Terrifying moment massive shark trails boat as onlooker screams line from Jaws

Footage shows two people in a small boat at a popular holiday spot in Rhode Island, in the United States, when suddenly onlookers see a massive shark behind them
A massive 20-feet shark was filmed at a popular holiday resort with an onlooker heard screaming a line from the famous Jaws film as it lurked by a small boat.
Diners eating by the beach were suddenly alarmed to see the predator lurking in the water and worryingly close to a boat with those onboard apparently unaware. The sea was looking calm in the footage when the fin of the shark appeared from the water behind the boat which had two people in it. A shout came from a man amid general chatter in a restaurant saying: 'There is a shark in the pond.' It was followed by general laughter before other people realised that he was actually being serious with the 20-feet predator moving through the water.
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It is a reference to a scene in Jaws, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, where a crowd shouted out that a shark had entered a tidal pond where children were playing in a boat.
And it happened in real life in the water at Block Island, Rhode Island, in the US, where the fin was seen cutting through the water by diners at Dead Eye Dicks on Great Salt Pond. But fortunately the boat was heading the other way from the shark and there was no attack like in the film.
The footage was shared online by the Atlantic Shark Institute who commented that they had received calls about the sighting of the predator.
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'Sharks are arriving in Rhode Island daily as water temperatures continue to rise and more and more species of shark find them suitable to their liking,' it stated. 'Hopefully this shark will find its way out of Great Salt Pond soon and continue on its way!'
It also said: 'We got some wonderful video but loved this one from Jen Seebeck who was enjoying dinner at Dead Eye Dicks when she noticed the fin slicing through the water inside Great Salt Pond. Clearly a very large shark and reminiscent of a scene from Jaws on this 50th anniversary of the film. Can you guess what the species is?'
Atlantic Shark Institute executive director Jon Dodd said the shark in the video is a basking shark, estimated to be approximately 20 feet long with a large dorsal fin.
The basking shark is the second-largest fish species after the whale shark and live on tiny plankton. They are commonly spotted in southern New England waters in late spring, according to the New England Aquarium. Basking sharks can be mistaken for great white sharks but they have pointed dorsal fins, while the basking sharks have rounded fins.

