If you spend a lot of time in the ocean, it is hard not to think about sharks. I visit the beach near my home in southern Maine regularly with my family, and almost every night from spring to fall, I go surf fishing after dark. For a long time, I soothed my anxiety with statistics—in America, you are far more likely to be killed by a riding mower than a man-eating fish—and by reminding myself that, in all my years of beachgoing and striped-bass fishing, I’d never encountered a great white in the wild. But then, late one night a few weeks ago, I saw one. It was, as best as I could tell, a juvenile white, and the experience was wholly anticlimactic: A dark triangular fin appeared about 10 yards from where I was wading. It cruised the shallows at a 45-degree angle to the shoreline and seemed uninterested in me. I backpedaled out of the water.
This would be the year that I finally spotted a shark. Maine’s great-white population has been growing for some time—the state had its first fatal shark attack in 2020—and this season, sightings have been unusually high. In July, beaches in Phippsburg were temporarily closed due to a shark sighting. Last month, Mile Beach, Half Mile Beach, East Beach, Wells Beach, and multiple Biddeford beaches were closed for the same reason. At one point, nearly a dozen sharks were reported at Pine Point Beach in a 48-hour period. Then, a longtime lifeguard at Scarborough Beach, Greg Wilfert, was dragged five or six feet underwater by a shark that grabbed his rescue torpedo. After the incident, Wilfert and his fellow lifeguards began monitoring the water with drones. He told me that they’ve seen as many as 15 great whites a day, which they chase off with Jet Skis. (Curious if they were exaggerating, I accompanied a drone-owning friend to check things out on a random afternoon: We saw four great whites in 30 minutes.)
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But if seemingly everyone agrees that more sharks have been around this season than in the past, even scientists are having a hard time pinning down what exactly is driving the spate of sightings, and what it means about the future of Maine’s beaches. Jérôme Pinti, a senior scientist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, attributed the rising number of great whites to a combination of factors: Climate change has expanded the species’ northern range; the effects of shark-conservation efforts begun in the 1990s are beginning to be felt; and, because the state is home to large biomasses of prey species including striped bass and seals, all the new great whites are finding ample food.
Pinti also said, however, that ascertaining the true extent of the state’s white-shark increase is difficult without a formal stock assessment, which has yet to be done. He noted that the growing popularity of recreational drone use muddies the picture. “I believe we have more sharks,” Pinti told me. But also, “everybody and their brother has a drone right now. So if you have drones above the water all the time, you’re gonna see sharks a lot more.” Whether the rise in shark sightings is because of an actual increase in the number of sharks swimming in Maine waters, or because new technology simply makes the fish easier to spot, is an open question.
Another open question is what, if anything, Mainers and those who visit the state’s beaches should now do differently. Ryan McDermott, a co-owner of the Black Point Surf Shop in Scarborough, told me that the sharks are making him and his fellow surfers choosier about when they go out. “It better be pretty good surf to get you out there when you know that there’s more than a handful of great whites just around the corner,” he said. I suggested that coastal Maine may soon become Cape Cod 2.0—another New England tourist destination that has had to negotiate its own rapidly expanding population of toothy ocean inhabitants. McDermott corrected me: “It’s already kinda happened.”
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When I tracked down Wilfert, an affable 71-year-old who bears more than a passing resemblance to Dog the Bounty Hunter, he was still manning his lifeguard post, flanked by a pair of massive Newfoundland water-rescue dogs. He walked me down to the water’s edge and showed me the frayed rope of his yellow rescue torpedo. He told me that he didn’t see the shark that came after him—he felt it. He thought his buoy had gotten caught on a boat propeller, until the fish dived and started dragging him down. “I’ve been here 55 years,” he said, “and I’ve never seen a shark.”
When I asked Wilfert whether he’d changed his habits, he said he was still swimming, though he confessed that he was not going out as far and had recently relied on drone shark spotters. As our conversation ended, a pair of elementary-school-age boys ran up to the perma-tanned Wilfert to ask him if he was the lifeguard who had been attacked. They, too, wanted to hear about the shark.
In the emptier-than-usual parking lot, a stone’s throw from the beach smoothie shack, I walked past a stylish woman unloading beach chairs while her teenage kids impatiently snapped their gum. I stopped on the way to my own car, identified myself as a journalist, and asked whether she was worried about the recent surge of great whites.
“Not worried and don’t care,” came the reply. “My husband is a lobsterman.”