Rare whale shark encounter has special meaning for fishing captain
A Virginia sportfishing captain told his customers to be careful not to hook the enormous whale shark that visited his 20-foot boat during a recent excursion.
Capt. Brian Esteppe and his clients then watched in awe as the gentle giant, nearly as long as the vessel, swam in such close proximity that Esteppe had trouble capturing the entire animal in frame.
“You will not believe this folks,” he narrates in the footage he captured last Saturday, five miles off Chincoteague on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. “This whale shark is 16 feet. Man, this is just the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
The whale shark stayed with the boat for more than a minute, in what Esteppe told The Virginian-Pilot he considered a sign from above, having recently lost his father-in-law.
“I believe it was almost sent from above somehow, there just to make sure I was OK,” the captain said. “Almost like an angel of the sea.”
Esteppe owns Y Knot Fishing Adventures and his group was fishing at a depth of 70 feet. The veteran captain has undoubtedly seen plenty in his days spent at sea, but he never expected to see a whale shark because they rarely venture so far up the Atlantic coast.
Jack Musick, professor emeritus at Virginia Institute of Marine Science, told Chesapeake Bay Magazine that whale sharks are more typically encountered in tropical regions.
“Whale sharks occur worldwide at tropical latitudes [so] a whale shark off Chincoteague would be exceedingly rare,” Musick said.
Whale sharks, an endangered species, are the largest fish on the planet and can measure 40-plus feet. They roam the currents filter-feeding on plankton, and are known among divers as being docile and unwary.
Esteppe told the Virginian-Pilot that he first spotted the whale shark in the form of a “big dark shadow” rising from the depths, and that he reached out and touched its rough skin at one point before the creature “swam off just as graceful as it came in.”
–Whale shark video and images are courtesy of Y Knot Fishing Adventures