George Breen / CapeCodSharkHunters.com This photo shows what Cape Cod Shark Hunters says is a 16-foot great white shark in the foreground swimming near a group of seals. The shark was spotted last week north of the Chatham, Mass., harbor inlet in close proximity to popular swimming beaches. 
 
 One Cape Cod town is warning swimmers of a menace lurking in the waters this Fourth of July: great white sharks. 
 
 Recent sightings of at least two great whites, including one reportedly measuring up to 16 feet in length, prompted officials in Chatham, Mass., to ban swimming in an an area known for its abundance of seals, according to The Cape Cod Chronicle. 
 
 “Chatham issues advisory after numerous shark sightings, banning swimming within 300 feet of seals along eastern coast,” according to a statement posted by the Cape Cod Chronicle on its Twitter account on Sunday. 
 
 Calls by msnbc.com to the Chatham harbormaster were unanswered on Monday. 
 
 George Breen, a pilot for the Sandwich, Mass.-based conservation group Cape Cod Shark Hunters, said he identified two great white sharks during a routine survey flight on June 28. One shark, he said, was seen about a half mile offshore, while the other was just 50 yards from land. 
 
 The larger one, a 16-footer, was spotted near North Beach Island in Chatham, he said. 
 
 “He was big and close to shore,” Breen told msnbc.com. 
 
 Breen said the two great whites he spotted did not appear to be the same two tagged last year and detected via transmitter signals picked off Chatham last week. At least eight sharks were tagged for research last year, Breen said. 
 
 'We have so many seals' 
 
 Shark sightings, including some in near-shore waters, have spiked in recent years as great whites continue to hunt seals off the Chatham coast, said Joe Fitzback, a veteran sea captain with Chatman Bait & Tackle. 
 
 "The great whites have always been here and we will have more," Fitzback told msnbc.com on Monday. "We have so many seals that it only makes sense that we will have more sightings as the years go by." 
 
 Fitzback said he also spotted a great white shark last week but it was unclear if it was one of the two spotted by Breen. He said his first encounter with a great white came in July 2001, when he was in a boat just a couple of miles east of South Beach. 
 
 "They're out there and they're hungry for seals," Fitzback said. 
 
 He said shark sightings have become big business for the resort town, located on the elbow of Cape Cod. Chatham has six beaches, five located on the Nantucket Sound and one on the ocean side of the Atlantic. 
 
 "It's a novelty of sorts," Fitzback said. "When there are sightings, it gets kind of hectic around here. Everyone wants to come down to see the sharks. But the truth is, you can't see them from the beach, you have to go out into the water." 
 
 Last year, several Chatham beaches shut down due to shark sightings and reports of seal attacks. 
 
 As of Monday, Chatham beaches remained open. 
 
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 ﻿ ||||| CHATHAM — It's not just the fine homes and quaint seaside setting that attracts summer tourists to Chatham, an upscale village located on the elbow of Cape Cod. The great white sharks that patrol the town's beaches are becoming another big draw, and this past weekend one of the large fish was spotted about 100 yards from shore. 
 
 Saturday's sighting, near the mouth of Chatham Harbor, comes on the heels of a sighting Thursday by a shark-spotting plane. A pilot looking for sharks as part of a state shark-tagging operation photographed a 12- to 15-foot great white prowling near the surf zone on the north side of Chatham inlet, the Cape Cod Times reports. George Breen, a pilot for Cape Cod Shark Hunters, told the Hyannis-based daily newspaper that he photographed the shark as it was stalking a group of seals in shallow water. 
 
 While it remains unclear if that shark was the same one spotted Saturday near the entrance to Chatham Harbor, great whites are known to frequent local waters due to a burgeoning seal colony on nearby Monomoy Island. WCVB TV in Boston reports that Saturday's shark was seen just south of the entrance to Chatham Harbor, or about 100 yards from shore. 
 
 MassWildlife biologist Greg Skomal confirmed both of last week's sightings, which follow last month's detection of two great whites that were tagged last summer in order for scientists to track their habits and migratory patterns. The tagged sharks were detected via transmitter signals picked up off the Chatham coast. 
 
 Last summer, town officials were forced to close North Beach, North Beach Island and South Beach in August following numerous sightings and reports of seals being attacked, the Times reported. Skomal said at the time that it was unclear if sharks are attacking seals in near-shore waters more frequently, or if more reports are being made because more people are paying attention. 
 
 Material from the Associated Press, CapeCodSharkHunters.com, the Cape Cod Times and WCVB-TV was used in this report. ||||| EASTHAM — Six-year-old Blake White, who was fishing with his family off Rock Harbor in Cape Cod Bay Saturday, asked his dad for some help reeling in what they thought would be a massive striped bass. 
 
 But after over an hour of being towed around the bay, the fish that came to the surface next to their Aquasport was a great white shark, not a striped bass. 
 
 “‘We're going to need a bigger boat,’” Lars White said he told his family onboard the 22-foot center console boat. “The reaction was to ask the boys to go to the center of the boat and sit down.” 
 
 The shark hadn't bit the line, it swam into the hook and spent an hour and a half trying to free itself, according to White. 
 
 Watch a video interview with the family who hooked the great white 
 
 When the shark finally surfaced, Lars' wife, Niccole, took some photographs of their only catch of the day and then they cut their line and the shark swam away. Blake had hooked into the shark, which his father estimated was 10-12 feet long, at about 1:15 p.m. about a mile from Rock Harbor on the Eastham side, Lars White said. 
 
 Blake, his 8-year-old brother Pierce, and their grandparents were excited when they saw the shark, but made sure they stayed away from the sides of the boat, Lars White said. Lars White and his family live in Houston, Texas but his parents live in Eastham. 
 
