Teenage paddleboarders enjoying the waters in Cape Cod on the Fourth of July had an unexpected — and unwanted — visit from a great white shark.
Margaret Bowles told CBS News that she had been paddleboarding with her bestfriend Madeleine Cronin for a few hours near Stony Beach when the terrifying experience occurred.
The duo didn’t realize the immediate danger they were in though. Indeed, Cronin took a picture of her friend - but had no idea that there was a fin peaking out at the bottom of the frame.
"I was like, 'Take a picture of me!' right. Then next to her board, this, 8-inch out of the water, fin. It's like fleshy and grey and I'm like, 'Oh my goodness,'" Bowles told the broadcaster. "My heart kind of sank."
A second picture, after Bowles realizes what is in the water, paints a different picture.
“When I am looking through the phone and I see her face change from just like happy or whatever to, ‘Oh my God, there’s a shark,” Cronin told the outlet.
The shark eventually passed within a foot of Cronin, who felt it in the currents.
"Immediately we kicked into like, 'We've got to get out of here,'" Bowles said.
Cronin agreed, saying from that point on their focus was just to "go, go, go" back to the beach. She paddled so hard that she broke her oar on the way back to the shore.
"Not many thoughts after that," she told CBS News.
Once the teens were safely out of the water, they reported their sighting to the Sharktivity app. The app can be used by beachgoers to keep informed on the latest shark sightings.
John Chisholm, of the New England Aquarium confirmed that it was a great white — citing its pointed dorsal fin — and estimated that the animal was about the size of the teens' paddleboards.
White shark activity in the area is “pretty rare” though, he added.
After the chilling encounter, Bowles said she was proud of herself and Cronin for staying calm in a frightening situation, noting that it would have been "easy for one of us to freak out and fall off the board or something."
Cronin said she planned to take a break from the ocean for a "few days" but added that she would be back eventually.
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