Great white shark party in the Lowcountry: Another famous fish located off Hilton Head coast

November 5 update: Katharine has moved out into the Atlantic, after her Lowcountry visit. Continue to check www.islandpacket.com for the latest from the OCEARCH shark tracker.

There’s a great white shark party off the Hilton Head coast, apparently.

Three of the four great white sharks being tracked by OCEARCH have last pinged their locations around the Lowcountry coast.

A 2,300-pound great white shark named Katharine was spotted off the coast of Hilton Head Island on Sunday, according to OCEARCH’s tracking.

Katharine joins the shark party along with Miss Costa, a 12-foot, 1,600-pound great white shark named by OCEARCH after its partner, Costa Sunglasses. Miss Costa pinged her location last week off the Lowcountry coast close to where Katharine was located.

Katharine and Miss Costa could be here to hang out with Mary Lee, OCEARCH’s most famous shark with more than 101,000 Twitter followers, who last pinged her location off the coast between Tybee Island and Hilton Head Island in late September.

Chip Michalove, Hilton Head Island charter boat captain who has studied great white sharks and their behaviors for more than a decade, said it’s common for great white sharks to visit the South Carolina coastal area as the weather gets cooler.

“They’re making their migration to our region as we speak,” Michalove said. “The water temperature dropped 10 degrees during the hurricane, which is was started it.”

Michalove, who has touched the nose of a great white shark, said the great white shark population is “nothing to fear.”

“The state (of South Carolina) has never had a great white attack, ever,” he said. Well, except for maybe a couple in the 1800s.

Katharine has been cruising around the South Carolina shore since Oct. 25, when she pinged her location off the Myrtle Beach coast.

Like Mary Lee, Katharine has quite the social media fan club, with a whopping 42,000 Twitter followers and more than 5,000 Facebook followers.

She’s no stranger to the Lowcountry. According to OCEARCH tracking, she has pinged her location here in December 2013, January 2015 and April 2016.

“Great whites are here in the winter. The water gets hot and then (they) move out in the spring and head to Massachusetts,” Michalove said. “Took me about 12 years of studying this to be the first one to catch or even see one in South Carolina.”

Katharine has made an unbelievable cross-Atlantic journey since being tagged by OCEARCH in August 2013, logging more than 28,813 miles. She has been as far north as the Newfoundland coast, as far west as Panama City, Fla., and as far south as the Bahamas.

“The great white isn’t like the tiger, lemon or bull shark. The white sharks are traveling ... distances on a daily basis,” Michalove said. “One day it’s off Savannah; the next day it’s off Charleston.”

In 2016 alone, Katharine has been all the way to Nova Scotia and as far south as Jacksonville, Fla. According to OCEARCH’s tracking, she’s been clinging around the Carolinas since early July.

The shark is named after Katharine Lee Bates, a Cape Cod native and songwriter known for her poem and song “America The Beautiful.”

Katharine, Mary Lee and Miss Costa, along with another great white named Lydia, are being tracked by OCEARCH through Expedition Nantucket, an initiative to provide a broader understanding of the ecology, physiology and behavior of the north Atlantic great white.

You can track their shark adventures through the Atlantic here.

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This story was originally published October 31, 2016 at 12:41 PM with the headline "Great white shark party in the Lowcountry: Another famous fish located off Hilton Head coast."