Eddie Monat, a commercial diver from Bar Harbor who operates a nature tour boat in the summer, has had a few encounters with sharks over the years.
Earlier this month, he was rammed twice by what he thinks was a porbeagle shark while he was using an underwater camera to show his customers on his boat what kind of marine life dwells at the bottom of Frenchman Bay. He was struck first in his side and then on his leg.
“I’m about 100 percent sure it was a porbeagle,” Monat said Tuesday morning as he was getting ready to head out for a morning tour. “Seals bite you. They don’t hit you.”
He says he also was bit by a seal earlier this summer, but he thinks it was meant to be playful, not menacing. He wasn’t injured by the seal.
“I got bit on my right butt cheek,” he said. “I am 100 percent sure that was a seal messing with me.”
Monat recently recounted some of his encounters over the years on social media as more Mainers and tourists have grown increasingly aware of sharks along the coast. Tour boat passengers have recorded and shared cell phone videos of sharks eating seals, while the state has recently hired its first shark researcher, in part because a woman was killed by a great white shark off Harpswell in 2020.
But despite that, Monat, who dives year round, is not concerned. Shark attacks are extremely rare.
“There aren’t many shark attacks,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an issue.”
His shark encounters — such as one in 2015 in which he inadvertently filmed either a porbeagle or a white shark in the water behind him — typically occur in August, and usually when he is working as an underwater guide for his tour boat Starfish Enterprise. The boat operates in Frenchman Bay off Bar Harbor, though last year it was based in Eastport.
He said he also was rammed in the early 2000s by a mako shark.
Monat carries a video camera with him on his dives and, through a microphone in his SCUBA helmet, talks to his passengers at the surface while his partner, Edna Martin, pilots the boat. Passengers watch a video feed on a large monitor mounted on the boat as Monat collects starfish, lobster and sea cucumbers off the bottom of the bay that he brings to the boat for them to look at and touch before he returns them to the water.
Monat is focused on the bottom when he dives and has lights on to help him see. The lights illuminate the water a few feet around him, including lots of floating plankton, but make it harder to see further away. That means he’s often unaware of things that might be only a few feet beyond his scope of vision.
Porbeagle sharks resemble white sharks and often measure 8 feet long and 300 pounds. They tend to feed on small-to-medium size fish such as mackerel or squid, and so aren’t considered a major threat to people. The porbeagle that struck him a couple of weeks ago likely was in the area because of a large pile of squid eggs that Monat found nearby, he said.
Porbeagles, like all sharks, are highly sensitive to electric currents in the water, and so often are attracted to divers with video cameras or other electronic equipment. Monat said he can turn off his camera and his lights if he thinks there is a shark nearby, but he cannot shut off his microphone.
Monat wears a kevlar suit on dives, and has metal weights on his wrists and ankles, plus a SCUBA tank on his back. Because he is usually face down within arm’s reach of the bottom, he doesn’t think he’ll be mistaken for shark food.
“I feel relatively safe as long as I’m on the bottom,” he said. “I’m pretty sure if a porbeagle grabs me I’ll be fine.”
White sharks pose a slightly higher threat, because they go for larger prey such as seals and prefer to attack from below. Monat said he thinks he’s been shadowed by a white shark before, but has never come into physical contact with one.
“They’re around, of course,” Monat said.