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Telegraph

17 hours ago

• Telegraph

I watched Jaws almost 50 years ago, but I'm still terrified of the water

I'm with my family on a small rib boat in Monterey. Instead of the habitual Californian sunshine, everywhere is shrouded in mist. It's hard to make out the horizon and, when I turn back, the security of the shoreline has also disappeared. It's eerily silent and I'm trying to think happy thoughts. 'So, we had a sighting of a great white shark a couple of days ago,' said our guide. 'It breached just over there, beyond the pier.' The happy thoughts scatter to make way for a familiar fear. Now all I can think of is that famous line, 'We're gonna need a bigger boat,' as I gaze down at the mere inches that separate us from the water and the fact that I am sitting exposed at the back with my eldest. It will get us first. As we putter along, we pass a dead seal floating in the water, a chunk of flesh missing. 'Do you mind if I take another look at that?' our guide checks. My middle child is keen while I've already written the headline in my head: 'Family of five in great white tragedy'. This is what happens when the first film you saw at the cinema at an inappropriately young age was Jaws. I was three when Jaws was released, so even by the relaxed parenting standards of the Seventies, I couldn't have seen it then, even though it was rated A – the equivalent of a PG now. It must have been a re-release or a special summer showing as I was aged about seven and at primary school. I remember telling my friends over a packed lunch of fish-paste sandwiches that I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up, with no idea what that entailed. As an only child with working parents, I spent a lot of time in the school holidays with my widowed grandfather. My parents suggested he take me to the cinema. Perhaps they had something like Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in mind. However, these were not the days of infinite choice, and Jaws was the only option in the small cinema in the West Midlands we found ourselves in. We had no idea what lay ahead, although the iconic poster should have presented us with a large clue. Saccharine Disney, this was not. Cocktail of horror, confusion and fascination As I passively smoked the cigarettes of other cinemagoers, this cinematic experience marked me. I remember the strange cocktail of horror, confusion and fascination watching the opening scene of the midnight swim where Chrissie is attacked. Steven Spielberg located the psychological weak points I didn't know I had at that tender age: the depth and expanse of the ocean, intensified in darkness; the human, powerless against the forces of nature; a predator; the shock of the surprise and the power of music to grab the subconscious and give it a good shake. With Chrissie's agonisingly lengthy – or so it felt to me – demise, I remember the abject terror of being at eye level with this woman, as though I was in the water opposite her (clever one, Spielberg), shocked by the tugging, the thrashing, the dragging. It was viscerally jarring. The image of her long, tangled hair when her remains are discovered and pored over, lodged in my head. The popcorn remained untouched. Looking back now, it's as if Spielberg had communed with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to skewer our fears. Let's take a place associated with carefree fun, somewhere everyone goes, and unleash hell. No-one was spared. The bright and beautiful young things were taken out; the cute kid on a lilo was seized in front of his mother's eyes as the sea turned incarnadine. Even cocky Quint's hubris is crushed between the jaws of Jaws. All of it wrapped up in the genius of John Williams's musical score which signalled the presence of a predator in a slow, chilling bass to the extent that merely saying 'dun dun' is a shortcut for danger for those who know. The way the music ratcheted up in volume and pace until it was a screeching frenzy, reminiscent of Psycho, created almost unbearable tension. I exited the cinema with a crush on police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and the adrenaline rush of having been on a cinematic roller coaster. I remember my grandfather letting out one of his trademark whistles of relief at the end, and it certainly cemented our already strong bond. We'd survived. I left with a fear, horror and yet almost obsessive fascination with sharks. I could freak myself out during a school swimming lesson, just by imagining the music. Similarly, my imagination went into overdrive pottering about in the sea on childhood holidays to Bournemouth. Weirdly, it hasn't dimmed with age. Sharks: friend or foe? Much to the understandable consternation of those experts who know and understand sharks best, Jaws has been the worst PR ever wrought on an animal that does a stellar job at maintaining the oceans' ecosystems. One of those experts is Brendon Sing, founder and co-director of UK charity Shark Guardian. He has worked with sharks most of his adult life; his WhatsApp profile picture of a great white stares up at me, like a form of aversion therapy. 'It still has such an effect on people today, and I'm blown away by that,' Sing says of Jaws. 'A lot of stuff you're told about sharks is completely wrong.' He's frustrated with the amount of misleading information put out through TV documentaries and alarmist media headlines. One of his pet hates is the phrase: 'shark-infested waters'. 'Sharks don't infest the water; they live there. Sharks have been in the oceans for over 400 million years,' he says. Sing clarifies that sharks do not have an aggressive agenda against us, nor are they out to eat us. Humans are not their prey. Shark attacks, of which there are incredibly few, are usually owing to mistaken identity or a curious shark investigating a possible meal before realising it's not their usual fare. 'We have millions of people that enter the oceans on a daily basis and there are sharks there all the time. On average, we lose four or five people a year. If they did eat us, we'd be losing thousands a year and that just doesn't happen,' states Sing. The Shark Guardian website also points out that around 50 people a year are killed by jellyfish and 150 by falling coconuts. Sing tells me that drone footage they have gathered over the past few years shows how often people come into contact with great whites without ever realising. 'Sharks will sometimes be swimming 10 metres away from people, but once they realise we are not their food or natural prey, they turn and swim away. They do everything they can to avoid us. Sharks are very intelligent and very curious but their number one priority is self-preservation.' Indeed, more than 90 per cent of shark bites that occur are superficial because the shark retreats once it realises it has made a mistake. How to prevent an attack I gingerly ask Sing what I should do if I were to encounter a great white. Things I've read, like punching a shark on the nose or poking it in the eye, seem both impossible and counterintuitive. In a diving scenario, sharks are most likely to swim to you before turning away, Sing explains – and the best thing to do is to stand your ground. 'If anything, move towards it first and you'll see it turn away and back off. You're showing you're a threat,' he says. I can't even conceive of doing this, but I defer to Sing's expertise. It's easy for sharks to be demonised in films. They don't have the cute factor of dolphins nor the Hollywood smile, and Dangerous Animals, a horror released this month, further perpetuates their killer qualities. Yet, as Sing points out, sharks need protecting – and education needs to shift our perception. 'They're still doing the job they've been doing for millions of years: maintaining the marine ecosystem and keeping our oceans in the best condition possible to sustain all life. They're massively important,' he adds. Sing urges me to break my fear and go to see sharks with an expert, but it's going to take a significant amount of brain-rewiring to take that step. Will I be watching Jaws this month? You bet – in honour of my grandfather – but, hopefully, this time it will be with more facts and less fear.

