- Ray Trautz and Pete Emond were surfing at Coast Guard Beach when they came across the great white
- The 3-metre shark was ‘aggressive and excited’ and almost attacked one of their legs
Two Cape Cod surfers had a close encounter with an “aggressive and excited” 10-foot great white shark, which nearly attacked one of their paws and forced them to hit the shark and escape to safety.
Ray Trautz and his cousin Pete Emond were surfing at Coast Guard Beach on Saturday when Trautz spotted the great white.
“Pete was sitting on his board and I was standing on mine when I looked over my shoulder and a 10-foot great white shark was right there, right near Pete’s legs,” Trautz said in a Facebook post.
“The shark even turned on its side as if to grab a leg, at which point I screamed SHAARRRRK because Pete still didn’t know.”
“As I screamed, I stuck my paddle into the water at the back of the shark and it turned violently toward me, tail and head slapping back and forth causing the water to erupt,” Trautz said.
Ray Trautz (pictured) and his cousin Pete Emond were surfing at Coast Guard Beach on Saturday when Trautz spotted the great white.
Trautz posted a photo of Coast Guard Beach. He hit the shark with his paddle as it looked at his cousin’s leg
‘The huge tail section of the shark almost hit Pete in the face. I was shouting at Pete to get to shore while the shark was circling behind me very aggressively and excitedly.”
The surfer said he was able to escape unscathed when a small wave came and he rode it toward the Massachusetts coast.
“We both escaped unharmed and a little shaken. I’ve seen a hundred great white sharks while surfing, but this tops all my interactions with sharks,” Trautz said.
The. will be held between October 18 and 19 Atlantic white shark conservation eight great whites tagged on the coast of Cape Cod.
According to their logbook activity, October was the third busiest month for shark activity along the Cape in recent years.
In July, Cape Cop was named as one of the world’s new great white shark hotspots after a study monitoring the coastline from 2015 to 2018 found as many as 800 individual great white sharks had visited its waters.
The study, the first-ever estimate of white sharks in the North Atlantic Ocean, was published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series and concluded that “Cape Cod is one of the larger white shark hotspots in the world.”
Drone footage showed sharks along the coast of Long Island during the Fourth of July weekend
According to the International Shark Attack File, the US is the shark attack capital of the world, with 41 of the 57 confirmed attacks worldwide in 2022.
The Northeast saw a slew of shark attacks this summer, with footage capturing large numbers of sharks along the coast.
Swimming was banned in parts of nearby Nantucket after two bloodthirsty sharks tore apart seals just offshore.
South of Cape Cod, drone footage captured 50 sharks off the coast of Long Island on July 4.
A 15-year-old girl reported she was bitten at Robert Moses State Park in Suffolk County, New York, prompting officials to fly the drone over the water the group spotted.
On July 3, a teenage surfer was mauled by a shark after riding his surfboard into the waves off the coast of Fire Island, New York.
In late June, a notorious 395-pound shark named Jekyll was spotted off the coast of Maine.
Cape Cod (pictured) saw 800 individual great white sharks in its waters between 2015 and 2018
Mariah Meyer, a shark diver and marine biologist with One Ocean Diving, Haleiwa, Hawaiii, gave her advice on how to survive a shark attack.
“First, stay calm and remember that we are not part of the shark diet, but we don’t want to act like prey in the water, so limit erratic swimming or splashing,” she said.
“Second, if you encounter a shark in the wild, don’t take your eyes off that shark.
“By making eye contact with the sharks around you, you let them know that you too are a predator and not a prey animal,” Meyer said.