No sharks in Formentera? Maybe not just a few metres from Ses Illetes, but that doesn’t mean that sharks don’t prowl the coastline a few miles away. To be precise, 12 if we listen to Ăngel MiguĂ©lez, a fisherman from the area who was surprised to discover that he was sailing just a few metres from a large shark.
A biologist rushed to the scene
It happened last Sunday and they couldn’t believe it. It was practically the same size as the boat they were travelling in, so they had no trouble realising that it wasn’t just a fish. According to Joan Carles Palerm, a biologist and president of GEN, who was there a few minutes later, it was a porbeagle Isurus oxyrhinchus, a species of lamniform elasmobranch of the Lamnidae family that can be seen in the waters of the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean and Red Seas.
MiguĂ©lez believes it was between 5.5 and 6 metres long, but Palerm says the largest ever caught was 4.5 metres. Be that as it may, he and his two friends enjoyed the experience and did not hesitate to record what happened to make their story credible. MiguĂ©lez took out his GoPro just in case: “If I tell it and nobody sees it, they won’t believe me”. He did it without fear of what might happen: “No, why? Sharks have been there all my life and nothing has happened”.