A Canadian fisherman was in for some heart-pounding action when he realized he had hooked a Great White Shark in open water when all he was looking for was striped bass.
Rick Austin said he was kayaking right off the coast in Nova Scotia’s Minas Basin when his line took a very hard hit, CTV news reported.
“She’s pretty big. Yeah, she’s pretty big,” Austin says breathlessly on his video. “Jesus Christ. What the f—k was that?”
As he continued to reel in his line, and as his tiny boat was being pulled by whatever was on that hook, Austin could be heard huffing and straining to keep his pole in his hands.
“I mean, seriously, people, I got a glimpse of that thing. That thing is massive,” Austin said as the shark continued to pull at the line.
In his video, after fighting the fish for a few minutes, the shark leaped out of the water. Austin, though, seemed to think he had a porpoise on the line.
“Oh, Jesus!” Austin yelps. “That’s a Porpoise. I gotta let that go.”
Austin knew that the porpoise is a protected species, and he could get in deep trouble by landing one.
Saying, “I don’t want that,” Austin then says that it is time to cut the line. And so he let the fish go.
But according to experts who watched his video, Austin did not have any porpoise on that line.
Great White Shark, Carcharodon carcharias, Mexico, Pacific ocean, Guadalupe (Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Experts at both the New England Aquarium and the Department of Integrative Biology from the University of Guelph confirmed that he had hooked a small Great White Shark that weighed about 250 pounds and was up to seven feet long.
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