LIGHTHOUSE STORIES - AHOY, MR. SEA DOG!!

I spent my childhood on the various lighthouses with my parents, and during that time I had a few short and pretty much safe encounters with the sharks. One encounter was neither safe but thankfully it was brief enough so we could safely escape.
Sharks are no fun when they surprise you, but even less if you make such a blatant mistake that we almost did.

One day we were returning in our little boat from the usual fishing tour. We were always trying our luck with the nets and lobster traps because that was the most successful. At the way back we noticed a big black item floating under the cliffs.

The route we took was the shortest and pretty much the only way to go home with the boat. There are numerous pictures online to show what that place looks like - a vertically set 300-foot tall cliff falling into a 400-foot deep black abyss - have fun screaming.

Usually, at that place our engine would give up on us, so we were prepared for a stop anyway.

The item was big and artificial looking, like a huge piece of crumpled plastic foil free floating on the surface.
Numerous loose pieces were sticking out of it, and the looks made no impression that it could be an animal.
My father waved his arm and told my mother that the plastic would be a perfect fit for a greenhouse.
We had a really nice garden and a greenhouse was in the plan.
My mother agreed and they decided to dock on this thing and tow it home.
At the moment my mother was close enough and turned to shut and tilt the engine she looked under the boat in the sea and saw a huge head that was in size proportional to the stern of our boat.
In fear, she dipped the engine back in, push it to the highest velocity and drove away as fast as she could.
As we all turned to see why is she reacting this way, we only could see a huge backside of an animal diving in, and the dive seemed to last forever.
A shark was super-huge and we never saw anything like that before.
I have no idea what were those additional spikes and flippers sticking out of his body but we were all sure it had a few too many.

As we came home my parents told everyone what they saw and alerted the villagers as we were staying on the inhabited island at that time. For the few next days, the whole island was in the state of the red alert because of the huge beast.
Local fishermen and barges were reporting every now and then that they encounter or spotted a huge animal that resembles the shark but considering the size of it, they kept distance.
They said that we should consider us very, very lucky that we didn't wake up that giant in the wrong moment.
Barges also reported a huge size, nonspecific entirely black body and additional flippers and something that looked like the attachments but with no idea what they are for.
The whale shark fell out of an equation because the animal didn't fit the description.
All the local sharks are lesser in size, have different heads, dark gray in coloration and have a very well defined number of flippers.
The huge beast disappeared without a trace in the same way it appeared.

The villagers and fishermen had encounters with the sharks on numerous occasions, but the unknown fish gave them creeps for months.

One day during the summer season I found my father standing outside carefully examining the bay with the pair of binoculars.
At one moment something captured his attention.
I came next to him and asked what is going on. He pointed me at the 'dot' in the bay that was moving as fast as a speedboat while making waves left and right.
I think it is a shark, he said walking back to the building for the radio station to alarm the village while I stood there trying to focus my vision on what was under that 'dot'.

When the 'dot' came to the brightly colored shallows it showed me a dark elongated body that appeared - from my perspective- to be a size of a bus.
It 'slowly' turned left and an animal returned to the deeper water and then - disappeared.
Nobody encountered a super-sized shark at that occasion, and my estimation of its size was downgraded due to the distance and water distortion. Also, what kind of a shark - or an animal in general - looks like that ...

I found out a few things years after, but that will be a theme of my next article.
Seeing these creatures on the television, reading the books and online articles has little to no similarity to actually seeing them first hand.