The sun rose red in a pale blue sky, glowering behind pine boughs on the low coastal horizon of Jonesport, Maine. It’s an odd portend for a fair-weather day, likely due to smoke drifting down from Canadian wildfires. The clock reads 4:50 am. My alarm was set for 5:00 am but I slept in my Subaru and it’s already too bright for my nerves to ignore. Dawn comes early Downeast.
I stumbled out of the car, camera in hand, struggling to capture the sky’s dusky pastel palette, the salt-tinged breeze and low rumble of lobster boat engines already lining out of Moosabec Reach towards Eastern Bay. I was there to face down a recurring fear: great white sharks in Maine waters. But as the day unfolded, I began to see that the monsters lurking for me in those frigid waters don’t all have teeth.
My friend and master Maine sea kayak guide Karen Francoeur was scheduled to arrive around 11:00 am with longtime clients, and enthusiastic paddlers, Cynthia Crane and Steven Kirk. The plan was to paddle from the Beals Island boat launch to the lighthouse on Mistake Island while the tide receded, before riding it back to the boat ramp. In Maine, everything moves with the moon.
In the meantime, I head to Great Wass Island Preserve Shoreline Trail to stretch my legs and get a good look at the bay from the steady shoreline. It’s a beautiful view, but the real reason for my jaunt is to try and get a handle on what had me so spooked when I first paddled this bay three summers ago. A muted dawn chorus trilled through sun-sparkled coastal jack pines. I paused, snapping photos of a rhoda to the tune of a hermit thrush’s song.
As I rounded the corner to Mud Hole, the trail steps down from shallow-soiled woodland to rocky shore and Eastern Bay expands to the horizon. I remember it as a vast, blowing wilderness. This morning though, it looks… contained.
The images my mind holds of this bay are gorgeous. Sweeping vistas and natural glory, tinged with the specter of great white sharks. Or, rather, tinged by my fear of them.
I first paddled past Great Wass during my first season sea kayaking in Maine, and the mysteries of the North Atlantic loomed large. There was a swell that day, strong winds, and granitic islands that grew to labyrinth walls as the tide fell away beneath me. Then there were the salmon net pens and masses of harbor seals. To me, it felt sharky as hell.
That feeling is hard to pin down. When I used to surf in California, it was a weight in your gut that was deeply informed by local knowledge. Rumor backed by science and years of experience in places like Bolinas or the coastline just north of Santa Cruz. But, really, it’s when the hairs on your neck, an ancient fur we once wore, raises like the scruff of a dog. Danger—this looks like a good place to hunt.
On this day, June 4th, I have a few things going for me. While great whites, known to scientists simply as white sharks, can arrive in Maine as early as May, they usually appear in numbers in late June or July and don’t peak until August and September.
That, and the weather called for light winds. Last time, strong winds forced us to fight our windcocking boats, which is the habit of a sea kayak to turn into the wind. By the end, after 10 miles of paddling in blustery conditions, I could not stop thinking about sharks.
Scanning the seemingly placid bay, I wondered if the sharks weren’t just a scapegoat, a tiddy, toothy container to tuck all my fears into. A way to talk about fear that most people can relate to. Instead of saying out loud, “I am afraid of it all.” Then again, I thought, let’s see how I feel when I’m out on the water.
By the time we unloaded and rigged the boats, the wind had picked up and the tide had bottomed out. The water was so low that we had trouble navigating the shallows while maintaining distance from the harbor seal colonies lounging on intertidal ledges. They’re pupping, and it’s dangerous for the babies if we spook their mothers into the water at low tide, which drops 13 feet below the high tide mark this far north.
Already, the bay felt bigger and much less tame than it had looked from shore. I could see why my memories are a bit grandiose. Still, I have a much better sense of our route and our plan to work with the tides than last time. I felt more settled, like a happy little seagull on home waters.
Then my water bottle popped free of the deck rigging, and I fell behind the group as I backpaddled to grab it. White sharks are ambush predators, and it’s less safe to paddle alone. Anxiety crept up my spine. In my haste, I fumbled the bottle several times. It didn’t help that two crows were cawing out obscenities overhead, chasing an eagle away from their nest.
I took a breath, trying to acknowledge my manufactured panic, and “splash!” My head whipped around in time to catch a huge spray of water just off the starboard quarter of my stern. My heart leapt. I knew it was just a harbor seal, who often slapped the water like a beaver to warn you away, but my amped-up nervous system surged. I yelled, “seal!” When everyone laughed, the horror music in my head quieted (you know the tune), and I settled back into the gorgeous day.
We paddled around Little Hardwood Island and the salmon net pens came into view. Last time I was here it was later in the season. The fish were older then, swimming in endless counterclockwise circles, staring at us with listless eyes like deadheaded trail horses.
Now, what I assume are juvenile smolts leap occasionally out of the water, netted mesh guarding them from the sky. An emancipated gull struggled around the edge of the enclosure, trapped inside with plenty of food, but no fresh water. We looked for a door, but didn’t find one. It was hard to paddle away.
After passing the line of cages, we headed to Hall Cove for lunch. Shrimp and fry swarmed over the murky bottom where we hauled out over an anemic waterfall. A gaggle of Canada geese who had been sunning themselves on a grassy knoll just above the tideline silently rose and trundled single file into the timberline, swallowed by the forest.
As we snack on Karen’s signature hummus wraps, I ask the group if they ever think about sharks.
“Yes,” says Cynthia, “when I hear things on the news.” Less so for Steven. “I feel pretty safe in a kayak floating over the top of the North Atlantic,” he says, “but maybe I’m not.” While white sharks have rammed into sea kayaks, including two incidents I remember around Monterey Bay and Santa Cruz, California, when I lived there in 2017, I’ve never heard of a fatality involving a sea kayaker, and couldn’t find evidence of one online.
“I don’t spend a lot of time being afraid of them,” says Karen, who runs Castine Kayaks. But she does want her guides to be aware of them and know how to mitigate risk. “If you think there are sharks in the area, the best strategy is to paddle close together. That’s what groupers do when a shark is coming through, get together and look wicked grouchy!”
Marine scientist Matt Davis with the Department of Marine Resources agrees. I’d interviewed Davis back in 2023 for a podcast covering white shark distributions in Maine. I gave him a call after our paddle to find out what had changed since. He and his partners have found that over 100 tagged sharks have visited the state since 2019. To track their movements, the state has placed receivers along the coast in locations between York and Reed Beach State Park. When a tagged shark swims within 400 to 500 meters of one, it logs the interaction.
Of course, not all sharks are tagged—those are just the sharks we know about. And, while we know more about what white sharks are up to in Maine than we ever have before, Eastern Bay is east of Reed Beach. Meaning, there is no data here. The state has plans to deploy 14 more transceivers downeast, all the way up to the Cutler Coast. But they’re not there yet.
Matt and his wife are both surfers and frequent Popham and Reed Beach State Parks, which are both very close to some of the most frequent shark detection sites. Yet he doesn’t spend much time worrying about them.
“ Maine is a pretty broken coastline,” Davis says. “And because of that, a lot of the fish and seal populations are spread out over space.” That means they move around a lot. “It may give you some comfort to know that there probably aren’t white sharks just sitting off the beach, hunting around for an extended period of time,” he says.
More importantly, though, we’re not on the menu. ”Even in places that are known to have white shark aggregations, such as Cape Cod,” he explains, “we see very little interaction between humans and sharks.” Still, Davis encourages everyone to be aware of your surroundings and agrees with Karen that staying in groups helps. You should also stay away from large concentrations of fish, or bait balls and seals.
But what if the seals won’t stay away from you?
After lunch, the wind laid down and we traveled over smooth, evergreen waters to reach the otherworldly shores of Mistake Island, home to the most whimsically battered lighthouse I’ve ever seen. We grab a few snaps of the view and paddle out into the Atlantic to round the island. Immediately, the swell lifts and lowers us in heaves of energy rolling in from distant shores. For the briefest of moments, we are at sea.
Soon, we are back in the sheltered cove of the southern channel. Rough winds and breaking waves keep the granite islands from accumulating soil, forcing trees to stand back from the fray. What’s left are low-lying, rose-colored strips of stone separating glass calm waters from a pearlescent sky.
Seals surround us. Mothers and babies float together, staring. Pairs play nearby, side-eyeing us. This is where you aren’t supposed to be, floating with the buffet. But the seals seem calm, and experts like Matt tell you to watch their behavior. The only care they seem to have in the world is us. As we paddled back, several of them followed, splashing away whenever our eyes locked.
The last time I made this traverse, we paddled a football field length away from what I remember as a massive seal colony on a large, slanted rock outcrop. Despite our attempt at stealth, they stampeded in what is still one of the most awe-inspiring moments of my life. It was a glorious sight that left us guilt ridden, having forced them to waste hard-won calories fleeing to the water, where they are definitely on the menu.
On this trip, I felt none of the wind-fueled panic I remembered. It felt leisurely. We practiced navigating with map and compass despite a clear line of sight across the bay, enjoying the sights, sounds and fresh salty smells. At one point, I glanced down to see a large grey shape directly beneath me. I felt like throwing up for a moment, until I realized that it was probably just a seal. (Fingers crossed.)
Around then I realized, all that fear and anxiety I felt three years ago wasn’t really because I was terrified of sharks. It’s because I was terrified of everything. The sharks were a scapegoat for the confounding contours of a coastline that would stretch the length of California if you unwound it; for the unending pull of 13-foot tides unfurling beneath our hulls and the wind that whips up despite the weather reports. And, yes, the actual sharks.
Each fear builds upon the next, until it becomes one big dead-eyed nightmare. Sharks are easy to vilify, focus on, talk about. The problem is that centering them did very little to make me any safer on the water. Practicing my rescue skills, learning how to work with the tides and trading my aggressively vertical whitewater paddle strokes for a wide, horizontal dance—these are the things under my control.
Building my skills let me turn down the dial of distress and see the true dangers more clearly. I still want to read every scrap of research the Department of Marine Resources collects about white sharks to better understand the ecosystems I travel through. But I don’t need to conflate great white sharks with all of my fears. They’re big enough already.
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Guest Contributor L. Clark Tate is a writer, audio producer, photographer, documentarian and registered Maine sea kayaking guide. Her work ranges from offshore windmills and white sharks to artists and adventurers who sacrifice for a meaningful life. Says Clark, “I can’t get enough of our world or the people in it and seek to share that sense of wonder in my work.” Find more of her work at lclarktate.com.