BBC News

19 hours ago

• BBC News

From Orkney to Amity Island: Jaws star Robert Shaw's Stromness childhood

For film fans across the world, the English actor Robert Shaw will always be Quint. The hard-bitten, shark-hunting, salty sea dog from Steven Spielberg's 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws was a defining role for the distinguished stage and screen star, the more so since it came just three years before his sudden death at the age of has seen a surge of events and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the film, now firmly established as a much-loved and lauded less well-known is that Shaw's path to stardom and success included five years as a child in Orkney, a period which would have a huge effect on the rest of his life. Speaking on a US chat show more than more than 30 years after leaving Orkney, Shaw spoke movingly of the influence the islands had on him and his family."My father killed himself when I was 12," he said. "He was an extraordinary man, a marvellous man and he was a doctor in the Orkney Islands, which is right at the top of Scotland. Those terrible islands where there's wind and sea and you get a hundred-mile-an-hour gales."He was the lighthouse doctor and he used to keep a medical bag on each island and when you couldn't get in because the sea was so rough, my father would go out... and jump off and swim ashore."And there would be his medical bag and then he'd deliver whatever baby was to be delivered." That story perfectly summed up the mixture of romance, nostalgia and pain which Shaw carried with him from his Orkney childhood. Robert Shaw was born in Lancashire in 1927 and lived there until the age of seven, when his father Thomas took over a GP practice in Stromness, Orkney's second-largest town. The new doctor and his wife moved there with their five children. The couple were Cornish, though both had Scottish ancestry. They may have felt a connection with their new home at the other end of the British Isles, but they undoubtedly stood apart from their new Shaw Myers is Robert Shaw's nephew. His mother, Joanna, was the actor's younger sister. His new book - Robert Shaw: An Actor's Life on the Set of Jaws and Beyond - explores the period in struck by a class photograph which shows a young Robert Shaw standing by himself on the back row, distinctly separated from his classmates."Isn't it unusual? Or interesting, I should say. How Robert is standing apart and rigidly at attention and very much looks the outsider," he says. "By that point he was six or seven years old, he had an English accent and accents are really important, especially with children. They define if you're part of a group or an outsider. The Shaws were outsiders."Speaking on BBC Radio Orkney in 2018, Christopher's mother Joanne offered some insight into what isolated her family from others."I just remember what a unit we were, because for various reasons mother wouldn't have other children over after school," she the "various reasons" other children weren't allowed to play at the Shaw house was the doctor's increasingly out of control around six years in Stromness their mother left him and took the children south, to England. Eventually he followed and the family was briefly reunited. But after years of struggling with his addiction, Thomas took his own life. Robert would go on to enjoy some success as a novelist as well as an actor, and Christopher believes much of his Orkney childhood can be found in his two published works The Hiding Place, and The Sun former includes descriptions of landscapes clearly inspired by the shipwrecks in Scapa Flow. And there are emotional resonances too."He was pulling from his Orkney experiences as a child for much of what's in The Hiding Place. And then in The Sun Doctor, I think he went a step further than that. "The father is an alcoholic who didn't kill himself but died and the mother was blamed," he says."And that was something that my grandmother always had to deal with. That some people blamed her for the death of her husband. Whether she had killed him directly or drove him to drink." After a short spell as a teacher, Robert trained as an actor and spent much of the 1950s building up his career on stage and screen. He was the star of the popular TV drama The Buccaneers but his film breakthrough came in 1963 as a villainous heavy with the rather Scottish name of Donald Grant in the second Bond film From Russia With Love. That same year he returned to his former home in Stromness. He was on honeymoon with his second wife, the actress Mary Ure. They stayed at the Stromness Hotel and while there were talked into helping out with a fundraising event to raise the cash for a swimming pool for the town. A photograph taken at the event shows the couple posing with the band and the winner of the 'Miss Swimming Pool Stromness' beauty contest, Irene Irene Linklater, she fondly remembers that night, 62 years on."That was a big surprise. I never really got over it," she says."[I] Knew who they were but I had never seen them before and I hadn't still seen a film that they were in but I knew of them." A week after Shaw's death in 1978, BBC Radio Orkney broadcast a tribute. It was presented by Archie Bevan, a local teacher and author who was one of the founders of the islands' St Magnus Bevan, who died in 2015, described that 1963 visit and spoke warmly of Shaw's 1963 visit."I remember that my first meeting with Robert Shaw that year was on the Stromness golf course. He was playing in a foursome with some members of the local club. "His dark hair had been bleached to a startling, Aryan blonde, a memento of his starring role as a villain in From Russia With Love, which he'd just finished shooting".Local artist and author Bryce Wilson has written a history of Stromness. "He loved to go playing golf with some of his pals who were still around. I remember him coming with Mary Ure. That was the talk of the town," he career brought him great acclaim and riches, with an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Henry VIII in A Man For All Seasons and starring roles in enduring classics such as Battle of The Bulge, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The Sting. But he was a troubled man. Like his father, he struggled with alcohol. It impacted upon his work and home life. He was married three times and had 10 children. After years of mental health and addictions issues, Mary Ure died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription medicine in 1975, just two months before the release of three years later Shaw, by then remarried and living by a lake in rural Ireland, died suddenly of a heart attack. He was is probably the film he is most remembered for. It changed the way Hollywood released summer movies, creating the modern blockbuster. It confirmed 28-year-old Steven Spielberg as the biggest director of his generation and is today regarded as one of the greatest American films. Shaw's Quint steals the film and screenwriter Carl Gottlieb credits the actor with writing the character's chilling monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War film's 50th anniversary has brought festivals, films showings and tributes across the in Orkney, many are remembering Robert Shaw as one of their own. For Bryce Wilson, it all comes back to that childhood in Stromness and the sea."Robert Shaw served his apprenticeship for Jaws by mucking about in a boat in the harbour. All the young folk were in dinghies mucking about," he says."So that's what we put it down to. It's where he learned to work his passage in Jaws".You can hear more on Robert Shaw's childhood in Orkney on The Sunday Show on BBC Radio Scotland from 10:00 on Sunday 22 June.

