My late friend Mark Libby of Pemaquid fished commercially in Muscongus Bay, primarily southwest of Monhegan Island. During his four-decade solo fishing career, he encountered many uncommon marine species, including a yellow-nosed albatross and basking sharks. The latter, he said, were, “nearly as long as my 39-foot fishing boat.”

In the 1990s he began seeing great white sharks.

“Once, when my boat skirted Monhegan, seals were scrambling out of the water and onto ledges,” he said. “A great white was chasing them. Luckily, my nets weren’t in the water. Catching one of those rascals would have been disastrous.”

Jesse McPhail — a 48-year-old lobsterman in Down East Maine — wasn’t so lucky. Several years ago, McPhail was checking his lobster traps within sight of Eastport’s Chowder House when he and his stern man, Alex Matthews, approached an oddly bobbing lobster buoy.

“It was zigzagging a few feet underwater,” McPhail said. “I figured a tuna was tangled in my line. So, we hooked the line to an electric pot hauler and started lifting. As the heavy fish rose, we were shocked seeing a great white shark’s head approaching the surface.”

The lobster pot line had somehow gotten looped around the shark’s head. “It was alive, but no way were we going to untangle the line in the water.”

McPhail and Matthews deployed his second pot hauler anchored to the vessel’s roof, tied a rope around the shark’s tail, and lifted the 14-foot animal out of the water.

“Hanging upside down in the air, the shark played dead,” McPhail said. “We lowered it onto the railing and carefully untangled the line.”

The fishermen snapped several photos, lowered the shark into the water head first, untied the tail line, and watched it swim into the deep blue. Shark researchers in Massachusetts examined McPhail’s photos and concluded that the great white was a juvenile female, likely in her late teens.

A few months before McPhail’s tussle with a great white, Kingsley Pendleton of Deer Island, New Brunswick — less than 10 miles northeast of Eastport — was boating with his family in Lord’s Cove when he too had a close encounter with a great white shark.

“The shark was a half-mile from our boat and swimming towards us against the tide in choppy water,” Pendleton told me.

Initially, he wasn’t sure what it was, “but as it came closer, I could see a very large triangular dorsal fin and knew then that it was a sizable great white, and not a basking shark.”

Pendleton and his family were drifting in his 19-foot Carolina skiff when the shark circled the boat.

“My nervous wife and daughter were urging me to start the motor, which I did, aligning the boat alongside the shark. When its snout was even with the bow, I looked back and could see its tail extend about a foot beyond the stern. Aware that my shallow skiff weighs about 1,000 pounds, I said to myself, ‘If that 4,000-pound shark threw itself onto my boat, as it often does to grab seals sunning on ledges, we’ll be in deep trouble.’ It circled the boat a few more times before disappearing.”

Pendleton’s unofficial 20-foot shark was larger than the 17-foot, 2-inch female great white captured, tagged and released in Oct. 2020 by OCEARCH — a science organization committed to collecting and sharing oceanic data — off the south coast of Nova Scotia. Weighing 3,541 pounds, scientists estimated that she was at least 50 years old and likely had produced upwards of 100 young during her lifetime. By November, she was reported swimming off the New Jersey coast.

University of Maine and Maine Department of Marine Resources researchers are monitoring the Gulf of Maine’s great whites with cylindrical fish acoustic receivers. Since 2020, receivers have recorded radio tagged great whites in Eastport, Harpswell, Ogunquit, Kennebunk, Higgins Beach, Phippsburg, Hermit Island, Wells, and elsewhere. According to DMR, a total of 93 great whites were detected between 2020 and 2024. Some were tagged in Maine, but the majority were tagged offshore of Cape Cod by Dr. Greg Skomal, a world-renowned Massachusetts shark researcher. Since 2012, he’s tagged more than 300 great whites.

The July 2020, fatal shark attack of a 63-year-old woman in the waters off Bailey Island was the first in Maine’s history. Most shark attacks are the result of a human being mistaken for a seal. During Dr. Skomal’s 2019 TEDx Talks presentation, “Living with Sharks,” he said, “These are fish, and fish make mistakes, and they don’t do it very often. But when they do, it can be devastating.”

The increase in great white shark populations in the Gulf of Maine is a result of two federal laws. First, in 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act provided legal protection for seals in U.S. waters. Historically, seals were indiscriminately killed by New England fishermen. Seal bounties, dating back to colonial times, resulted in local extirpation in Maine and elsewhere. When the law was enacted, a University of Maine survey documented fewer than 5,000 harbor seals and zero gray seals along the state’s coast. Today, in Maine, the estimated combined population of both phocids is approaching 100,000. More seals, a favorite prey of sharks, means more sharks.

Second, in 1976, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act was enacted to halt overfishing and rebuild depleted fish stocks to ensure long-term biological and economic sustainability of marine fisheries. In 1997, an amendment was added designating Atlantic great white sharks as a federally protected species, paving the way for a partial recovery of shark populations. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, as of 2015 — the most current estimate — the number of great whites in the Atlantic is 69 percent of its 1961 population size. Shark population growth, though, lags booming seal populations because the apex predators grow more slowly. Females don’t reach sexual maturity until their teens, and then they only produce two to 10 pups, possibly every other year, after 12 months of gestation.

“As the white shark population rebounds and seal populations rebound,” Dr. Skomal said, “this predator-prey relationship is going to re-emerge anywhere these two species overlap.”

Shark enthusiasts, scientists and whale boat captains are reporting a remarkable shift in public opinion of sharks. Once widely demonized as “man-eaters,” sharks are quickly gaining rock-star status. Four summers ago on a Campobello Island Cruises Whale Watch boat, I overheard twin 8-year-old girls — each wearing identical “Save Our Great White Sharks” sweatshirts — quiz Captain Mackie Greene. “Did you know that great whites are endothermic?” one girl asked. He answered yes and then winked at me and said, “More and more clients, like these knowledgeable girls, are asking me to please show them a shark.”

Pendleton is also a passionate fan of great whites.

“I’ve boated for many years,” he told me. “I’ve seen lots of whales, porbeagles (mackerel sharks), basking sharks, and thresher sharks. Seeing a great white shark, though, is special. My wife jokes that I’ll tell anyone about our encounter with a large great white in August 2021. She’s right because it sure made my summer.”

Ron Joseph of Sidney is author of Bald Eagles, Bear Cubs, and Hermit Bill: Memories of a Maine Wildlife Biologist, published by Islandport Press