| Javier Gurrea, the owner of the 'Solaire II', got the shock off his life last Friday as he and his crew were fishing two miles of the Canet d'En Berenguer coast (near Sagunto) when an enormous shark appeared alongside the small craft.
He immediately reported the sighting to the coast guards, who deduce from the description provided that it may well have been a pilgrim shark, which feed off plankton and are therefore harmless.
According to José Tena, who is the dean of the Experimental Science faculty at Valencia's Catholic University, there have been only two reported shark attacks on humans off Spain's coasts in the last five hundred years: one of Valencia's Malvarrosa beach twenty years ago, and the other near Algeciras in the nineteen seventies. |