This fishing trip quickly turned into an unexpected encounter for Nicholas Casley. This 58-year-old man was on a fishing boat with his son off the coast of Cornwall, in the south-west of England, when they spotted a fin not far away from them on the surface of the water.
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This fin obviously belonged to a shark who started to slowly approach their small boat. Holding their breath, the father and son looked into the water and saw the body of an enormous shark that had stopped just before their eyes. According to their estimations, the creature measured around eight metres.
Despite its incredible dimensions, the shark didn’t pose any danger to the two fishermen because it turned out to just be abasking shark(Cetorhinus maximus).
A giant of the oceans, the basking shark can reach sizes of up to 12 metres but is considered harmless to humans because it only eats plankton and algae.
Basking sharks are regularly spotted in summer off the coast of Cornwall and the United Kingdom. This year, however, they seem to be arriving a bit earlier than normal, since they were first spotted at the end of April.
