Grand Manan teacher Andrew Jones had been itching to get out fishing with his boat and was frustrated by the long spell of wet foggy weather. When a fine day dawned on Thursday, July 20, he told his wife, "This is gonna be my big day." Little did he know that it would be "the best fishing trip of our lives" without catching a single fish.
      Jones and two friends had shut off the engine and were drifting and enjoying lunch about five miles from Grand Manan near the ferry route when they suddenly realized a 12 foot great white shark was right beside the 27 foot Albin boat.
      In the clear water, they looked the shark "right in the eye" as it circled the boat several times. It opened its mouth -- "I think it flossed its teeth on the back of my boat," Jones laughs -- then "kind of rolled over" and slapped its tail against the hull. With the crew getting nervous, they started the engine but the shark still didn't leave right away. Jones thought about taking pictures but "then realized, this is a video situation," and the 19 second video he posted on Facebook immediately caused "quite a stir." Word spread rapidly on Grand Manan and beyond as people shared it, and his phone began to ring. By Sunday night the video had been viewed 190,000 times.
      Jones has seen plenty of basking sharks and some porbeagles, but this "just doesn't happen: you don't see such things," he says, still in awe of the encounter. "Did that really happen?" they asked each other on the way home. He says he wasn't scared. "Maybe I'm not smart enough to be scared," but he thinks the shark was just curious and "checking things out."
      He is intrigued by the range of reactions to his video. A two year old "couldn't stop watching and asked for it to be played repeatedly. A woman watched it and then had a nightmare, while someone else 'couldn't even watch it.'"
      One of his first phone calls was from a weir diver asking if the shark was anywhere near Whale Cove. Among the hundreds of Facebook comments, someone in Nova Scotia advised, "They are aggressive and they will eat you." He has had "tons of interview requests," and the New England Aquarium called, looking for more photos in hopes of identifying the shark from their catalogue. This one has a distinctive cut in the dorsal fin and some scarring.
      There was a lengthy debate on social media as to whether the shark was Andromache, a 10 foot sub adult female tagged by Ocearch off Cape Cod in 2020 and currently "pinging" in the Bay of Fundy. This shark, however, clearly had no dorsal fin tag. At 12 feet, Jones says it could weigh 1,000 pounds. Adult great whites average around 15 feet and the biggest may grow to 20 feet and 4,000 pounds. They may live 70 years. In the past, Guinness World Records listed a 37 footer that was caught in 1930 in a weir off nearby White Head Island. Some researchers have since argued it was a misidentified basking shark, but there is at least one photo of this alleged record breaker and a tooth or two still in the community.
      "I'm the luckiest person in the world, to be out there in nature," Jones says. He enjoys observing changes in the bay and in the fish populations. "Nature is amazing. There's so much life in the Bay of Fundy. The more time you spend out there, the more you see." The encounter "is all a blur" but "every time we told that story the shark got bigger, just like a good fish story should. I wish we could do it all again."