On my boat 35 miles due East off the coast of Asbury Park, NJ (left from Sandy Hook) - Been fishing all day chumming the waters for blues and what have ya,. It was sweltering hot and just my buddy and I with 4 poles out and hours have passed. We're sitting on deck chairs that put our head height just below the rear deck gunwales so our vision is trained on the poles and not our surroundings. Around 1pm comes and the sun is just beating us up and my friend says, "I'm so fucking hot I'm going to jump in the water" and starts to take off his shirt. I immediately tell him no fucking way are you doing that. We've been chumming for 5 hours now and it's a very bad idea, a shark will get ya.. I tell him take a gallon of water out of the fridge and douse himself.
So he goes to the galley, fetches the water, stands up in the aft cockpit and cools himself off and then comes back to the lower deck and plops back down in the deck chair and says, "I feel much better". I then say, yeah, at least you weren't shark bait. And two seconds later we hear the unmistakable loud bang of a gun. We both shoot up and as we do we hear another shot and yank our necks to the forward starboard there is another boat with one guy hanging onto a rod for dear life with another guy leaning over pointing a shotgun into the water and fires off another round..
After another 15 minutes or so they attempt to haul this beast lurking below into the boat. by now we know it's a shark but they size and type is what really threw me off. It was a 9 ft bull shark.
First off, a bull shark is a known human attacker and surely would have gone after my friend had he jumped in and secondly, why was it so far off in deep water? It could have been the most unlucky coincidence ever.
After consulting the water temp charts later that evening it seems it probably followed the prevailing warm current so far offshore and doing so was definitely out of it's normal hunting grounds and likely very hungry as they caught it on a 6lb snapper as bait. It would have loved my 200lb friend to death!
We fished together many times after that and not once did he ever mutter the thought of jumping in to cool off.