A Jupiter High School student named Nick Bailey has garnered national attention after having a very rare encounter with a Great White shark. And not just one time, but twice with two Great White sharks, and both chance encounters happened only a few miles off the Florida coastline.
Bailey told CBS12 News that he's an avid freediver and spearfisher, having done it practically his entire life.
"When I was 3-years-old, [or] 2-years-old, my dad was teaching me to dive even in the pool," he told the news outlet.
Approximately a week ago, Bailey was on, what he believed to be, a routine dive near the Stuart Inlet which is about 4 miles offshore. And fortunately, his video camera was rolling.
In the video, Bailey can be heard yelling, “Great white! Great white!" As he was nearly within arm's length of the shark.
When CBS12 News Reporter Stefany Valderrama asked Bailey, "Were you at all scared at any point?" he replied, "Not at all, you can tell by his behavior, that he had no intention of hurting me.”
The very next day Bailey said that he and his friends hit the waters again, just 3 miles off the coast of Jupiter.
"The last thing I expected was that the next day I would see another one," Bailey explained. But to his surprise, he would have yet another rare encounter with a Great white shark.
"Is there any chance that it was the same shark?" Stefany Valderrama asked Bailey, to which he confidently replied, "It was not, actually," he said. "The first shark was a few feet bigger and it had a broken dorsal fin."