This is the photo that set off a mad dash for shore. Photo: Madeleine Cronin // CBS News
If the advent of shark tourism proves one thing, it’s that some people will go to great lengths to come face to face with the ocean’s most feared animal. However, over the holiday weekend a pair of New England paddle boarders did it without even meaning to, when they accidentally snapped a photo next to a great white shark.
The incident occurred off of Woods Hole on Cape Cod on July fourth, as CBS reports. Margaret Bowles and Madeleine Cronin were paddle boarding near Stony Beach, when Cronin paused to take a photo. “I was like, ‘Take a picture of me!’ right,” Bowles told CBS. “Then next to her board, this eight-inch fin. It’s like fleshy and grey and I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ My heart kind of sank.”
It was the unmistakable shape of a shark’s dorsal fin, which John Chisholm of the New England Aquarium confirmed to CBS belonged to a great white. “In that location it is pretty rare for a white shark, but it has happened in the past,” he explained. “In this case, the shark had a pointed dorsal fin, so I knew it was a white shark.”
However, the scientific categorization of the beast was far from the minds of Bowles and Cronin at the time. In the next photo Cronin took, you can actually see the exact moment Bowles realized they had to escape. “When I am looking through the phone and I see her face change from just like happy or whatever to, ‘Oh my God, there’s a shark,'” described Cronin.
The pair immediately kicked into gear, paddling back to shore so hard that Cronin broke an paddle. “From there it was kind of just like, go, go, go! Get to the beach. Not many thoughts after that,” added Cronin.
“I think we were both quite calm, given the circumstances, which I’m super grateful for, because it definitely would have been easy for one of us to freak out and fall off the board or something,” concluded Bowles.
