Watch: Kayak fisherman unknowingly hooks into a great white shark

Rick Austin was fishing for striped bass from his kayak in the Minas Basin of Nova Scotia last week when he hooked into something big. It wasn’t a striped bass. It turned out to be a great white shark that weighed more than 200 pounds.

Austin posted video of the encounter on YouTube with a caveat for language, but CTV News also had it in a clean version in its report below:

When the fish leaped out of the water, Austin didn’t realize it was a great white shark, saying in the video, “That’s a porpoise. I gotta let that go.”

So he cut the line.

“My first thought was that it was a dolphin and that it would just spool me and then it would have hundreds of yards of 50-pound braid wrapping around it,” Austin wrote on Facebook. He realized it wasn’t a dolphin but a shark after watching his video.

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Austin later had it confirmed as a great white shark by biologists from the New England Aquarium in Massachusetts and the Department of Integrative Biology from the University of Guelph, Ontario.

“They estimate it to be between 6- and 8-feet long, weighing between 200 to 250 pounds,” Austin wrote.