A party of sport fishermen had a rare brush with a huge great white shark off the coast of New Jersey Monday.

In an encounter that was very similar to a scene from the 1976 blockbuster "Jaws," the shark came right up to the stern of the boat and grabbed a bag of grounded up fish bait called chum.

The once-in-a-lifetime experience was caught on video and has shark researchers buzzing. Watch the video at the top of this story of the encounter.

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"We've fished for sharks a lot and never seen anything like that. We were amazed by how big it was," said Capt. Jeff Crilly, owner of Big Nutz Required II, a 31-foot Bertram sport boat.

Crilly, 31 of Toms River, estimates the shark's length was more than half the size of the boat, or 16 to 18 feet.

"It was harder to guess the weight because we had nothing to compare it to, but it was probably about 2,000 pounds," Crilly said.

Crilly and a five-man crew were participating in a mako shark tournament and had several types of bait in the water as attractors, including the body of a small tuna drifting on a rope and the bag of grounded up fish bait.

The shark was not hooked and, after stealing the bag of bait, swam off on its own power and vanished, Crilly said. The encounter lasted a couple of minutes. See it in the above video.

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Check out the gallery above of mako sharks at the Shore.

They were positioned about 30 miles southeast of Manasquan Inlet in an area with a water depth of 110 feet, home of the wreck of the R.P Resor, an oil tanker that was torpedoed in 1942 during World War II.

On board was Ray Kerico, Sean Smida, Steve Minkena and Kevin Schellar.

Crilly, an experienced captain, has won several local shark fishing competitions including Mako Mania in 2015 and Mako Fever in 2016. Both tournaments are held on the Manasquan River.

The length of the shark is the same as social media sensation Mary Lee the Shark, a tagged great white shark that weighed 3,500 pounds in 2012 when researchers put a satellite tag on her.

Mary Lee's satellite tag went silent in June 2017 when she just miles from Beach Haven, but the OCEARCH team that tagged her believe she's still alive.

While great white shark populations are on the rise on the East Coast, marine experts said Crilly's encounter is still rare.

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"As the population continues to rebound, of course, these chance encounters could increase. This is still a very rare encounter off New Jersey for this elusive fish," said Melissa Michaelson, of Brick and a volunteer at the Shark Research Institute in Princeton, where she helps verify shark bite incidents.

Michaelson said the shark could be a mature female shark that could be here to pup. The New York/New Jersey bight, an underwater indentation along the Atlantic coast, has long been theorized to be a nursery for great white sharks.

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When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom where is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com