BBC News

a day ago

• BBC News

The History Hour Jaws and the Charleston church shooting

Available for over a year Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. This programme includes outdated and offensive language. It's 50 years since the original Jaws film was released in cinemas across America. The movie premiered on 20 June 1975. Our guest is Jenny He, senior exhibitions curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. She tells us about the history of this blockbuster movie. We also hear from Carl Gottlieb, who co-wrote the screenplay. Also, the story of the women who were forcibly detained in sexual health clinics across East Germany, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and the 1964 civil rights swimming protest that ended when acid was poured into the pool. Finally, the horrific account of Polly Sheppard who was a survivor of the Charleston church shooting in South Carolina, USA in 2015. Contributors: Carl Gottlieb - Jaws co-writer. Jenny He - senior exhibitions curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Sabine - one of the women forcibly detained and abused in a sexual health clinic in East Germany. Archive of William Norman Ewer - journalist who attended the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Archive of JT Johnson and Mimi Jones -activists in a civil rights swimming protest . Polly Sheppard- survivor of the Charleston Church shooting. This programme contains movie excerpts from the 1975 film which was a Universal Picture, a Zanuck/Brown production and directed by Steven Spielberg. (Photo: Steven Spielberg on the set of the film 'Jaws' in 1975. Credit: Archive Photos/Stringer)