Great white shark ‘pinged’ off Hilton Head coast. Others seen in SC waters recently
Over the last few weeks, at least three great white sharks have paid visits to Beaufort County waters.
Most recently, the 8-foot-9-inch, 432-pound shark, named Brunswick after the city in Georgia, was “pinged” off the Hilton Head coast Friday morning.
It was the shark’s first “ping” since being tagged by the OCEARCH team on their Northwest Atlantic Shared Foraging Area expedition.
OCEARCH is a nonprofit research organization that tags and tracks sharks and other marine life.
A “ping” happens when a tagged shark’s dorsal fin breaks the surface of the water and transmits a signal to a satellite overhead, according to the OCEARCH website. The transmission then sends back an estimated geo-location.
The team had been fishing off the coast of Hilton Head since February 21, which happened to be the same day Hilton the shark — who was originally tagged in the area in 2017 — made an appearance.
Hilton weighs in at 1,326 pounds and is 12-feet-5-inches long. The shark seems to like to visit his namesake island often since he had just been pinged there weeks earlier.
On February 22, a day after hearing from Hilton, the team tagged a 12-foot-long white shark near the coast of St. Helena Island. She was accordingly named Helena.
OCEARCH’s expedition ended Saturday in Savannah. People can still keep up with all of the tagged sharks on the organization’s website, which has a real-time tracker for all the animals it’s researching such as sharks, whales, turtles, and other sea creatures.
This story was originally published March 2, 2019 at 3:11 PM.
