Was Shark Sighting Really Just a Sunfish?

The shark sighting was reported at Sunrise Beach in Marshfield, Mass.

A picture-perfect beach day turned into quite a vacation story to tell when someone thought they spotted a shark off the coast of Sunrise Beach in Marshfield, Massachusetts, Wednesday afternoon.

Robert Willette, who was vacationing on Sunrise Beach, said, "Well everybody was down in the water and then a police officer came running down along the walk here and he's just yelling 'get out of the water, get out of the water!'"

Fisherman Dan Newcomb spotted the fin from his boat too and decided to circle around for a closer look.

"It's big, it's 6 or 7 feet long and it's very prehistoric looking and really ugly, but there's no doubt that somebody would notice the fin and make it out as a shark," Newcomb said.

But Newcomb knew right away this wasn't a great white.

"It wasn't a shark because you could tell because the fin's slowly laying back, it just kept slowly laying back, they're really slow creatures, and I've seen sunfish before, so very quickly I identified it as a sunfish, it wasn't a shark," he said.

And once the Harbor Master's office was able to confirm this was a sunfish and not a shark, they allowed these beachgoers to get back in the water and enjoy the rest of this beautiful beach day.

"When we arrive on the area we want to make sure safety first for everybody, we don't know if it's a shark, I mean there was an actual shark sighting of a great white shark off the coast of Duxbury Beach, which is right around the corner from where this sighting was, so could it have been that great white revisiting us, certainly," Senior Assistant Harbor Master Bob Coakley said.

So the Harbor Master ruled this a false alarm, but beachgoers Ally Driscoll and Aiden Holland are still convinced what they spotted a great white.

"We just saw like the fin splashing when it was swimming back out," Ally said.

"I knew it was a great white," Aiden said with authority.

When asked if he's a shark expert he replied while laughing, "Sure!"

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