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Feb 3, 2006 9:05 am US/Central
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Minnesota Man Encounters Shark In Hawaii
by Lisa Kiava
(WCCO)
A Minnesota man on vacation in tropical Hawaii was out on the water when he lived through a moment straight from the movie "Jaws".
"Then I felt something and (I) looked down and this shark brushed my kayak," said Dan Lankheit. He faced off with the ocean's most feared predator as he was paddling his kayak far from shore.
"I saw his eye look at me and then he just disappeared," Lankheit said. "And so I thought, 'Well, I'll just start paddling and he'll think that I'm moving and I'm alive and I'm not food and he'll probably leave me alone."
Lankheit said he kept seeing the dorsal fin following him for about 15 minutes. He worried about his friend, who was in another kayak some distance away.
"I yelled to Bob, 'great white!'" Lankheit said. "Now, I am not sure it was a great white at that time, but it was much bigger than what my boat was."
That means the shark was roughly 18 feet long or more, according to the captain of a dive boat who also saw the shark.
Witnesses could not tell if the shark was a great white or a tiger shark. Lankheit said he didn't care what kind of shark it was, he just wanted to get aboard the dive boat fast.
"And I start waving at them, please come here, this is not a good thing what I'm in here," Lankheit said.
Hawaiian officials are keeping an eye out for the shark, but no one got a photo of it.
"As I said, the head on this thing was unreal," Lankheit said.
Lankheit returned to Maui and was not hurt in the incident. Hawaiian media covered the encounter because people there were fascinated with how large the shark was.
Unlike in the movie "Jaws", people did not have to leave the beaches and water because the shark was far from shore. The shark did back down and a larger dive boat was able to convince it to leave the area.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)