of a fisherman’s snapper.
The group was 25 miles of Port Canaveral when the shark took the snack.
Great whites have been known to swim up the coast of the Eastern United States; there is a shark birthing nursery off the coast of New York.
The shark tracking group OCEARCH confirmed the nursery’s presence in 2016 when they tagged nine great white pups.
The group has a website and app where users can track the movements of all of their tagged sharks for free.
