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A shark was spotted near the beach in Cape May Point at around 3 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 5, 6abc Action News reported. One beachgoer said the shark was about six feet long.
The sighting caused swimmers to run onto the shore and lifeguards kept people out of the water for about a half hour, according to Wildwood Video Archive.
"Sharks are always out here," Cape May Point Beach Patrol Chief Ben Swan told 6abc. "We swim with sharks every day. Most of the time you just don't see them."
The beach scare came about a week after two nearby sightings of basking sharks. The Cape May Whale Watch and Research Center said a 15-to-20-foot shark was seen on the ocean's surface off the coast of Wildwood on Friday, July 26.
A similarly sized basking shark was later spotted about five miles offshore from Cape May on Thursday, Aug. 1.
"We know this is a different individual from the one we had last week because the notches do not match on this dorsal fin," the research center said.
There have been 16 confirmed unprovoked shark bites in New Jersey since 1838, according to the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) from the Florida Museum of Natural History. That is the tenth most in the U.S., just behind New York state's 24 bites.
The last Garden State attack was in May 2023. A Pennsylvania teen girl named Maggie Drozdowski had her foot bitten while surfing in Stone Harbor, abc6 reported.
The ISAF's 2023 data said 52 percent of all unprovoked shark bites around the world happened in the U.S., with 36 incidents and two deaths occurring along American shores.
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