Cameron MacMillan was working the back deck of the Brown Eyed Girl out of Mabou Harbour at dusk Thursday when he noticed something strange about the bluefin tuna they were towing behind the boat.
“We had him about 20 feet behind the boat just towing him along. It was just after we finished bleeding him. You tow them for an hour after you catch them,” MacMillan said.
About five minutes after they bled the tuna, he saw a big splash behind the boat.
“But the fish should have been already dead. So, I was like that doesn’t make sense. It should be making no kick or anything,” MacMillan said.
“I ran back and I just looked and I said, ‘Man there is something on that.’ I could just see this all-white belly.”
He watched as a great white shark bit into the tuna.
“He just latched on. We were going about four knots (or 7.4 km/h) in the boat and that shark was towed along upside down, backwards,” MacMillan said.
“It was just latched onto the tuna and it wouldn’t let go.”
MacMillan, 20, tried pulling in the tuna a little bit. “And you could feel him just shaking and shaking. You could see him just thrashing at it.”
MacMillan and another crewman then pulled the tuna right in to their boat.
“The shark followed the fish right to the boat. He was right beside us. I could have touched him in the water. I could have touched the top of his fin. He had to be about 12 to 15 feet long. He was just huge.”
The shark bit a good chunk out of the fish, MacMillan said, estimating the bite of tuna weighed about 23 kilograms.
“He had his mouth full and when the piece ripped off the fish, he would have had his mouth full and wouldn’t be able to bite back on. So, we pulled the fish right in (close) to the boat.”
The shark continued to follow the boat with the tuna tied tight to the Brown Eyed Girl, he said.
“He wanted to come back for more. He wasn’t done with that tuna.”
The crew -- MacMillan and three others -- got out a flashlight and watched the shark.
“But then we kind of wanted to get out of there because we didn’t want him to eat the rest of our fish. So, we put the boat in gear and got out of there a little quicker. But I swear he definitely followed us for a little bit.”
The shark was bigger than the tuna, which weighed about 300 kilograms.
When he got home, MacMillan spent the night studying pictures of different types of sharks and he’s quite sure this was a great white.
“I just kept looking at pictures of how the fins are and how the belly looks and, man, to the best of my abilities I can pretty well give you a 99.99 per cent chance that that was a great white. I’m certain of it.”
After looking at MacMillan’s photos of the bite out of the tuna, Heather Bowlby, a shark scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, confirmed the attack came from a great white.
“The white striations above the punctures as well as how clean (and big) the teeth marks are,” are telltale signs that it was a white shark, Bowlby said.
The bite out of the tuna was 56 centimetres across.
MacMillan — who has been fishing tuna for six years — said he’s never seen anything like the shark attack. Nor have the other three men who were working aboard the Brown Eyed Girl Thursday.
“Nobody has ever seen this on this boat. One of the guys I fish with has been fishing for 50 years and he’s never seen it.”
Aside from the commercial fishery, MacMillan's skipper, Andy Rankin, runs a tuna charter company called Rankin Tuna charters from August to October.
The crew of the Brown Eyed Girl still don’t know if they’ll get another tag to replace the damaged tuna. They’re only allowed to catch two during this fall season.
“It shredded it up pretty good,” MacMillan said of the shark that chomped the tuna. “They could chop up the other side of the fish and it would still be good meat. But I don’t think it would be worth very much.”
MacMillan was out fishing for tuna again Friday.
“We’re in the heat of it right now. There’s probably about 15 boats out today that I can see.”
MacMillan thinks we’re getting more white sharks in Nova Scotia waters.
“You can see their migration pattern comes right into the start of the Gulf (of St. Lawrence). There are lots of seals for them to eat. Port Hood and Henry Island are littered with seals … That’s their lunch so they’re going to come get them.”
When he was out fishing Friday, the shark attack had MacMillan worried about a possible repeat. “When you’re reaching into the water you think twice now. It’s pretty crazy.”
MacMillan isn’t likely to be going for a swim in the ocean any time soon.
“Not for a little bit I don’t think. That’s what all of us were saying. We all swim off the beach off West Mabou. And it was not that far past it. It was really, really close to the beach off West Mabou. It made a fella have second thoughts, that’s for sure.”
