For all the effort spent reeling in fish, sometimes the most impressive catch is on video.

Hap Farrell, the captain of the Stunmai II, says its hardly the first time he’s had a great white shark swipe a client’s catch during one of his fishing charter trips off Cape Cod.

But to catch it all on high-quality video is a bit more rare. And to do it twice — once in which the leaping shark jumped several feet out of the water — in one day is even more spectacular.

“Whoa!” the group of fishermen exclaimed in unison as the breaching great white shark pilfered one of their lines (footage of the second trip begins around the one-minute mark in the above video).


Farrell, who runs Stunmai II Sportfishing out of Rock Harbor in Orleans, says the two encounters came during two separate fishing trips Saturday out on Billingsgate Shoal in Cape Cod Bay.

The first happened Saturday morning, in which he said a 12-foot shark left a client with just the head of the striper they were reeling in.

The second encounter happened during a separate trip Saturday afternoon and made for even more stunning video.

Once again, fishermen were left with just half a fish.

While the airborne shark made for incredible footage, Farrell says its not an uncommon occurrence during these trips. The difference was that this time he caught footage of the breaching shark on his own “broadcast-quality” camera, rather than just a client’s cell phone.

Farrel, who is a member of an association of Rock Harbor fishing charters, said each boat tends to see around one shark a day.