 White sent photos of the shark to the Atlantic Great White Shark Conservancy, a non-profit that researches the sharks off Cape Cod. State shark scientist Gregory Skomal confirmed in an email that he was aware of the report and that the shark in the photograph provided by White was a great white. 
 
 Great white sharks have been spotted in increasing numbers in recent years around Cape Cod but primarily along the beaches of the Outer Cape on the Atlantic Ocean side of the peninsula. There were at least five great whites in Wellfleet Harbor starting in July 2015, according to data from receivers moored throughout the harbor that detected the unique identifying signals broadcast from acoustic tags on the animals a total of 6,564 times. 
 
 That makes the Outer Cape harbor the number two spot on the Cape for detections from the 65 great white sharks Skomal and his team have tagged over the past six years, behind only Chatham among towns and areas monitored from Southeastern Massachusetts all the way up to Cape Ann. 
 
 But there have been no reports of somebody hooking into a great white so deep into Cape Cod Bay. Rock Harbor is located in the inner elbow of the peninsula a short distance from the popular Skaket Beach in Orleans in an area with significant tidal changes. During low tide much of the flats just outside the harbor is exposed. 
 
 An area off Jeremy Point in Wellfleet is frequented by a large population of seals but the animals, which are a primary source of food for great white sharks, are not often seen closer to Rock Harbor. 
 
 The family didn't notice any seals in the area where they were trolling for bass, White said. 
 
 “Blake was telling the story about how it was his fish and he needed a little help to reel it in,” White said. 
 
 He wants to go fishing again next weekend, but told his father “maybe we can catch something a little bit smaller.” 
 
 Read more about sharks on Cape Cod: capecodtimes.com/sharks 
 
 — Follow Haven Orecchio-Egresitz on Twitter: @HavenCCT ||||| Last Monday’s shark attack off Truro’s Ballston Beach – the first in 76 years on Cape Cod – set off a media furor and horrified beachgoers along the storied Massachusetts peninsula that attracts millions of vacationers every summer. 
 
 It may also force the hordes that crowd the Cape’s beaches to relearn a lesson lost for decades when seals had all but disappeared from the New England coasts – that swimming among shark’s prey is very dangerous. 
 
 Lifeguards were on high alert, hundreds of spurious dorsal fin sightings were reported and airborne spotters scanned the offshore swells for great white sharks, the prime suspect in the attack on Chris Myers, 50. 
 
 More than 300,000 grey seals, and their vulnerable pups, now live on the Cape – a population 30 times the nadir in the 1960s – and the return of the seals has attracted a return, inshore, of great white sharks. 
 
 “The reason the great white sharks are coming closer to shore in the Cape Cod area, specifically on the eastern shore, is because of the growing grey seal population,” said Greg Skomal, a Massachusetts marine biologist. 
 
 Mr. Myers and his 16-year-old son were swimming several hundred metres offshore, close to known seal colonies, when something bit his lower legs. 
 
 Meanwhile harried Massachusetts tourism officials were battling to prevent a single attack morphing into a nightmare marketing scenario of sinister fins slicing the waters off Cape Cod. 
 
 “Not to downplay the nasty experience the bitee has had but there are sharks in the ocean,” said Betsy Wall, executive director of the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. “There’s a lot of signs and notices about where it is safe to swim and where it is not. People should stay away from seals.” 
 
 Mr. Myers, 50, who is expected to make a full recovery from deep gashes that required more than 40 stitches to close, apparently got the message. 
 
 “Maybe people need to be a little more careful than I was,” he told Good Morning America, his lower legs still heavily bandaged. “Don’t be an easy meal.” 
 
 “It’s the summer news doldrums and nothing tops a shark attack for media excitement,” said George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research who also maintains the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida. “It’s a hot-button issue and not just because of the movie Jaws,” he said. 
 
 “When humans disregard the rules … such as going in the water with seals in the area,” there will be attacks, he said. 
 
 Great whites, while hardly the ferocious, man-eating terrors depicted in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 horror-thriller Jaws, are dangerous and have been sighted with greater frequency in recent years off Cape Cod as seal populations have re-established themselves. 
 
 Seals, along with sea birds, fish and dolphins are routinely eaten by the great white, which can exceed five metres in length and weigh more than two tonnes. 
 
 Seal-hunting sharks like to lurk just offshore to attack as the seals leave or return to the beach, especially where the bottom drops off suddenly, Mr. Burgess said. “It’s a bad idea to swim there.” 
 
 Shark attacks on humans are statistically rare; fatal attacks vanishingly so. In 2011, a typical year, just roughly 120 attacks were verified worldwide, of which only 17 were fatal. By comparison, an estimated 100 people die every year from jellyfish stings. The last, and unconfirmed, fatal shark attack in Canada was off Nova Scotia in August, 1891. 
 
 “But ultimately, the sharks are in their realm, … we are the intruders,” said Rob Mottice, a shark expert and marine biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, Tenn. “There will always be a handful of attacks,” he said. “Sharks attack because they mistake humans for something else. Whatever we do won’t change that.”
– Sightings of at least two great white sharks—one 16 feet long—stalking the waters off Cape Cod have triggered a swimming ban at the popular summer tourist spot during one of busiest times of the year. One shark was spotted a half mile from shore; the other was just 50 feet from land. "He was big, and he was close," an aerial spotter told MSNBC. Now Chatham officials have banned all swimming within 300 feet of seals, and are warning against swimming at dawn and dusk—though beaches currently remain open to sunbathers. Shark sightings have spiked in recent years as the big fish hunt seals off the Chatham coast. Last year, several Chatham beaches were shut due to shark sightings and seal attacks, notes the Springfield Republican.