Family Shocked After Hooking Great White Shark In Auckland Harbor By Mistake

A family of four was shocked on Monday afternoon when they accidentally hooked a huge Great White Shark while fishing for snapper about 100 meters off the Te Atatu Peninsula, New Zealand in only 2.5 meters of murky water.

As reported by The Daily Mail, having caught a couple of nice fish for dinner, the Robertson’s were just about to head back to shore when Jaan Robertson’s brother, Mat, felt something tugging on his rod.

Mat said, “Phew I’ve got something on here,” continuing, “S***, I can’t hold this,” handing the rod to his more experienced brother.

At that point, the shark apparently jumped, “I thought it was a freakin’ whale at first, it was so big. I just started screaming at the guys, ‘Get the anchor up, quick, quick, quick.’ And when it jumped there was this big slap like a whale. But you could definitely see it was a shark by its underbelly – it was really white and you could see the teeth in its mouth,” Jaan said.

The Robertson family managed to haul anchor and back the boat towards the shark, “I don’t want to kill an animal like that or hurt it, so if I can get it closer to the boat and cut the line off at its mouth it’s going to have a better chance of surviving. But then it did another jump and the line broke. I think it landed on the line,” Jaan recalled.

There have reportedly been a number of Great White shark sightings in the coastal area recently. On Friday, Te Atatu resdient Mike Fleming also had a close encounter with a 4 meter long giant just off Kauri Pt.

Fleming and his son-in-law were in their boat in about 15 meters of water, when all of a sudden they heard a huge splash, “At that point I thought it was perhaps a kingfish or stingray but while we were looking over to that side of the boat, probably no more than 7m away, this shark came about halfway out of the water. He was huge. He was big. It was enough for all of us to go into mass hysteria on the boat,” Fleming told reporters.

It is not clear if that sighting was the same Great White shark that the Robinson family encountered on Monday.