See great white shark fishermen caught – and released – off New Jersey coast

NEPTUNE, N.J. – Fishermen looking for one brand of ocean predator encountered another – a great white shark – while fishing over a once-lost shipwreck 10 to 15 miles from the New Jersey shoreline.

According to a crew member, the shark was hooked by accident Sunday with fishing gear and let go immediately.

Chris O'Neill, of Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, said as soon as they identified the shark they cut the line and released it. O'Neill took a photo of the shark when it was near their 26-foot-long boat.

"There are a lot of rules and regulations when it comes to these sharks. As soon as we knew what we had, we turned him loose," said O'Neill.

Great white sharks are prohibited to be landed by fishermen and must be released if hooked.

O'Neill said they were not trying to catch a great white. His party of four was fishing for another species of shark called a mako, a popular game fish.

He said the other three crew members were his uncle Joe O'Neill and Sam Messler from Manahawkin, New Jersey, and Robert McLaughlin from Barnegat, New Jersey.

They were fishing on the wreck of the Robert Walker, which lies in 85-feet of water off the coast of the Absecon Inlet near Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The Walker was a 132-foot sidewheel steamer built in 1844 that served in the U.S. Coast Survey, a precursor to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The ship collided with a ferry June 21, 1860, and sunk.

The location of the Robert Walker shipwreck was unknown for years. Divers found it in 1970 but were unaware of the name. NOAA identified the wreck in 2013 from pieces recovered by divers.

O'Neill said the great white shark hit a bait that was 40 feet down in the water. The shark took about 15 minutes to reel in. He said the shark was a juvenile and estimated the length to be between 4 to 6 feet long.

"When we were reeling it in, we couldn't tell what we had. It didn't fight that hard," O'Neill said. His party started the day 40 miles offshore, tuna fishing on a ridge known as the Cigar for its shape.

The so-called New York Bight has long been theorized to be a pupping ground for great white sharks. It is an area of the Atlantic Ocean from Cape May, New Jersey, to Montauk Point on Long Island in New York.

Jack Casey is often cited by shark experts as discovering the white shark nursery. In the 1960s, Casey was working at Sandy Hook Marine Labs when he caught several neonates. The pups still had umbilical scars.

White shark numbers, which were declining in the 1970s and 1980s, are rebounding because of conservation measures.

Last summer OCEARCH, a nonprofit ocean research group, tagged several juvenile great white sharks in the New York Bight as part of a mission to understand the life-cycle of great white sharks.

Follow Dan Radel on Twitter: @danielradelapp

WSBTV