Hilton swims closer to Donkin
Fin spotted off False Bay beach over weekend
He might be the most talked about great white shark in these parts since Jaws, and he’s turned his fin closer to Cape Breton shores once again.
The electronic tracking device for Hilton the Shark, a social-media superstar by most measures, pinged offshore early Wednesday morning.
This time, he was found just a few kilometres off Port Morien and Donkin at 4:18 a.m. He registered again at 6:21 a.m. swimming away from shore.
The latest pings follow one on Tuesday at 4:35 a.m., indicating the four-metre long shark is likely an early riser.
Though his electronic tracker has been registering the shark’s position each time its fin breaks the water’s surface, only one possible eyewitness sighting has surfaced to date.
Glace Bay native Jason Lawrence, who now lives in Halifax, was walking the beach of a family property in the Homeville/Mira Gut area on Saturday when he and his mother Diane spotted a fin in the water.
“We’ve had the property down there for about 40 years and you never see anything like that there before,” he said during a phone interview. “I thought I’d take a picture to see what people thought.”
The iPhone image he captured from the False Bay beach appears to show a fin very far offshore in a spot where there is no sandbar. It’s the first time he’s ever seen anything like that in the area.
He shared the image with the Post and with the Museum of Natural History in Halifax, who told him it could be a shark, or a sunfish, or even a porpoise.
“It may be a fin. It may be this, it may be that. I wasn’t going to go check. You wouldn’t get me in that water for a million bucks to go have a look.”
The image he captured on Saturday came after Hilton’s electronic tracker indicated he was around the nearby Main-a-Dieu area on Thursday.
Hilton’s electronic tag first registered off Cape Breton on Sept. 6 and has since been noted to be swimming off of Scatarie Island and other parts of Cape Breton.
Hilton was tagged in March 2017 in Hilton Head, S.C., by the Ocearch research team. He’s estimated to be over 20 years old and weighs about 2,000 pounds.