Woman Spots Shark Unusually Close to the Shore in South Carolina

Stock image of a shark. Skeeze/Pixabay

A family vacationing in South Carolina discovered a shark swimming quite close to the shore in Myrtle Beach.

The shark was filmed just inches away from beachgoers, according to the Myrtle Beach Sun News.

April Plemmons of Kannapolis, North Carolina, filmed the close encounter on July 6 at 1 p.m.

The shark was about four feet in length, according to the report.

“She had taken the photo just a minute before we were told to get out,” Susan Bare, a local, told the news outlet.

“We turned right then and saw it,” said Bare. “I’m talking a foot from us. It was in such shallow water it was unreal.”

She said several of her family members were in the water when the shark approached. She said that everyone got out of the water before Plemmons, her daughter, captured the moment on camera.

“You could go down the beach as far as you could see and see everyone lined up looking. It was right there in front of us. I was like ‘video it, video it, April. Video it,” Bare recalled. “The lifeguard said she had seen this before, but I personally had not seen something like it before. This is the closest I’ve ever seen, and you can tell by the video. Video don’t lie.”

The family then watched the shark leave, and they went back into the water, she said.

“We watched it go out,” Bare said. “We understood that this was very unusual.”

“We got in the water but not too deep, but so did everybody else,” she said. “I would have to say the lifeguards could have made the situation worse. If they had come down the beach running and in a panic ‘get out, get out, get out’ it would have been different.”

Bare said that it makes for a good story to tell others.

“For the grandchildren, we’d just seen a crab in the sand and then saw a jellyfish here not too long ago,” Bare said, according to the Charlotte Observer. “So this was like ‘aww, we’re getting to see everything!’”

It’s not clear what species of shark it was.

Dad Spots Sharks with Drone

A Florida father unwittingly took photos of a shark approaching his children at New Smyrna Beach last week while using his drone.

“Kids were playing in the beach and I just decided, ‘Hey, now’s a good time to get a picture of them overhead,” Dan Watson said, Fox News reported. “Literally, as soon as I got it into the air, I started seeing a shadow moving through the water right towards them.”

Watson said he went to his wife and told her to tell the children to get out of the water.

“I immediately get the kids out of the water. I see them get out of the water, and he immediately brings the drone to me, and I see the shark swimming at my children,” Sally Watson told News 13.

She added, “When you think of a shark, you think of them in deep water, you don’t think of them extremely close, and you don’t think they’ll come in knee deep water … it is terrifying to see them come that close to my kids.”

Meanwhile, the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File said it investigated 130 shark attacks, finding that “the 2018 worldwide total of 66 confirmed, unprovoked cases was lower than the most recent five-year (2013-2017) average of 84 incidents annually.”

“There were five fatal attacks this year, four of which were confirmed to be unprovoked. These numbers are in line with the annual global average of six fatalities per year,” the museum’s website says.