New video shows a close encounter between a great white shark and people on a fishing trip off the Jersey Shore.
Mike Cavallo was fishing with his daughter and a friend a few miles off Point Pleasant Beach on Friday. After Cavallo hooked a black sea bass, a great white shark unsuccessfully tried to chomp the fish. It was a moment caught on camera that Cavallo will never forget.
“Complete shock. I never thought in my life I would see a great white up that close or even a shark up that close,” Cavallo said.
There is currently a renewed focus on sharks at the Jersey Shore. The 2004 made-for-tv docudrama “12 Days of Terror -- which is based on a series of deadly shark attacks on Long Beach Island and other parts of the Shore back in 1916 -- is currently being featured at the annual Lighthouse International Film Festival on Long Beach Island which runs through Sunday.
Jack Sholder, the director of the film, came to LBI for a special screening.
“When you make something for television, you don’t get to see it with an audience,” Sholder said. “So it’s fantastic to see it with an audience.”
The movie was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, rather than New Jersey. Sholder said he spent all of his summers as a child at the Jersey Shore however.
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“We went to Atlantic City every summer and we would spend the whole summer there,” he said. “I was really thrilled to get invited. I was glad that they were going to screen the film.”
While shark attacks often make headlines, experts say they’re still very rare.
“I hope people will understand that we share the ocean with nature,” Christine Rooney, managing director of the Lighthouse International Film Festival, said. “That we all have to be conscientious of how we treat the ocean.”
