On Saturday, roughly a mile-and-a-half from Rock Harbor, in Orleans, a group on a fishing expedition aboard a charter boat was greeted by one of the ocean predators, which tore into a striper hooked on one of their lines.

Great white shark sightings were plentiful in parts of Cape Cod and the South Shore over the weekend.

Marc Costa, captain of the Columbia, a 42-foot wooden sportfishing vessel, said the people aboard his ship went quiet as they pulled half of a fish out of the water, after the great white had apparently chewed through it.

"We were bringing the fish in, and it just grabbed the fish," he said in a telephone interview.


"You saw what the result of that was," Costa added, referencing a post on Facebook that shows a woman holding up the half-eaten striper.

Costa posted a second image of the great white swimming close to the surface of the emerald-green waters, nearby the boat.

That same day, a group of fishermen participating in a tournament off Chatham encountered a great white swimming just yards from their vessel.

The run-in was captured on video by the excited party, who watched as the shark's dorsal fin cut through the ocean's surface as it approached them.

"Some guy said, "We've got a white shark under our boat!!!!'. [We] were like, 'Yea right,' and then it came up and jumped!!," Jay Goodwin wrote about the experience, which he posted on YouTube. "Ten minutes later we found this big [expletive deleted] shark!!!!!"

State biologists confirmed that both sightings were great whites.

In a third incident Saturday, beaches in Plymouth were cleared, and swimming was banned, after a lobsterman spotted a 15-foot shark about a half-mile off Manomet Point.

Long Beach and White Horse Beach reopened around 2 p.m. Sunday, after a search of the area by the Plymouth harbormaster was inconclusive.


Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear.