Shark attack hooks national media onto local fish farm diver

A close encounter with a large shark on Saturday, October 23, was videotaped by a Perry diver in waters off Eastport and has captured the attention of media from all over the world.
A six- to eight-foot porbeagle shark approached Scott MacNichol, 30, while he was diving in Johnson's Cove for MER Assessment Corporation, checking on the condition of salmon farm sites for Cooke Aquaculture. He had started the assignment at noon in about 100 feet of water and estimates he was in 30 feet of water when the shark appeared around 2 p.m.
"It circled a couple of times and then picked up speed and came at me and bit the camera," reports MacNichol. "I screamed."
"When I came up, I threw my camera in the boat and jumped right in after it," recalls MacNichol, who was wearing a 36-pound weight belt and 35-pound tank and pack at the time.
Chris Heinig of MER and diver Shaun Small were sitting in the MER boat when MacNichol surfaced, and they saw the shark "draped over my shoulder."
"If I'd known he was going to go over to check out the camera, I would have filmed more, but I'd never had any experience with a shark," points out MacNichol, who has been a certified diver for 13 years.
After about an hour, when the shark had not been sighted again, Small took over the diving. However, he wasn't in the water very long when the porbeagle reappeared. Small, too, made a quick exit from the water and back into the boat unharmed.
After MER Assessment Corporation posted MacNichol's shark footage online, "it went viral," he reports. And although he points out that his hometown newspaper was the only news coverage he sought, "AP got ahold of it. I've heard from people all over the world. National Geographic is interested in meeting me. I've talked to Larry King's producers, and people representing Stephen King contacted me."
He was also approached by the Today Show and Good Morning America, but MacNichol, his girlfriend and his three-year-old son Brayden, as well as Shaun Small and his wife, were flown to New York City on Thursday, October 28, so the two divers could appear on CBS's The Early Show, where they were interviewed by Harry Smith the next morning. "They treated us really well. It was a lot of fun," reports MacNichol. We were picked up by limousine at our houses. They took us to Bangor and flew us to New York."
Porbeagle sharks, which eat small fish, are not common in the Eastport area, but there has been speculation that this summer's unseasonably warm temperatures might have something to do with their presence. In late September, a six-foot porbeagle was successfully hooked during a fishing charter on the Vonnie and Val out of Eastport, and Captain Skip Harris reported that the shark battled a succession of four people for two-and-a-half hours.
"I was going to gaff him, when he turned his head and spit the hook out," recalls Harris of the shark. "Then he circled the boat twice, with both his tail and dorsal fin sticking up out of the water before he disappeared."
On Saturday, November 6, two weeks after MacNichol's shark encounter, he showed his father Stanley and cousin Jesse Shannon where he saw the porbeagle. "I left them out there fishing, and they threw chum into the water, never thinking they'd get a shark, but they did!" he reports. "It was eight feet long. They [struggled] with it for quite awhile, but the line broke before they could get it into the boat."

"You can't guarantee it's the same shark I saw, but that was quite a coincidence