Sharks!

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.