Great white shark surprises paddleboarders in photo off Cape Cod: “We’ve got to get out of here.”

By Brandon Truitt

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    Massachusetts (WBZ) — They say a picture is worth a thousand words and a photograph of a shark taken by two teenagers in Massachusetts last weekend certainly tells a story.

The photo taken off Woods Hole on Cape Cod on July 4th shows a great white shark just feet away from Margaret Bowles on a paddleboard – and she didn’t know it.

Wildlife experts confirmed it was a great white shark.

Bowles and her best friend Madeleine Cronin had been paddleboarding for hours near Stony Beach. When Cronin went to take a picture of Bowles, she had no idea what was near the edge of the frame.

“I was like, ‘Take a picture of me!’ right. Then next to her board, this, 8-inch out of the water, fin. It’s like fleshy and grey and I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness,'” Bowles said. “My heart kind of sank.”

In the picture, you can see the expression on Bowles’s face is drastically different, when she realized what was happening.

“When I am looking through the phone and I see her face change from just like happy or whatever to, ‘Oh my God, there’s a shark,'” Cronin said.

The shark was about a foot away from Cronin’s board and she could feel it passing her under the water.

“Immediately we kicked into like, ‘We’ve got to get out of here,'” Bowles said.

“Get to the beach”

“From there it was kind of just like, go, go go! Get to the beach. Not many thoughts after that,” Cronin said.

Cronin paddled so hard to shore she broke her oar. Once they got out of the water safely, they reported their shark sighting using the Sharktivity app. The request made its way to John Chisholm of the New England Aquarium.

“In that location it is pretty rare for a white shark,” said Chisholm. “But it has happened in the past. In this case, the shark had a pointed dorsal fin, so I knew it was a white shark.”

Chisholm said the shark was roughly the size of one of the paddleboards.

“I think we were both quite clam, given the circumstances, which I’m super grateful for, because it definitely would have been easy for one of us to freak out and fall off the board or something,” Bowles said.

Cronin planned to take a break from the ocean for a “few days.” “I’ll be back eventually,” she said.

Chisholm credited the women for how they handled the situation and gave these tips for others swimming in open water this summer.

What to do when you see a shark

“Stay calm first of all. If you see the shark, you are at an advantage. It’s when you can’t see the shark that things can go bad,” Chisolm said. “You’ve got to be aware that sharks are in our waters this time of year. They could appear anywhere. Even when you least expect them, so you have to take that into consideration and prepare before you go.”

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