Has A Shark Ever Sank A Boat?

One of the great white sharks that attacked Keith Poe’s fishing boat over a recent three-day period struck the 24-foot vessel with such force that Poe thought it had been struck by a sailboat.

“Words cannot describe how loud the impact was around my head [while I was] inside the boat’s v-berth,” Poe stated in a Facebook description of his extraordinary encounter, while fishing near a dead whale off Los Angeles County.

“The boat was full-on attacked 7 different times… usually at sunrise or sunset.”

The whale was an adult female humpback whale known among marine mammal enthusiasts as Wally. The 45-foot leviathan washed ashore at Dockweiler State Beach on June 30, raising concerns that it might attract sharks to the coast.

The carcass had been towed offshore for at least the third time – it kept drifting back toward land after previous attempts – before Poe found it 10 miles beyond the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The prolific shark tagger, whose vessel is named Shark Tagger, planned to tag and release white sharks attracted by the whale’s scent.

He arrived at the bloated whale carcass last Wednesday at sunset, and over the next two days he counted at least seven individual white sharks, including several large females. The largest of the sharks measured about 18 feet.

White Shark attacks on boats have been reported from numerous places, including Australia, Japan, South Africa, Canada, South America and the United States. Attacks on boats and other types of marine vessels were recorded as far back as 1865 in V.M.