Maritime fisherman Jay Edgett was fishing with a group of friends last Friday night off a wharf in Dorchester Cape, New Brunswick when he made a rare catch.
He had two lines in the water and he says he wasn't surprised when something hit one of the lines.
"I thought I had a striped bass, because it hit really hard and he started running with it, and I started putting everything I had to him," says Edgett.
Eventually the fish tired and came to the surface. One of Edgett's fishing buddies was able to get it into a net and hoisted it to the surface. Only, it wasn't a striped bass as he had originally suspected.
Edgett says it took him two days to identify his catch as a sand tiger shark. He says he has caught many fish in the area, but he has never caught anything like this.
"I seen the teeth and just realized it wasn't anything that I was familiar with," he says.
Steven Campana, a shark expert with the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, says only four sightings of the sand tiger shark have been recorded in Canadian waters, and this is the first time one has been seen as far up as the Bay of Fundy.
"Finding a sand tiger shark is actually very unusual in Canadian waters," says Campana. "This type of shark, the sand tiger shark, is normally an ocean resident."
The Petitcodiac and Memramcook rivers converge in the bay where the shark was caught, and some speculate whether the shark's presence is somehow connected to the opening of the Petitcodiac Causeway. But Campana doesn't think the two are related.
"I don't think it really has anything to do with the river itself," says Campana. "I think it's probably more related to the ocean temperatures being right, and this particular shark managed to swim up there, in nice warm water, and maybe got himself a little bit lost."
Campana says the shark, which measures just over a metre long, is probably two to three years old, and it may not be alone.
"The sand tigers tend to be more in loose aggregations," explains Campana. "But they're not totally sole predators, like the great white for instance."
Sand tiger sharks aren't known to be aggressive toward people, but Edgett says this particular shark seemed to dislike the wharf.
"He bit right onto the wharf," says Edgett. "It was something, he was one mean shark."
According to National Geographic, the sand tiger is a threatened species. Edgett says this shark was released shortly after being caught, but he was able to capture some video first – proof to back up this whale of a tale.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Jonathan MacInnis
