Man Fishing on His Kayak Hooks Great White Shark in Shocking Video

A retired Air Force serviceman in Nova Scotia got the surprise of his life when a great white shark bit onto his fishing line on Sunday.

Rick Austin, 61, was fishing for striped bass in his kayak in the Minas Basin when he met the ocean predator. "I was one mile off the coast and there were swimmers everywhere," Austin told Newsweek. "I could see them from where I was anchored."

After two hours of fishing without any luck, Austin decided to take another approach, using a live mackerel as bait to lure to hopefully reel in a catch. That's when things started to get interesting.

"After a few minutes, my reel starts clicking a little bit, and I thought that's weird. So, I start reeling in my other rod," he said, adding that he made sure to switch on his GoPro camera. "I'm so glad I did."

What the camera captured wasn't exactly typical.

"My first thought was this looks exactly like Jaws. It was just so surreal. It was quite the adrenaline rush for sure," Austin said.

At first, he thought it was a dolphin, but there was something unusual about the way it had jumped out of the water. And the power of the animal was unlike anything Austin had felt before: "It could have dragged me 20 to 30 miles," he said.

Before either he or the animal got hurt, Austin quickly cut the line. "In my mind, it was a really good call," he said.

But Austin was still unsure of what he had actually seen. And so, he hurried home to inspect the footage.

"I was so excited to get home just to see if the video was any good," he said. "I was so happy that it turned out the way it did [but] I had no idea it was a shark until later that evening."

Austin shared the footage to the Facebook group Striped Bass Fishing Nova Scotia on Sunday evening. "Everyone [was] saying 'that's a shark,'" he said. "Then these professionals got involved. They said that great whites don't typically jump—it's very very rare—but [looking at the footage] they said 100 percent it's a great white shark."

The biologists, who were from the New England Aquarium and University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, said that the shark was a juvenile, roughly 6 to 8 feet long and weighing between 200 to 250 pounds. And it was definitely a great white.

While Austin has never seen a great white shark in Minas Bay before, he said that they were becoming increasingly common in the area.

"The waters are getting so much warmer, and the seals [their prey] are coming more and more to our area," he said. "Their feeding grounds have expanded tremendously."

Reflecting on his experience, Austin said that it had been a stark reminder of how dangerous the ocean can be.

"Oh man, my life could have been done right there," he said. "It definitely was an eye opener for sure. It was an amazing experience [but] it definitely got my heart pumping and adrenaline going. I'll still go out but next, I'll probably try harder to have somebody with me."