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IT’S enough to make a surfer cringe – a massive shark swimming nearby and you’re completely unaware. This picture was taken on the Central Coast on September 17 at Killcare by drone pilot Tom Caska. It shows a massive shark following a pod of dolphins right near where people are surfing. They are on 3m long SUP boards, which gives an indication of its size. There’s no word yet on what kind of shark it was but it’s not the first sighting of a large one on this stretch of coast this month. Just a week earlier, a great white shark measuring about three metres long circled a boat in Lake Macquarie. Daryl Evans of Floraville and Kerry Thomas of Pelican spotted the shark about while anchored at a spot known as The Barge, about halfway between Coal Point and Belmont. ‘‘My first thought was ‘We need a bigger boat’,’’ Mr Evans told The Newcastle Herald. ‘‘We had a mesh fish keep hanging overboard that keeps the fish alive until you clean them, so I grabbed that because if the shark got there first we could have capsized.’’ The friends were in a four-metre tinny for their weekly fishing trip and had only been anchored at The Barge for an hour when they saw the shark about one metre under the surface following a berley trail up to the boat. ‘‘It circled the boat about six times, from about 10 to 15 metres away until he was about 1.5 metres away,’’ Mr Evans said. The shark returned about 20 minutes later about three metres under the water and circled the boat once. ‘‘I’ve been fishing for 45 years and that is the first time I’ve seen a great white in the lake,’’ Mr Evans said. Paul Wilcox, 50, died at Byron Bay earlier this month when he was bitten by a shark while swimming off the town’s main beach.

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