What do you do when 14-foot white shark is 'checking' you out in Florida? Shoot video, photos
Not to mention the stories you'll bring home from your Florida vacation.
That's what happened when a Kentucky family headed out for a fishing trip from Florida's Panhandle.
Capt. Taylor Bankston took a group of anglers from Kentucky — a mother, dad and two daughters — out on his 26-foot boat, Get the Gaff, on April 10.
➤ 'Giant teeth and a giant eyeball.' Photos show Florida boater's great white shark encounter
While fishing about nine miles from Destin in the Gulf of America, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico, "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.
'I immediately knew I had never seen a fish in the water that big. It had to be a great white,' Bankston said. 'It was just circling us and checking us out. It was as if we were viewing a dinosaur,' he said.
Bankston said the shark circled his boat about 20 minutes, mouthing the back of the boat at one time "to see what we were ... and realized that we weren't anything eatable."
After the shark circled for about 20 minutes, it just disappeared.
➤ More photos, videos posted by Taylor Bankston on Facebook
'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.
Bankston estimated the shark was about 14 feet long, with a dorsal fin about 2 ½ feet tall. He estimated it to be between 1,100 and 1,400 pounds.
'The dorsal fin looked like the fin on 'Jaws,' " he said.
"Jaws 2" was filmed in the Destin area.
'First thing I thought was 'captain we're going to need a bigger boat,'' Bankston said.
To put it in perspective, Bankston's boat was 26 feet long, making the shark just over half the length of the boat.
'If I would have been hooked up to a heart monitor, there would have been some peaking and beeping," Bankston said.
Bankston said the anglers onboard were ecstatic.
'Oh my gosh, it made their vacation. It was a great day."
Destin is located about 40 miles east of Pensacola or 50 miles west of Panama City. It's about 130 miles west of Tallahassee.
White sharks love to visit Florida during the winter months.
OCEARCH, which describes itself as a "data-centric organization built to help scientists collect previously unattainable data in the ocean while open sourcing our research and explorations," regularly tags and tracks sharks, both white and tiger sharks.
In January 2025, scientists tagged a 13-foot 9-inch shark, nicknamed "Contender," near the Florida-Georgia border.
The male shark was estimated to weigh more than 1,300 pounds.
➤ 2 great white sharks, one massive at 1,653 pounds, ping off Florida east coast. Here's where
After being tagged, Contender headed farther south, exploring the waters as far south as Indian River County before turning to head north.
His last "ping," when a transponder attached to his dorsal fin sent a signal to a satellite, was Tuesday, April 15, off the coast of North Carolina.
Three other sharks — two white and one tiger — tagged by Ocearch have pinged off Florida this week, including one this morning:
Dold: Male white shark, 761 pounds, 11 feet 2 inches long. Pinged 10:45 a.m. April 16 in the Gulf west of Sarasota.
Morada: Female tiger shark, 761 pounds, 11 feet 2 inches long. Pinged 7:34 a.m. April 15 in the Atlantic southeast of Miami.
Breton: Male white shark, 1,437 pounds, 13 feet 3 inches long. Pinged 8:54 p.m. April 12 in the Atlantic east of Jacksonville.
Florida is known as the shark bite capital of the world. And Volusia County leads the state in the number of unprovoked attacks, according to the International Shark Attack File.
Information provided by Dr. Gavin Naylor, director of Florida Program for Shark Research and curator of Florida Museum of Natural History.
➤ Curious about Florida sharks? We asked an expert about things you should know
Some large sharks can swim in waters that are 1 or 2 feet deep.
There were 351 unprovoked shark attacks in Volusia County from 1882 to 2023.
Bull sharks are tolerant of fresh water and can be found in estuaries and rivers.
Dawn and dusk are the worst times to be in the water but bites are possible any time of day.
Sharks follow baitfish so watch out for them close to shore especially in the summer.
Black-tips and Atlantic sharp-nose are the most common encountered by Florida swimmers.
The most aggressive shark in Florida waters is considered to be bull sharks.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Great white shark circles, bites boat fishing off Destin, Florida
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