'Thought I saw a submarine': Florida charter boat has close encounter with great white shark
Destin's Capt. Taylor Bankston and his group of anglers from Kentucky were out on a fishing trip aboard his 26-foot center console charter boat, Get the Gaff, on April 10 when they got a huge surprise.
'We were on a regular fishing trip, and I looked up ... what I thought I saw in the water was a submarine, and I was waiting next for the periscope to pop out of the water,' Bankston said.
'But it never did ... and then the submarine turned into something that had giant teeth and a giant eyeball,' he said.
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Bankston said it swam past the boat.
'I immediately knew I had never seen a fish in the water that big. It had to be a great white,' Bankston said.
Bankston, who operates his boat out of AJ's on Destin harbor, had four customers aboard the boat from Kentucky, a mom and dad and two daughters. He said the anglers were ecstatic.
'Oh my gosh, it made their vacation,' Bankston said.
Bankston explained that he had the motors off and was using an i-Pilot trolling motor to hold them over a spot. They were fishing about nine miles out of Destin, Florida.
'We were just sitting there over the reef catching fish, and she popped up and circled us for 20 minutes,' he said.
At one point, the shark came up and 'mouthed the back of the boat, bit it, to see what we were ... and realized that we weren't anything eatable, and then kept going,' Bankston said.
The shark continued to circle the boat for about another 10 minutes.
'It was just circling us and checking us out,' Bankston said.
Early on, Bankston had gone up in the tower of his boat to get a good look, photos and video.
He said when everybody on the boat walked over to one side, it would lean a bit.
'I was leaning over the top of the great white ... my heart was pumping,' he said.
After the shark circled for about 20 minutes, it just disappeared.
'Then five minutes later we saw a dorsal fin about 100 yards away from us going across the surface slow as all get out ... like the movie Jaws. That was her when she swam away,' Bankston said.
The dorsal fin on the great white was about 2 ½ feet tall.
'Literally the dorsal fin looked like the fin on Jaws,' he said, making mention that the movie "Jaws 2" was filmed in the Destin area.
'You don't think that theme song – dun, dun, dun – was going through my head when I saw that thing,' Bankston said.
'First thing I thought was 'captain we're going to need a bigger boat,'' Bankston said.
Bankston said the great white was about 14-feet long and estimated it to be between 1,100 and 1,400 pounds.
'It's the biggest fish I've ever seen,' he said.
'We were all baffled. It was as if we were viewing a dinosaur,' he said.
Although it was huge, Bankston said they were never really scared.
'I knew I was in a good boat,' he said. 'And I knew we couldn't short clean the boat today.
More: 'Definitely not geared up for that': Destin boat hooks 20-foot great white shark
'You respect the piece of equipment that kept you separate and safe,' Bankston said.
However, he did admit, 'If I would have been hooked up to a heart monitor, there would have been some peaking and beeping.
'We weren't down in the hull crunched up, but we were highly alert and lots of adrenalin flowing,' he said.
After the shark left, they went back to fishing and caught plenty of mingo.
"The mingo had no idea there was a 1,400-pound shark swimming above their heads ... and they were still chewing like crazy,' Bankston said.
'It was a great day."
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Great white shark circles Florida fishing charter boat
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