Great White Is Landed 4 Miles Off the Coast

NEWPORT BEACH —  A local angler fishing four miles off the coast last weekend landed a great white shark, a rare catch for those waters.

Measuring 5 feet and weighing in at a scant 55 pounds, the great white was landed after snatching a hook baited with mackerel.

“Usually, they don’t come down this far south,” said John O’Neil, who was fishing for mako sharks off Crystal Cove with four friends in his 31-foot sportfishing boat when the great white was hooked.

O’Neil said that after catching a few mako sharks near Dana Point late Friday night, the group moved up to Crystal Cove, where they continued “chumming” for sharks. Chumming is a procedure in which the crew throws ground fish into the water, kills the engine and waits for the big fish.

O’Neil, who is having the great white mounted, said that once the shark was in the boat the crew realized it was not a mako. Five minutes earlier, Brian Belknap had hooked a 100-pound blue shark. Belknap was also the primary fisherman to haul in the great white.

“They are such an isolated species,” said Stanley Cummings, executive director of the Orange County Marine Institute. “Any time you catch a white shark, it is a rare incident.”

Great whites are found all over the world, ranging from the frigid waters of Alaska to the tropical environments of Southern California, Panama and Chile. They live mostly in offshore and coastal areas and feed primarily on seal, sea lions and a variety of fish. However, they are known to attack humans. In the hit movie “Jaws,” a monstrous great white terrorized beach-goers over a Fourth of July weekend.

“They are found all over the world and not restricted to one ocean. They begin to fend for themselves as soon as they are born,” Cummings said, noting that the shark caught near Crystal Cover could have been hundreds of miles from its birthplace.

However, the shark may have been born close to where it was caught, according to another marine biologist.

“There are very good indications that great whites breed and mate down here in Southern California,” said Dennis Kelly, a marine biology instructor at Orange Coast College.